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- Convenors:
-
Anna Krzywoszynska
(Oulu University)
Erika Szymanski (Colorado State University)
Selen Eren (University of Oulu)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites analyses of how creatures and environments are being transformed and reconstructed for the purposes of a “Green Anthropocene”. What systems and tools of valuation are employed in the remaking of other creatures (and relationships with them) to fuel sustainability transformations?
Long Abstract:
Nature-based solutions. The blue economy. Climate-smart agriculture. Increasingly, institutional responses to global environmental crises intensify management over other-than-humans to sustain certain visions of human well-being. We are witnessing a kind of “Green Anthropocene” in efforts to optimize environmental and ecological flows to sustain specific human goods (see e.g. the 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto), transforming planetary life processes and humans’ roles in them.
In this panel, we seek empirical examples and conceptual analyses of how creatures and environments are being reconstructed through and for such sustainability transitions. Our intended focus is on the systems and tools of valuation employed in the remaking of other creatures (and more-than-human relationships with them) in the image of certain agendas and imaginaries.
This panel responds to recent reports about shifts from extractivist approaches to natural resources toward enrolling environments, ecosystems, and creatures into global challenges-focused agendas by valuing them in additional ways. Organisms and ecosystems are imagined to be not only manipulable, but transformable through specific interventions at molecular, cellular, organismal, ecological, and environmental levels. Other-than-humans are being enrolled as "the right organism” for new kinds of jobs in circular economies, carbon capture, sustainable land use, and similar undertakings. We aim to explore the extent to which existing logics of, e.g., geoengineering, genetic engineering, or environmental management are sufficient to describe these practices, and to build on prior analyses of how humans enroll creatures as laborers, collaborators, or service-providers. We hope to investigate what is being sustained in these sustainability transformations. In line with the conference theme, we ask: how can (and how do) STS analyses participate in these transformations? How can STS approaches articulate why these transformations matter beyond metrics used to judge one approach as more or less sustainable than another?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Justine Leret (Frankfurt Goethe University)
Short abstract:
As an international green market emerges, large corporations are promoting “regenerative agriculture” on an industrial scale by valuing soil life. Using ethnographic data from the Paris Basin, I ask how the STS framework can illuminate the impact on non-human and human labour at the farm level.
Long abstract:
In the face of environmental crises, European policies respond mainly by integrating ecosystems into the market economy. In agriculture, soil life is increasingly seen as valuable, often depending on its ability to store carbon. In Ile-de-France, large companies are promoting “regenerative agriculture” experiments through public-private research partnerships. To disseminate these practices (no-tillage, cover crops, sheep grazing) on an industrial scale, agronomists are developing digital tools to translate farmers’ relationships with their soils into calculable, marketable data.
In line with the panel theme, I will focus on the tools created to value the earth, i.e. farmers’ complex soil biodiversity. What kinds of knowledge and criteria do they rely on? What technologies do they require? How do they change the division of labour at the farm level? Beyond the opposition between high-tech, climate-smart robots, and agro-ecological solutions, “regenerative agriculture” is expanding through technologies of valuation to enrol soil ecosystems in a global green market competition.
The Marxist theory of the Capitalocene, as articulated by Jason W. Moore, is primarily based on the idea that today’s ecological crisis is rooted in the capitalist appropriation of “cheap natures”. STS approaches show how non-humans are increasingly being enrolled in the generation of capitalist value. In the context of farmers’ protests against the European Green Deal, this paper suggests that STS can also be a tool for analysing how the valuation of "nature" can contribute to the precarisation of human labour – from increased inequalities between farmers, to gender to the exploitation of migrant workers.
