Presentation short abstract

Decolonising the politics of knowledge at play in contemporary global peatland conservation requires attention to entangled histories of expropriated labour and skill. The paper revisits key moments of geographical translation to rethink the politics of expertise and inclusive climate futures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper asks what it means to decolonise knowledge in global peatland conservation when the making of “peatlands” as climate assets rests on long histories of expropriated labour. Drawing on work-in-progress from the ERC project PEATSENSE, I examine how diverse knowledges and sensing practices are being reconfigured as peatlands become priority sites for climate mitigation. I focus on historical entanglements between the making of Scottish bogs, Patagonian turberas [peatlands] and Amazonian aguajales [palm swamps] across distinct political moments. Sheep-farmers dispossessed from the Scottish lowlands in the late nineteenth century became critical actors in reorganising more-than-human labour in Tierra del Fuego, their embodied agrarian skills producing peat in new ways - as fuel and agricultural support. Finnish palaeoecologists invited by Chilean and Argentinian governments later helped define peat as fungible substrate within national economies. These translations resonate with the twenty-first-century arrival of Finnish and British ecologists in the Amazon basin, deploying corers, drones, LiDAR and satellite classifications to redefine wetlands through the terminology of below-ground carbon in turba [peat], a term with little cultural history in the region. The analysis situates peatlands within human geography accounts of resource- making and governance and political ecology critiques of green extractivism. At the same time, it mobilises feminist STS to foreground more-than-human, embodied sensing practices through which peatlands have long been known, valued and contested. Ultimately, the paper asks what an inclusive climate future for peatlands would require, and how we might “provincialise” peatland conservation without abandoning urgent commitments to justice and biodiversity.