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Long abstract:

In Kabwe, Zambia, lead poisoning from past and present mining operations has left a seemingly indelible mark on the town. In Kabwe, there is a temporal division between the passive and active aspects of people’s experience with extraction. The passive aspects refer to events that happen in Kabwe, such as the long arc of mining and decline, amidst the slow violence of pollution. The active aspects refer to what people do about these circumstances, such as the interventions people make to produce alternate futures. The past is reckoned with to envision a different future in Kabwe on two distinct registers: the legal and the material. In 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anglo American South Africa, a former owner of the mine area, to remediate the lead poisoning. The law is a vehicle to address the wrongs of the past, but what are the limits of the futures that can be imagined under the law? On the material level, Kabwe residents re-mine mineral waste. For small-scale miners, the toxic, material vestiges of the mine are a way to achieve a better future in Kabwe. How do residents’ engagements with materials of the past conflict with the lawsuit’s goals for the future, and vice versa? The lawsuit and re-mining are two ways people actively use time, which raises questions about the differing ways the past is drawn on to build the future. This paper explores what horizons are opened or closed with different strategies of future construction amidst toxic legacies.

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Long abstract:

The sounding of a ‘nitrogen crisis’ (Raad van State, 2019) necessitated a far-reaching agricultural transition in the Netherlands, not in the least for cattle farming. Since 2019, however, effective policies have failed to materialise. In conversations with six farmers on three rather different cow farms in 2023, the sense that their futures were blocked or inaccessible was shared among all. Yet it is pasts that play a more intriguing role. In this paper, I (1) empirically trace one especially revealing claim, that ‘this is how we have always done it’, placing it (2) in a broader history of exploitation and pollution through agriculture, in which coloniality still plays its part (Simpson 2017, Wynter 1971, Morton 2009). I then (3) identify three matters in the data that each capture nitrogen in their own way, accommodating different publics and different accounts of the crisis at hand. Bringing this together, I suggest that the histories acknowledged and unacknowledged in the nitrogen crisis are part of what I call a translational politics that troubles pathways forward.

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Long abstract:

This paper focusses on the repercussions of the flooding in July 2021 that hit the Geul area in Limburg through the perspective of river mud. The ongoing presence of river mud has presented this area with problems crossing the realm of the private, public, and ecological. As a material reminder and remainder of the flood this substance has generated specific concerns about its toxic effects, composition, and proper management. Mud has caused the flood to linger on, in people’s memories and in their daily lives as a material presence.

I look at the way mud is entangled with its surroundings, which gives not only deeper insight into the aftermath of a flood but exposes also the constant becoming of a weather induced event. By recognizing mud as an active participant in the world's becoming’ (Barad 2003:803), entangled with other earthly creatures, I understand the effects of climate induced disaster from a new materialist/post-humanist approach, challenging human-centered perspectives on disaster. Based on ethnographic research I explain how mud’s composition, but also texture and properties bring together heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting, temporalities that “intersect, interfere and intermingle” and create entangled trajectories (Bensaude-Vincent 2022:213), which have become part of human and non-human bodies, environments and materials. Within these entangled trajectories, I illuminate among other things, how violence can be part of non-human agents’ actions, showing how “non-humans are not always the victims and humans not always the culprits” (Chao 2022:207).

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Short abstract:

Western Canada’s increasingly devastating wildfires burn in the wake of settler colonial occupation and cultivation of the land. Kinship provides an unexpected register of response in which those histories demand revisitation, their ongoing presence is faced, and alternative futures are imagined.

Long abstract:

In 2023, Canada experienced its worst-ever wildfire season: over 18.5 million hectares of forest burned. As the scale, devastation, and potential long-term effects of wildfire begin to outstrip the imagination, different frameworks for understanding, relating and responding to it become imperative.

Taking inspiration from the etymology of ecology – from the Greek oikos, for house – this paper suggests that kinship offers rare means of grasping the full temporal and spatial scope of the ecological disasters that mark the climate crisis, and a repertoire of ethics, discourses and practices that Canadians repurpose in response. Kinship shares vast scales of time and space with the climate crisis: changes in the climate can only be observed across generations and global geographies, and family is an intergenerational undertaking, continuously reworking its histories to generate alternative futures, routinely stretched across the globe in its mobilities and imaginations. Kinship practice has played a crucial role in the settlement of Canada as a settler colony, too: wildfire burns in the wake of settler family practices of claiming, cultivating, dwelling on and conserving the land, its devastation in direct proportion to the dispossession, occupation and domination that enabled those undertakings. As wildfire demands and enables new ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to and through the land, it is often in the register of kinship that Canadians pursue experimental responses – confronting them with the uncomfortable truths of their settler colonial pasts, and opening creative potential for decolonial futures.

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Long abstract:

On June 18, 2021, the village of Leersum (the Netherlands) and surrounding forests were struck by a rapid and destructive ‘fall wind’, leading not only to several casualties, but also to the felling and uprooting of over ten thousand trees. In only a few minutes, the downburst cleared entire forest stands, leaving behind a tangled and dangerous mess of fallen trees.

In this contribution I explore how the foresters in charge of this forested area responded to this event. Drawing out practices of fire-proofing, observation and tinkering with the forest’s self-renewal and regrowth, and partial memorialization of this event, I specifically highlight how anticipations of, and concerns with, the future informed these foresters’ practices in the aftermath of this disaster. I also pause with particular challenges in these post-disaster practices, specifically as they pertain to what turns out to be the forest’s rather limited capacities for regrowth through the seed bank typically built up in its soil.

Connecting these so far limited forms of regrowth with longer histories of internal colonization and exploitation of wastelands through state-mandated modern forestry, I approach this extreme weather event as a temporal implosion, in which the weight of both the materially salient past and a future of increased extreme weather events becomes a pressing matter of concern and generates acute dilemmas and even impossibilities in the present.

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Long abstract:

As in many cities, one of the ecological ravages that is ongoing in Brussels is the loss of its wildlife and their habitats. Among them, common swifts (Apus apus) are migrating and insectivorous birds that come back each summer to the same cavity, like eaves, ventilation holes, cracks, or putlog holes. In the last decades, new construction and renovation led to the destruction of these breeding sites, to the point that Brussels’s swifts have plummeted by half. This loss prompted a handful of swift enthusiasts to convert specific architectural interfaces into suitable cavities for the birds, sometimes with the support of the local authorities.

I look at these nest boxes as multiple technologies, each of them retrieving from past artefacts and experiences that carry distinct matters of concerns for swifts, their caretakers, and their co-becoming. Nest boxes are firstly reproductive technologies developed by the birds since ancient times, enacted as such at their own biosocial rhythm, and relying on architecture from specific epochs. Second, following ornithologists’ experiments from mid-20e century, city dwellers convert these nest boxes into technologies of vision, to watch over swifts’ daily life. Then, certain nest boxes draw inspiration from medieval towers built as breeding technologies, at a time when nestlings were appreciated as delicacies.

Nest boxes as multiple technologies assemble attempts to recuperate what can still be salvaged from different past times. I reflect on the path that such recuperations open for interspecific alliances, that is neither a restoration of authentic ‘nature’, nor a harmonious reconciliation.