Béatrice Cointe (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI))
Long abstract:
So called “negative emissions” have become an almost inescapable component of mitigation pathways. Research in STS and in climate science has documented the speculative character of negative emission technologies, tracing their origins in Integrated Assessment Models and their failure to materialize to date, and suggesting their invention risks locking us into unrealistic techno-optimistic imaginaries of climate action (Beck and Mahony 2018, Beck and Oomen 2021, Anderson and Jewell 2019). In this presentation, I will explore the hypothesis that the invention of negative emissions is not merely about techno-optimism, but also about enrolling ecosystems in climate action. More specifically, it is about finding ways of coupling industrial and terrestrial systems, both physically and conceptually.
I will focus on the history of BECCS – BioEnergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. The idea of BECCS is relatively simple: if one burns CO2 stored in biomass to generate power, and captures and stores the CO2 emitted in the process, the emission balance is negative. The idea emerged in the early 2000s from the encounter of forestry sciences with engineering, and its integration into models drove the coupling of land-use and energy systems models. Bridging industrial and natural systems is a condition for making BECCS even thinkable. I will discuss how it required both inventing new forms of valuations and articulating two distinct perspectives on climate change: energy-systems and ecosystems perspectives, or, in Isabel Schrickel’s words, “control” and “complexity” (Schrickel 2017).
Marta Villa (University of Trento) Mauro Iob
Long abstract:
There're forms of possession that are not attributable to individual private property or public. These are inserted between the two: they're collective private properties. In Europe there're communities that own the majority of Territories of Life, managed in a collective way. In Italy there're both in Inland Areas and along coasts: they create a mosaic of agro-forestry-pastoral, maritime and lagoon heritage. These domains are characterized by regime of inalienability and perpetual destination that safeguards environment. They take on sacred connotation for populations that survived with them, but who still defend them today for environmental value that has become predominant. L.168/2017 recognizes RC (real people and land in harmonious relationship) as primary legal systems and protects their vitality. RC embody living law: to preserve without dissipating and to hand it over improved to future generations who are its true owners. Strategies of action on territory linked to Green Anthropocene are implemented: local-ecological processes are intertwined with planetary ones where each human being has irreplaceable role because he implements ecosystem thinking, finds solutions based on relationship between culture and nature. However, they're opposed by extractivist economics which, directly or indirectly, seeks to take away from them what is in their possession in order to distort and disfigure it: damage is created to general public as positive externalities that RC bring, such as carbon capture, increased biodiversity, use of sustainable solutions, are interrupted. We present novelty and scope of L.168/2017 and real cases where law is implemented for protection of Territories of Life.
Syed Shoaib Ali (Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies, Kathmandu, Nepal) Kesang Thakur (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) Rohit Negi (Ambedkar University Delhi)
Long abstract:
The establishment of Apis mellifera(AM), or the European honeybee at a beekeeping research station in Western Himalaya was a landmark event in the history of modern beekeeping in South Asia. This history unfolded alongside green revolution through the 1960s. AM was far more productive, scalable, and opened opportunities for migratory beekeeping. Since, the state agriculture universities and state departments extensively promoted AM. But over subsequent decades scientists also observed that the mainstream discourse on modern beekeeping was disproportionately shaped by American and European experience. Among several concerns, within the Himalayan environment AM beekeeping was unsuitable for the majority of smallholders, particularly women.
We produce an in-depth ethnographic account of subsequent research and redesign that the scientists undertook alongside local beekeepers to rework the modern beehive to make it habitable for Apis cerana(AC). In the process they challenged dominant 20th century assumptions in agricultural entomology. Particularly that AC had a “hostile” nature, and tendency to “abscond”. We contend that meaningful technoscience in complex Anthropocene environments cannot be cast in mere scalable templates of practice, embodied in the modern “box of bees”. The revisions to the modern beehive took extensive rural fieldwork, experimentation, and deliberation to situate scientific practice in the specific cultural and ecological milieu. We phrase this exercise as one of renovation. Renovation opens necessary ground for place-based innovation, and highlights the need for a globally connected but decentralised loci of postcolonial technoscience.
