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.