Paper short abstract:

Drawn from long-term participant observation as a liveaboard boater in London, this paper discusses the complexities of marginal, diffuse or itinerant communities’ engagements with urban environmental or conservation initiatives, in light of wider narratives of displacement and spatial injustice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches canals as artefacts of the industrial revolution which, though abandoned following the decline of the industry, were later reimagined, reclaimed, and repurposed as watery ‘commons’ spaces for leisure and dwelling. These re-inhabiting practices have drawn greater interest – and stricter regulation – in the past decade since the popularity of living afloat ballooned alongside London’s austerity-led housing crisis.

It explores how liveaboard boaters respond to environmental initiatives and pollution mitigation measures being set up by Local Authorities, that often result in exclusion from these spaces (for instance, via bans on burning wood to meet clean air targets). In contrast, it sets out a counterexample of a boater-led campaign to hold the Canal and River Trust and Environment Agency to account following their inadequate response to a major pollution incident.

These issues sit within wider narratives of dispossession, of middle class or elite interests hijacking ‘green’ initiatives to ‘clean up’ and thus gentrify or ‘recapitalize’ (per Gandy’s observations on ‘edge spaces’) neighbourhoods. It thinks through Baviskar’s ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ in light of the dwelling practices of a mobile and constantly shifting community of boaters in formerly abandoned - but now increasingly monitored, regulated and monetized - spaces.

It asks what conservation comes to mean in these contexts – who gets to mobilize conservation practices, or environmental awareness more broadly, as justification and validation? How does this play into processes of delegitimization of transient or otherwise informally housed communities? Who is conservation for, who must compromise, and who stands to lose?

Paper short abstract:

Building on the metaphor of scratching in a huge petrochemical hub in southern Italy, this paper analyzes current conservation battles within emerging conversations about ecological frictions, late capitalist dynamics and politics of time-space in a climate of increasing industrial decline.

Paper long abstract:

Abandoned archaeological sites, a shooting range off-limits to the public, the rubble of a dismissed chemical factory on the horizon in an apocalyptic, almost fossilized, 1990s landscape and the prototype for a futuristic solar plant in south-eastern Sicily, in one of the largest petrochemical hubs in Europe, open up a frictional zone between the accumulation of historical traces over time and the presentification of possible alternative futures. In this paper, the metaphor of scratching sheds light on a form of agency that hinges on the manipulation of these contested, heterotopic landscapes displaying the effects of industrial processing and land grabbing. Indeed, transforming the environment into a DJing deck to fight and battle it out, environmental justice movements in Siracusa on the one hand muffle the latent anxiety and acquired insensitivity of everyday forms of disaster, while on the other expand the ring of light in which to imagine future alternatives through a phantasmagoric mix of natural and heritage conservation. Scratching thus represents a virtuoso technique used by groups who manage to disrupt late industrial logic, and reveal its gaps and latent contradictions. Building on the analysis of one specific case - a public demonstration, halfway between an eco-cultural outing and a protest march that I have captured during my fieldwork in this declining petrochemical hub -, I will analyze current conservation battles in the area within emerging anthropological conversations about ecological frictions, capitalist dynamics and politics of time-space in a climate of increasing industrial decline.

Paper short abstract:

By tracing the geo-history of Cherwon, a town divided by the Korean War, this paper aims to show that the conservation of what is called “the ecological paradise” of the DMZ is not a simple matter of keeping the status quo or going back to the past but has multiple temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the Korean peninsula offers a window into the Anthropocene future, a place where humans have suddenly vanished. Yet the DMZ is a least likely place to find such conventional evidence for the Anthropocene as radioactive materials, plastics, and chicken bones. This is the place where past human conflicts – colonial occupations, the Korean War, and unfinished Cold War tensions – have created a peaceful condition for non-humans. More than 5,000 species of plants and animals on the ground live with millions of land mines underground, whereas humans watch over, patrol, and environ this space of natureculture from a far. This paper explores the meaning of conservation from the perspective of multiple temporalities of conservation. By tracing the geo-history of Cherwon – a town that was developed as a rice farming place during the Japanese colonial period, served as a strategic front for the North Korean government before the Korean War, thoroughly destroyed and divided during the war, redeveloped by settlers coming from around South Korea, and recently inhabited by endangered species like cranes – this paper aims to show that the conservation of what is called “the ecological paradise” of the DMZ is not a simple matter of keeping the status quo or going back to the past. Our main argument is that multiple ideas of conservation co-exist, transposed from the past and also transposed into the future, where nonhumans can claim surprisingly a high ground in the politics of affect.