Kirsty Wissing (Australian National University)
Long abstract:
Synthetic biology (synbio), which takes an engineering approach to biology by editing DNA, promises creative approaches to transform environments and mitigate Anthropocene-influenced challenges. One example is engineering a gene drive (biased inheritance) to preference a particular genetic trait such as a single sex for all offspring and, in doing so, reduce reproduction possibilities for an invasive species or boost a native or keystone species’ population whose existence is threatened. Another example is engineering an animal to detoxify and bioremediate polluted environments. In such cases, synbio seeks to edit (other-than-human) biology to transform environments in ways that (some) humans see as sustainable. But what happens when human/other-than-human categories collapse to reshape ethical and regulatory responsibilities? What can STS scholars and synthetic biologists learn from Indigenous Australian ontologies that see plant and animal species not as separate to, but rather an extension of, human kin, expanding humancentric senses of sustainability? Drawing on desktop review and synbio discussions with Torres Strait Islanders, this paper explores how synbio techniques that aim to tweak other-than-human life might challenge, change or bolster Indigenous Australian multi-species relations and environmental responsibilities. Conversely, it also asks how Indigenous Australians’ perspectives might challenge synbio assumptions to strive towards more inclusive and intertwined efforts at sustainability.
Keje Boersma (VU Amsterdam)
Long abstract:
This article explores the structure and political use of “island thinking” in the scientific and policy literature about the use of gene drive technologies in conservation. In the first part of the article, we explore the narrative of contained gene drive use on islands and discuss how it juggles notions of localness and localization of gene drives and their (test) releases. Our aim here is to question the possibility and narrative of containing the spread of gene drives technologically or geographically. The second part of the article is devoted to reflection on nonlocal concerns about gene drives and the possibility of local gene drive decisions. We point to a tension between the attempt to create a local gene drive that allows for local decision-making and their nonlocalizability due to the global context in which these technologies and decisions are being made. Our second, more conceptual aim is therefore to open up a domain of thinking around the possibility of demarcation in our world – of our political, normative decisions, and of our reality. To these ends, we provide an analysis of arguments, frames, and discourse in the gene drive literature.
Kewan Mertens (Armines, Ecoles des Mines de Paris, Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL))
Long abstract:
International agreements have recently vowed to dedicate 30% of land surfaces to area-based conservation. Contrary to nature parks of the past, this generalization of what I propose to call “environmental zoning” does no longer merely aim at preserving uninhabited nature, but also at protecting biodiversity while maintaining human activities.
In many places, such as the Brière swamp in western France, this global policy translates into the overlapping of a variety of “zones” dedicated to specific environmental agendas: Natura2000 sites and biological reserves refer to spaces dedicated to the conservation and restoration of European environments, while a Regional Nature Park (Parc Naturel Régional) and a Unesco Biosphere Reserve seek to promote sustainable development.
In this manuscript, I conceptualize environmental zoning as a device for delineating, studying, valuating and controlling specific places for environmental purposes. Landscapes are thereby remade, and new ways of governing human-environment relations are experimented. I show that this does not go without friction and resistance. In the Brière swamp, park managers struggle with the containment of “invasive species” such as water primroses, nutrias and the Louisiana crawfish, while farmers and hunters regularly protest against restrictions on their activities. Meanwhile, tourists, another “invasive species” according to some, are attracted by the (valuating) labels of the different zoning devices. These frictions and struggles raise the following questions which I seek to answer: (1) what is to be sustained in Brière, for whom and for what purpose?; and (2) wat is the role of environmental sciences in environmental zoning?
Valentina Marcheselli (Cà Foscari - University of Venice)
Long abstract:
"Microbes have lived on this planet for such a long time that they have already figured out all the solutions; there’s a microbe for every pollutant" I am told during a lunchbreak in the lab kitchenette. After more than a century in which microbes have been thought of as enemies to be eradicated, an emerging probiotic turn is now recasting microbes as phenomenal allies, essential companions and serviceable labourers. In this context, "bioremediation" has come into view as the promise to repair damaged ecologies through the manipulation of selected organisms capable of balancing out, transforming and restoring entire ecosystems.
