Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the Yucatec Mayan struggle to defend indigenous grains and language as a prominent example of active indigenous engagements for an alternative future of pluricultural and multi-species co-existence in a globalized world.

Paper long abstract:

Both biodiversity and linguistic diversity are under threat owing to a similar set of factors in today’s interconnected world. As the transdisciplinary research field of biocultural diversity (Maffi 2005) demonstrates, these forms of diversity are strongly interrelated in terms of both their conservation and erosion.

The interrelation of biological, cultural and linguistic diversity is also clearly manifest in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Yucatec Maya speakers have conserved landraces, for example, those of the staple crop, maize in situ through their continued practice of milpa agriculture oriented towards subsistence. However, the two forms of diversity – agrobiological and linguistic are – threatened, owing to the increased tendency to turn away from the traditional agricultural production as well as the shift from Yucatec Maya to Spanish in daily language use.

In view of the pressure on local biocultural diversity, meanwhile there are a number of Yucatec Mayan initiatives to maintain both indigenous grains and language. Indigenous people in Yucatan increasingly engage in biocultural diversity conservation in a variety of ways ranging from everyday practice to digital activism. In these actions, Yucatec Maya speakers challenge the dominant neoliberal model of development – which has largely drawn on the objectification and commodification of “nature” (Escobar 1999) –, drawing on their own conception of human-environment-relationships.

This paper discusses the Yucatec Mayan struggle to defend indigenous grains and language as a prominent example of active indigenous engagements for an alternative future of pluricultural and multi-species co-existence in a globalized world.

Paper short abstract:

We engage with the biological concept of ecotones (i.e., multispecies contact zones along ecological gradients) to understand how different assemblages of biological species have been reshaped through the expansion of capitalist development in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we engage with the biological concept of ecotones to understand the complex mosaic of community ecologies involving humans and other animal species in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California, which is the largest cannabis-producing area of the United States. Ecotones are where different biological communities, ecosystems, or biotic regions meet. A diverse range of definitions and terms have been used to describe these ecological transitions: borders, transition zones, tension zones, zones of intermingling, zones of transgression, and so forth (Kent et al., 1997). Drawing on Donna Haraway (2007, 2016), we examine social life in these spaces of contact to consider how different assemblages of biological species have been reshaped through the expansion of capitalist development of the Redwood Coast, first through settler colonialism and extractivism, and more recently through the transition from illicit clandestine cannabis grows to large-scale legal enterprises. We consider consequences of multiple divergent land management strategies across the redwood landscape and look to local traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous nations in the regions for viable solutions to pressing crises. Ultimately, this paper addresses the questions: How has capitalist expansion shaped these multispecies contact zones in the Emerald Triangle? How can we support the capacities for humans to partner with the environment instead of promote extractive relationalities? We consider ecotones to be a generative concept that creates new questions about co-occupation, coexistence, and helps to understand the conditions by which particular human and more-than-human relations become calcified.

Paper short abstract:

By examining the Japanese oyster producers' practice of "seafloor plowing," a method for improving nutrients by disturbing the seafloor sediments, I show how the emerging form of human intervention attempts to balance ecosystem conservation and oyster aquaculture in post-industrial society.

Paper long abstract:

Local producers and fisheries researchers observe poor Pacific oyster growth over the last decade in Hiroshima Prefecture, the largest oyster-producing region in Japan. Changes in the composition of seawater nutrients that results in poor Pacific oyster growth has multiple causes. Since the development of estuarine watersheds in the 1970s, and more recently, the dam construction in the early 2000s, nutrients from the mountains have been unable to reach the sea. Further, some fisheries researchers’ claim sewage treatment, part of efforts to reach the government’s nationwide water quality standards, overpurifies the estuarine waters and thereby causes oyster maldevelopment. To address this latter problem for the Japanese aquaculture industry, local government sewage treatment plants increase the concentration of nutrients in the treated sewage water in winter when the level of phosphorus and nitrogen is low. Yet despite government attempts to address the problem, the nutrient imbalance remains. For local fishery cooperatives dependent on oyster growth for members’ livelihoods, the condition of the seawater is unacceptable. To help restore an appropriate mix of nutrients, members of a local oyster farming cooperative undertake "seafloor plowing," a method for reducing organic pollution while improving the uneven distribution of nutrients by disturbing the seafloor’s sediment layer and supplying oxygen. By examining this fishery cooperative’s attempt to balance ecosystem conservation and oyster aquaculture, I show how this practice of seafloor plowing, as a new form of human intervention, reconfigures multispecies relationships in a coastal aquaculture site in post-industrial society.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in a post-agroindustrial conservation landscape in DR Congo, this paper analyses tensions in socionatural times materialized in heterogeneous relations between people, agricultural plants, weeds and forests. This focus offers new ways to think about social-environmental justice.

Paper long abstract:

Yangambi, a small town about 100km west of Kisangani, DR Congo, used to be the quintessence of colonial agro-scientific capitalism: a world-renowned research institute served agricultural productivity and exports. Today, in the midst of shutdown agricultural factories, decrepit colonial buildings and decaying cash crops plantations that conservation-development projects attempt to restore, heterogeneous and unruly forms of human and vegetal (after)lives and relations have (re-)emerged spontaneously. This paper argues that post-agroindustrial ruins and their restoration act as material and symbolic sites of struggle between the hegemonic linear, compressed spatio-temporal frame of rational ecomodernization and the extended cyclical spatio-temporality of shifting cultivation. The low-wage, labour-intensive cultivation of short-cycle commercial food crops and export tree crops on permanent land plots owned by wealthier farmers, causes a rupture in communities’ long-term reciprocal relations with both forests and kin. In the same landscape, the sequence from field to fallow to forest to field and the slow growing, slowly harvested crops eaten locally coincides with reciprocal labour systems, allowing the reproduction of the nonhuman world –such as weeds and forests– and of relations with the living and non-living kin. I show that such tensions in socionatural times shape local understandings of socio-ecological change. Paying attention to various human-plant encounters and their spatial-temporalities, I suggest, offers new ways to think about pathways to social and environmental justice.