Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Mette Løvschal
(Aarhus University)
Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland (Roskilde University)
Send message to Convenors
- 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:
In Bronze-Age Denmark, human fire, cattle grazing, and turf-cutting maintained a plagioclimactic ecosystem known as heathlands. This paper investigates the shifting disturbance practices that people used to regenerate heather and embed themselves––and their dead––in the land.
Paper long abstract:
For millennia and well into the 19th century, humans have been managing and making a living from the heathland ecosystems of Skovbjerg Moraine in western Jutland. In the Bronze Age, these heaths functioned as winter grazing lands and a funeral landscape in which people entombed their dead. This paper investigates the human-mediated interactions of three companion species––fire, heather (Calluna vulgaris), and cattle––critical to the regenerativity of the human-heathland complex. Utilizing biological signatures embedded in grass and heather sods used to construct the burial mounds, I describe how human fire-setting and grazing practices interacted with the life history strategies of Calluna––a perennial ericoid species that dominates the heath––to produce a super-resilient ecology marked by pulses of extractive grazing and botanical rejuvenation. Bronze-Age Danish heaths present a model of mutuality-within-disturbance; they also offer a lesson in resource overexploitation. While Bronze-Age peoples’ fire and grazing practices produced sustainable landscape ecologies, turf-cutting associated with mound-building created wastelands of bare mineral soil, pulling vast areas of rangeland out of production. The price of honoring the dead was starving the living. The slow recovery of heather in these disturbance zones undercut peoples’ livelihood relation with the land, forcing the abandonment of funereal barrow-building and the reinvention of human-heathland relations in the Iron Age.
Paper short abstract:
By understanding how plants and people engaged in the past through archaeological research, we can challenge our contemporary relationships with the vegetal world. A consideration of 'plantiness' questions plant passivity and acknowledges how human becoming has been shaped by plants and by nature.
Paper long abstract:
As we face the challenges of human-induced climate change, we are forced to re-evaluate our relationships with nature. Modern practices of rewilding seek to return landscapes to their ‘pre-human’ state. Yet, many ecologies throughout the world have thrived because of human engagement. The removal of humans from nature has led to a wide-scale climactic crisis; how does removing ourselves further help in those processes of ‘rewilding’? How can we re-situate ourselves in nature and coexist with surrounding environments? In my research, I argue for a more-than-human approach to understanding past plant-human relationships to challenge the notion that humans have always separated themselves from nature. My research focuses on the theory of ‘plantiness’, which highlights the reciprocal nature of plant-human relationships where plants and people have formed negotiated relationships across extensive time-scales. Expanded from previous work, plantiness questions plant passivity and seeks to understand how plants have influenced human becoming. Plants should be viewed not as people, animals, or things, but as plants; they should be interpreted both for what they are and what they represent. In this paper, I will explore plant-human relationships in the Neolithic (4000-2500 BC) of eastern England, specifically focusing on the Fens – an extensive, dynamic coastal plain. How were Neolithic people engaging with and managing their surrounding environments? How did such relationships influence people? By demonstrating how plant-human relationships are contextualised archaeologically, we can challenge the separation of humans and nature. Plantiness provides a lens through which to study both contemporary and previous nature-human relationships.
Paper short abstract:
The Hadza of Tanzania as a hunting and gathering society engages with their physical surroundings on a daily basis. The human-nonhuman conviviality constitutes an ecology of inter-species relationships, connectedness, and kinship. The paper explores ethnographically the bioregional conviviality.
Paper long abstract:
The hunting and gathering Hadza of Tanzania are indigenous to the area they live in. Encircling the area, except to the south, there are National Parks with nature conservation and wildlife protection initiatives and legislation in place. The parks have been implemented in order to protect biodiversity, conserve forests, and lessen the destructive force of humans on the ecology of life. Only four percent of Earth’s population is considered indigenous, yet they steward 82% of the planet’s biodiversity and more than 60% of the world’s remaining forests. The conservation outcomes on indigenous lands fully compete with or even surpass the formalized conservation efforts.
What seems to lie behind this success is entangled conviviality. The human and nonhuman kinship ecologies produce more-than-human bioregional communities. In other words, this relates to the realm of worldview, connectedness, and relationships. In this paper, we dive into the case of the Hadza to learn of conviviality in a bioregional community that is characterized by intimate knowledge (eg. reflected linguistically, see Blench 2013), cosmological and ritual understanding, everyday engagement, and kinship care. The paper introduces ethnographic explorations into cosmology and ritual to expand on the entangled conviviality and kinship ecology of the Hadza towards their land.