By drawing on my ongoing ethnographic engagement with microbiologists’ practices and discourses, I look into what bacteria look like from the perspective of a microbiology laboratory focused on metabolism and the conservation of energy. I thus wonder how the way microbes are framed, managed and manipulated at the molecular level might provide specific modes of interspecies relation and possibilities of action, reaction, and intervention in the current global environmental crisis. In this presentation, I look into the research and practices that underpin imaginaries and research agendas connected to bioremediation and the promise of a more sustainable ecological management through the manipulation and control of microbial transformations. The microbiologists’ appreciation for the seemingly infinite metabolic potential of bacteria provides an entry point to discuss the frictions between the handing over of agency to the microbes, and the simultaneous thrusting of microbes into human’s advantage.
Eleanor Hadley Kershaw (University of Exeter)
Long abstract:
Microbial capacities for material transformation are increasingly mobilised to repair damaged ecologies at a range of scales. In synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology, the development of 'microbial factories' for the conversion of various feedstocks into materials, chemicals, fuels and food is heralded as a means of addressing climate change, reducing societal reliance on fossil resources, and creating circular economies. While social studies of synthetic biology have explored promissory discourses (e.g., Schyfter and Calvert, 2015) and factory metaphors (e.g., Boudry and Pigliucci, 2013), less attention has been paid to the relational reconfigurations and resource-making enacted by microbial factories and their more-than-human labour.
This paper explores multispecies collaboration towards material, chemical, social and ecological transformation in the case of a European research project that developed three new microbial factories in a waste treatment plant in Italy. The researchers and companies involved aimed to engineer microbes to (more efficiently) use carbon dioxide to produce chemicals and bioplastics. Through the microbial labour of fermentation, waste gains worth as gas feedstocks are converted into commercially valuable materials, fixing carbon and offering 'sustainable' chemical production processes.
Drawing on embedded STS research in this project, the paper opens up microbial factories to investigate the multi-scalar collaborations and transformations they (might) entail. It interrogates tensions between logics of biocapitalist exploitation and of industrial reparation, asking whether microbial factories are best understood as ecomodernist technofixes, or as the becoming 'ecologically obliged' (Papadopoulos, 2022; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) of synthetic biology, waste treatment and chemical industries.
Mikko Jauho (University of Helsinki)
Long abstract:
An integral part of the proposed greening of the Anthropocene is ecological public health, referred to by several related concepts, such as OneHealth, Planetary Health, and EcoHealth. This paper introduces a case in which microbial biodiversity is enrolled into the service of multispecies health and wellbeing. In focus is a Finnish interdisciplinary research group, which is developing microbes-mediated biodiversity interventions to combat allergies and other autoimmune diseases. The prevalence of allergies has steadily increased in the Global North, which has been linked to western lifestyle and urbanization. The current etiological view highlights the biodiversity loss and insufficient contact with nature, especially with environmental microbes as a key cause. To combat this, the research group has, on the one hand, developed and patented a safe and optimized microbial mixture that can be placed in built urban environment (e.g. kindergarten yards), but also in everyday consumer products (e.g. cosmetics, sheets, clothes). On the other hand, the group wants to increase microbial diversity in cities by rewilding urban green areas. The different goals and pathways of intervention reveal the tensions between ecosystems- and human-centered public health paradigms. The new biodiversity-driven model requires the rethinking of both the hallmarks of healthy and safe urban environment, cleanliness and order, and the characteristics of medical evidence production, isolation of the contributing factor, standardization, and dose-response thinking, while its success relies on meeting these criteria. The paper contributes to our understanding of transitions-in-action and the frictions that ensue when other-than-human actors are enrolled into human service.