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- Convenors:
-
Paula Schiefer
(Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science)
Tara Joly (University of Northern British Columbia)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The term "land reclamation" covers various approaches to landscape modification which are said to improve landscapes and make them more suitable for a certain need. This panel reflects on changing human values in land by analysing different land reclamation projects and their social aspects.
Long Abstract:
The term "land reclamation" encapsulates a myriad of approaches to landscape modification. Distinct from restoration's attempt to recreate past ecosystems, reclamation's methods of recreating land or ecosystems disturbed by human and/or natural processes aim to engineer and even "improve" current conditions and relationships between people and the land. Examples of reclamation include the reclamation of land from the sea, riverbeds, or lakes and the change of coastal areas, the draining of marshlands for agricultural purposes, or, usually in a North American context, the recreating of disturbed ecosystems in a post-mining landscape. Land reclamation can be used to counteract erosion and as a coastal defence, to create more land suitable for infrastructural projects like airports and harbours, or to build artificial islands for luxurious hotels. Farmers reclaim land to harvest more crops, and environmental scientists use post-mining landscapes to establish new or lost ecological assemblages.
With shifting definitions of "productive" land - political, economic, ecological, or somewhere in-between - reclamation practices often reflect changing human values in the environment and local landscapes. This panel aims to highlight social aspects of land reclamation and invites papers from all research areas. We understand the diverse social characteristics of land reclamation projects as a possibility to connect conservation with questions of Indigenous sovereignty and inequality, and ask for whom landscapes are reclaimed. Together we analyse the changing values in land- and seascapes held by locals, oil companies, bureaucrats, scientists, and/or Indigenous communities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Japan’s residents have been coping with the effects of coastal land reclamation for many decades. This paper looks at the ongoing social effects of the country’s largest land reclamation project, which—notably—was not coastal.
Paper long abstract:
To boost Japan’s rice production capacity, the country’s second-largest lake was transformed into a 67mi2 expanse of farmland through a massive Dutch-style land reclamation project over two decades, beginning in the 1950s. In 1964, the village of Ogata-mura was founded within the empoldered area inside the lake, which lies below sea level, to serve as a model for a new kind of highly mechanized, efficient rice agriculture. Nearly six hundred pioneer settlers were brought in from across the country. Subsequently, rice demand fell, and the national government initiated draconian measures to curtail production. The village community eventually became divided into two major groups—those who complied with Tokyo’s orders and those who did not. The former continued marketing their rice communally, through legal, government channels. The latter became black marketeers. Neighbors were pitted against each other, police roadblocks were set up, lands were seized, and the goal of creating a harmonious, egalitarian farming community slipped beyond reach as individual entrepreneurialism took root among the non-compliant farmers. Only during the first decade of the current century did the village society reach a point at which it could be said to have overcome the damage caused by the long era of conflict. Drawing on 17 years of ethnographic research (1995-2012) conducted inside the reclaimed land area, this paper will review the social effects of the reclamation of Hachirōgata—primarily those inside the polder dam, and secondarily those on the outside—and consider the situation today.
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes a Sahlins-ian approach to study the Santal 'Hul' in colonial India as a culturally dictated response to the social engineering policies of the East India Company and the forced sedentarization of the Santals to facilitate land reclamation and forest clearing in the mid-1800s.
Paper long abstract:
The relationship between land reclamation, social benefit, and social policy, has been a matter of contention across disciplines. This paper contributes to the debate on its transformative consequences from a deep-history perspective; by studying the Santal Rebellion in nineteenth-century India. Beginning in the 1820s, until a violent revolt broke out in 1855, the English East India Company undertook massive land-reclamation activities in eastern India, inhabited by several tribal groups including the Santals. This paper interprets the similarities between the Santal rite of 'bitlaha' (ostracism) and the events of the Santal Rebellion (Hul) observed by Elizabeth Rottger-Hogan (1982) as a cultural response to the disruption of the deep history of the Santals coinciding with the social engineering of the colonial state in the forested Damin-i-Koh. This paper argues that such land-'reclamation' policies leading to forced sedentarization, in fact, did not "improve lives" but engendered a cultural and social crisis within the community that is traceable in both the form of the rebellion and the songs and rumors circulating in the region at the time. This paper concludes that the Hul can be interpreted as an act of 'bitlaha' writ large— performed by the community to expel what they understood as the source of pollution—the colonial state. The events then assumed political significance by the dynamics of cultural transformation theorized by Marshall Sahlins enabling the Santals to engage politically with State-systems instead of evading them.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores relations between wetland conservation and land reclamation processes. It discusses the Bonifica Integrale (complete reclamation) implemented during the 1930s in Agro Pontino, Italy, and the subsequent development of wetland conservation in the region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the emergence of the category of ‘wetland’ in conservation discourses in relation to the recent environmental history of Agro Pontino, in Italy. The imaginary of this region, which nowadays hosts four wetlands included within the Ramsar Convention, is dominated by the land reclamation process implemented by the Fascist regime in the 1930s, and named ‘Bonifica Integrale’ (Integral Reclamation). This process involved the drainage of the Pontine Marshes, the largest marshlands in Italy, followed by the colonisation of the area, by the foundation of three new towns, and by the creation of the Circeo National Park in 1934. The meaning of this process has to be framed within the negative perception of the Pontine Marshes, and of marshlands in general, from the ecological, social, and political perspectives. In fact during fascism the verb ‘bonificare’ (to reclaim), literally meaning ‘turning into good’, was frequently associated with the verb ‘redimere’ (to redeem), meaning the actual religious act of redeeming the land and its inhabitants from the power of evil represented by the Marshes.
