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- Convenors:
-
Mette Løvschal
(Aarhus University)
Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland (Roskilde University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Historically speaking, a series of ecologies have thrived on entangled processes of anthropogenic disturbances e.g. fire and grazing. Such long-term interdependencies provide an opportunity to rethink human-nonhuman collaboration and forms of governance arising in landscapes thriving on disturbance.
Long Abstract:
In the Anthropocene epoch, human-driven landscape degradation is accelerating radically with the clearing and burning of rainforests, rangeland enclosure, landscape fragmentation and degradation, desertification and erosion. Processes that are making increasing proportions of the planet uninhabitable and in which humans are a distinctly destructive, exhausting and mechanical force. In an attempt to halt or reverse such processes, a series of large-scale landscape preservation, rewilding and planning initiatives have emerged seeking in general to (re)move humans from Nature. However, historically speaking, some ecologies have thrived on entangled processes of anthropogenic disturbances such as fire and grazing, including heathlands, grasslands, swamps and forests. Not only do many of these plagioclimatic landscapes have some of the highest biodiversity. They are also landscapes characterised by the incredibly long-term and sustainable coexistence of humans and ecologies — sometimes even spanning millennia. These practices provide an opportunity to rethink humans’ relationship with Nature and explore the specific collaborative roles involved in landscape conservation. Such practices involve people as companions working with and being with landscapes instead of destroying them or planning for their preservation. We are inviting scholars to discuss historical and current, traditional and modern knowledge of these socio-ecological landscaping and conservation practices. In this panel, we explore the multitudes of human-nonhuman collaborations, interdependencies and forms of governance arising in landscapes thriving on multispecies disturbance. Moreover, we investigate the relationship between material practices of care and extraction, forces of destruction and resurgence, and tradition, continuity and reinvention in disturbance ecologies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper asks how lessons and data from the past can contribute to sustainable habitat conservation in Europe's uplands, particularly in areas protected under Natura 2000 legislation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper asks how lessons and data from the past can contribute to sustainable habitat conservation in Europe's uplands, particularly in areas protected under Natura 2000 legislation.
The paper uses a mountainous peninsula in Kerry, Ireland, as a case study, with reference to other uplands in Europe. It begins by highlighting the difficulties that conservation of bog, heath and grassland habitats is facing due to rural depopulation and over-grazing. It then brings landscape history, palaeoecology and archaeology together to assess the long-term feasibility of conserving or restoring these habitats under current EU and National Park policy. Pointing to the surprisingly recent disappearance of woodland due to grazing, charcoal production and logging, I show that pre-1950s land use was not as ‘traditional’ as conservation discourse holds it to be. Historical management of uplands by farmers could vary greatly depending on socio-political factors and economic trends.
This environmental history of change is crucial to understanding the relative failure of habitat conservation in many parts of Ireland and other parts of the EU today. I outline how ‘lessons from the past’ can help to make upland management more realistic, if all stakeholders accept that society and landscape have been constantly co-evolving. The paper finishes by providing concrete examples of how archaeologists and historians might act on what they have discovered about past land management. I suggest that engagement with local land-use partnerships and ecologists is a crucial first step, before ever we attempt to influence legislation at a national or supra-national level.
Paper short abstract:
Models that imagine rewilding as “anywhere” can not account for more-than-human historical contingencies that shape rewilding when always happening “somewhere.” With the Oder Delta as a case, I explore how rewilding differentially materializes and the importance of more-than-human description.
