Paper short abstract:

The unfolding tragedy of decline in Cordyceps availability and gathering by Himalayan communities metaphorically captures the ecological fragility of the Third Pole in the age of the anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Himalayan Viagra is a popular term used for Cordyceps (caterpillar fungus) that is found at very high altitudes currently fetches $100,000 in the global market. Its high-value use in Chinese medicine as an aphrodisiac has propelled its high market demand and often it’s unsustainable collection (wild cultivation) in the Indian Himalayas for the global market. Based on a review of literature and some exploratory discussions, I use the case of Cordyceps as a species to understand glocal ecological ramifications among Himalayan communities and as a key to unlock the climate change narrative. Its is widely acknowledged that Indian Himalayan communities dwell in precarious and ecologically sensitive landscapes, and challenges of meeting livelihood needs are a supra-indicator of not merely a declining ecologism but how concurrent with climate change, human greed and globalization has undermined landscape sustainability. Following Ingold, landscape tells us a story, it becomes a chronicle of life and dwelling although it is not merely a space. We gather meanings from it, and local communities attach meanings to it. Nonetheless the landscape is not merely a scape of inscription but comprises a movement of incorporation and its life cycle indicated temporality as it unfolds our story and becomes the homeland of our thoughts. The unfolding tragedy of decline in Cordyceps availability and gathering by Himalayan communities metaphorically captures the ecological fragility of the Third Pole in the age of the anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

The Siberian Sakha people have experienced a new interest in their living landscape, expressed in the Yhyakh ritual. I incorporate Gabriel Tarde’s work into an account of this shift. The Yhyakh revival’s success helps us see how local Arctic perspectives can be integrated into scholarship.

Paper long abstract:

A strange turnaround happened in Sakha (Yakutia), north-east Siberia, at the end of the twentieth century. The indigenous Siberian Sakha people experienced a powerful new interest in their living landscape – expressed particularly in the Yhyakh festival – after decades of secularist modernization. This modernization had transformed both Sakha peoples’ interrelation with the land, and the land itself: extracting Sakha (Yakutia)’s natural resources was one of the Soviet administration’s key aims. Sakha conservation initiatives now evoke the pre-Soviet living landscape, in a reversal of Soviet modernisation’s twin effects. I incorporate the work of the nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde into an account of the Yhyakh revival. I show how Tarde’s relational depiction of the social offers a way of describing Soviet and post-Soviet transformation without positing a conflict or disjuncture between modernization and its epistemologies, and the conventions that preceded it. Tarde’s work offers a way of handling the dichotomy between the unpredictable and partial nature of Soviet modernisation and its effects, and the uniformity of so many of the intentions that shaped Soviet policy. This dichotomy haunts the wider discussion of global modernization and its epistemological alterities, taking shape in some discussions as a hard distinction between ‘indigenous knowledge’ and the rest. The success of the Sakha Yhyakh revival, seen in Tarde’s terms, perhaps helps us see how local Arctic perspectives can be incorporated into both scholarship and conservation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to explore vernacular weather observations amongst rural people on Sakhalin, Russia’s largest island on the Pacific Coast, and their relationship to the ice. It is based on a weather diary (2000–2016) of one of the local inhabitants and fieldwork that I conducted on the island.

Paper long abstract:

My paper proposes to explore vernacular weather observations amongst rural people on Sakhalin, Russia’s largest island on the Pacific Coast, and their relationship to the ice. It is based on a weather diary (2000–2016) of one of the local inhabitants and fieldwork that I conducted on Sakhalin in 2009, 2013 and 2016. The diary as a community-based weather monitoring allows us to examine how people understand, perceive and deal with the weather both daily and in the long-term perspective. My research argues that amongst all natural phenomena, the ice is the most crucial for the local inhabitants as it determines human subsistence activities, navigation and relations with other environmental forces and beings. People perceive the ice as having an agency, engage in a dialogue with it, learn and adjust themselves to its drifting patterns. Over the past decade, there have been numerous changes in the environment related to climate. At the local level, these changes have resulted in the uncertainty amongst local people concerning the ice’s behaviour and the future of winter fisheries. In my presentation I will show that vernacular or rural weather diaries can serve as a good source of information on the links between the weather, natural events, multiple beings, including fish and dogs, subsistence practices and local inhabitants. These sources can be further integrated into research on climate change and fisheries management policy.

Paper short abstract:

This proposal considers how environmental data practices and their related infrastructures may constrain the ways in which climate change knowledge is derived, narrativized, and travels in the Third Pole. How do these technoscientific practices map onto community knowledges on the ground?

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies have revealed decades of glacial melt in the Hindu Kush Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau (“High Mountain Asia”). A region with a dearth of in-situ environmental data and opaque, fragmented governance, remote sensing data plays a key role in uncovering the region’s environmental concerns. These range from disasters such as flooding and earthquakes that have devastated the region to the glacial melt that impacts local livelihoods and agricultural systems. In this growing environmental discourse surrounding High Mountain Asia (HMA), analogies such as “water towers of Asia” and “Third Pole” have become correspondingly popular.

This proposal seeks to critically examine the role of environmental data and its use in environmental governance in the HMA. Engaging in science and technology studies, it seeks to contextualize environmental data within the infrastructures in which it resides. For example, how do organizations like the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) respond to concerns of the lack of environmental data in the region.

One might consider HMA far from the usual sites of a study on technoscientific practices, in which Silicon Valley or Antarctica may be considered primary producers of technology and climate science. However, it is in a region like HMA where ideas and policies of climate change debated in global scientific communities have deep ramifications for millions of people vulnerable to its impacts living in the high mountains or relying on its resources downstream. The diversity of these communities and the landscapes they inhabit problematize the epistemologies of climate change knowledge production.