Discussing ethnographic and historical materials this paper analyses how the Agro Pontino became entangled in various stages of landscape policy, local use and environmental ethics, thus exemplifying how landscapes change their meaning over time, according to political contingencies that often conceal local imaginaries, knowledges and ecologies. This example epitomises the process by which global categories of conservation, such as ‘wetland’, are implemented into local scenarios, demarcating new interests and constructing new landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
The paper scrutinises the evolution of geo-engineering activities in the Maldives to show how the refashioning of terrestrial and submarine spaces reflects and fosters changes in archipelagic society.
Paper long abstract:
In the Maldives land reclamation must be viewed as part of a broader approach to modifying landscapes. Because the Maldives are an archipelago solely comprised of coral reefs, small islands and vast areas of sea, geo-engineering must be attuned to the specificities of this predominantly aquatic ecosystem. Consequently, I review terrestrial as well as submarine geo-engineering projects to infer the changing impetuses with which onshore and offshore landscapes have been shaped over the last six decades. Since independence in the 1960s, geo-engineering became a fixation for the post-colonial state and has by now developed into a massive enterprise that not only affects vast terrains in the atolls but also many domains of everyday life. It has evolved to a full-fledged activity, involving the construction of connectivity infrastructures (like harbours, shipping lanes and air ports), the facilitation of modernisation and economic development, the tackling of population pressure, land shortage and rampant urbanisation (through artificial island construction), the mitigation of erosion and climate change effects, as well as the catering for tourist consumption of environments (through beach nourishment and coral planting). By drawing out the progression of landscape and seascape modifications the paper on the one hand traces how such projects reflect shifting priorities and preoccupations of the island society as well as altered relationships between islanders and their archipelagic environment. On the other hand it discusses how landscape modification serves as an instrument to facilitate social, economic, cultural and political change.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. It will investigate (a) how colonial to post-colonial state imagined and reclaimed floodplains (b) how this imagination and reclamation of the space influences experiences and aspirations of those living in the floodplains.
Paper long abstract:
Britishers regularised settlements of the migrants in floodplains of the Indian state of Assam. This was done by reclaiming floodplains - making/unmaking of ‘reserve grazing grounds’. The goal was to extract revenue from floodplains.
Initially, these floodplains were reserved for the Nepali community for cattle grazing. But as they agitated against grazing fee, Britishers evicted them. They opened up of these 'reserves' to East-Bengal origin Muslims (Miyas), who continue to live there.
Miyas transformed the floodplains to food bowl. With time there was growing income, which allowed them to buy land elsewhere. There was fear of the migrants taking over all of the land. It made way from records of the colonial to post-colonial policies, particularly the 2019 Land Policy.
This land policy wants to re-reserve parts of floodplains for settling indigenous population, excluding the miyas. It declares any habitation in the floodplains as illegal. Remaining parts of the floodplains will be left fallow for flood drainage. Without land title, the miyas find it difficult to claim citizenship. They have to live as liminal citizen. Their lives highlight that citizenship is not a fixed construct, but hierarchies.
Based on ethnographic research, this paper seeks (a) how state imagines and reclaims particular space, (b) how this imagination and reclamation of the space influences experiences of those living there. It will do so by (a) historical account of reservation, de-reservation and re-reservation of the floodplains, using the idea of “eco-body of the state”; (b) workings of liminal citizenship fuelled by reservation policies.