Paper long abstract:
Why might environmental management strategies in the Anthropocene—such as rewilding—need to take seriously descriptions of more-than-human historical contingency? Rewilding as a restoration and conservation strategy in European settings attempts to (re)invigorate self-sustaining biodiverse ecosystem processes through approaches such as managed-unmanagement (e.g. infrastructure removal and infrastructures of containment), the installation of keystone species (e.g. releasing disturbance-creating large herbivores), and natural succession (e.g. ecologies emerging from such disturbances) to increase ecological heterogeneity and biodiversity. Such implementations are often authenticated and universalized through scientific narratives, practices, and models that decontextualize human and non-human relations to craft transportable restoration strategies of “letting nature go.” While useful for grounding new imaginings for post-Holocene world-building of noticed ecologies, such knowledge claims tell only a partial story, as these claims cannot account for the contingent socio-ecological histories of emergent relationships that make rewilding possible. To attend to this friction, I investigate the Oder Delta, an official Rewilding Europe site situated on the border of Poland and Germany. Through landscape histories and ethnography, I explore the two contrasting sides of the Delta and how rewilding’s ecologies, politics, and historicity are circumscribed by, reflect, and emerge out of contingencies of economic progress, state-making infrastructures, and more modest human projects that entangle and collaborate with non-human worlds. In sum, I show that by taking seriously and attending to more-than-human historical contingencies that unsettle nature/culture divides and determine where and how rewilding differentially materializes—such as in the Oder Delta—a more ethical reconstituting of rewilding in environmental management might be possible.
Paper short abstract:
Attempting to take the perspective from the Ik mountains in Uganda, this paper describes the land’s and forests’ changing entanglements with various human companions over time; including the indigenous Ik, herding neighbours and their animals, British colonials, conservationists and developers.
Paper long abstract:
The mountains in Timu forest in Ik County, northern Uganda have had various human companions over time. The indigenous Ik community have long lived in the mountains from a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence agriculture. During drought and hunger periods, hunting in the forest was essential. People burned grass in the forest for hunting purposes and to prevent wild bush fires.
When nature reserves were established by the British in the 1940s, many Ik were displaced and denied the right to hunt. Living in semi-nomadic villages between two nature reserves, the Ik cultivate gardens, but leave large areas fallow or untouched in the mountains. The mountain territories are perceived by most Ik to be shared with animals, trees, and spirits and other human guests. Neighbouring herders graze their animals in the Ik mountains, creating periodic friction, but also contributions.
In recent decades Uganda has lost an estimated 50% of it’s biodiversity. A strategy of ‘fortress conservation’ attempts to counter the decline, and people have been displaced based on assumptions that they use resources destructively. Yet, in fact, Ik activities in the mountains seem to have balanced hunting, gathering, and shifting horticulture leaving minimal harmful imprints. Now development projects introduce cash crops such as coffee and keeping of domestic animals, and bio-diversity projects are ‘sensitizing’ the Ik about the so-called ’right’ way to manage nature.
The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Ik mountains between 2010 and 2020.
Paper short abstract:
Shepherdesses across the remaining European heathlands are reinventing herding referring to traditional practices, recreation and biodiversity. This paper inquiries into this biocultural heritage practice in relation to ecofeminist aspects of in/equalities and desired pasts, presents and futures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the present day uses of herding practices performed by shepherdesses on heathlands throughout Europe. Heathlands are particular plagio-climatic landscapes that need disturbances from humans and nonhumans as well as particular geological and environmental conditions to avoid reforestation. One way of governing such disturbances is by means of herders. Heathland herding disappeared as a widespread profession during the 17th-19th century, along with enclosure and national programs of turning heathlands into agricultural land and pine plantations, resulting in an up to 90% loss across Northern Europe. However, over the last 20 years, shepherdesses have reinvigorated herding as a kind of voluntary recreational livelihood and situated landscape care, with reference to traditional practices and biodiversity benefits. Together with the still visible prehistoric remnants such as megaliths and barrows, such ‘living biocultural heritage’ makes these anthropogenic disturbed landscapes a unique site to inquire into landscape conservation, reinventions of rejuvenation practices and recreation. Furthermore, the links to past traditions and practices as well as the ecological effects, remain underexplored. Our paper is based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic participatory observations wandering with seven shepherdesses in western Jutland, Denmark. We wish to focus on the ecofeminist aspects of these reinvented human-heathland entanglements. By linking their practices to a deep time as well as historical perspective, we will enquire the desired futures that emerge in the anthropogenic vegetation hierarchies, pertaining to issues of gender in/equalities, age - and social hierarchies.