Short abstract:

The paper proposes a methodology for investigating and assembling local environmental knowledge in order to produce alternate narratives to dominant imaginaries of water engineers, and to question ecological uncertainties according a heuristics of fear.

Long abstract:

Large infrastructures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, like waterways, are promoted through progress narratives that cast those with concerns as opponents. Project designs produce an ontological framing, meaning a selection of what exists or is planned. The depicted forms constitute environmental motifs (Bouleau 2019) that shape the issues they pertain to. This argumentative and ontological framing works in favour of infrastructures and makes other distributive (Swyngedouw 2019) or ecological issues less prominent and asymmetries of resources hamper criticism. However, these imaginations do not completely exhaust representations of the future, particularly concerns regarding forms of biodiversity and their modes of governance in the future. My research aims to bring these concerns to light in order to gain perspective on the dominant imagination. I collected expressions of environmental concerns from voices less heard on the territory, such as from associative actors. I discussed their significance with an ecologist to identify relevant causations and assemble them based on the concept of "environmental motif" (Bouleau, 2019) into three alternative narratives aligned with different visions of the future of the ecological crisis (green growth, frugality, and ecological modernization). This stance operationalises the "heuristic of fear" (Jonas, 1990) with place-based linguistic and sensory repertoires of the environment.