Presentation short abstract

This article traces how emotions with multiple others fracture and spill over as negative surpluses that shape the Kibale National Park landscape in Uganda into a zone for ecolabel tea production but could in future be mobilised towards a more transformative conservation.

Presentation long abstract

Emotional political ecology has centred emotions as not only important for shaping subjectivities of conservation actors, but also vital pathways to transformative conservation. Recent literature in this field has foregrounded IPLCs and how they mobilise and deploy emotional connections with multiple others while performing conservation. Comparative narratives from culturally more fluid settings remain sparse in this discourse, however. Using Nixon’s notion of slow violence, I trace how emotional intensities incrementally shape the culturally dynamic Kibale National Park (KNP) landscape in Uganda into a zone for ecolabel tea production, and question whether annealing those emotional ruptures opens new possibilities for transformative conservation governance. I perform this exploration within the Kabarole District Forestry Office Archive, which simultaneously harbours expectation and conjured dreams, but also unanticipated forebodings of future failure. The analysis reveals interventions for formal forest management by the colonial and Toro native forestry administrations as imbued with emotional anxieties that fracture relationships among the landscape’s multiple others into gradational human-environment conflict and strained labour relations. When these anxieties accumulate and eventually spill over as negative emotional surpluses, the KNP landscape becomes a prime zone for ethical intervention through ecolabel tea production. What risks might such appropriation and commodification of emotions through ecolabelling present for the spiralling of the landscape’s emotional anxieties into further uncharted trajectories? I argue that conjuring transformative futures for landscapes like KNP could be more viable if conservation interventions took into account and attempted to anneal their negative emotional surpluses.