Paper short abstract:

Proposal for a collaboration that investigates land-based ways of knowing that do not position colonial narratives as hierarchically dominant.

Paper long abstract:

I am not proposing a specific paper so much as multidisciplinary collaboration within the framework of "terrestrial vision-making". I believe it is vital to weave narratives that move outside of dominant frameworks of language and perception. The Indigenous term "two-eyed seeing" which refers to the idea that different worldviews can be superimposed without hierarchy to create new emergent narratives is central to my way of thinking. Attempting to deconstruct colonial narratives of place-making I am interested in land-based narratives that move away from an "us" versus "them" dichotomy. I am interested in how discussions of land are framed as human-centric and there is rarely a genuine investigation into the land as whole, self-determining, and self-regulating. Land in the colonial nation-state framework continues to be about property, wealth, extraction, and power and is abstracted away from the real on the ground reality of biodiversity. Land including mountains, bodies of water, and forests are not mere divisions on maps, resources to be sold or exploited, land is quite literally life itself. All living beings have intrinsic value that is not solely at the discretion of human whim. The constant fear of the crime of anthropomorphism is a symptom of the profound disconnect we experience from the natural world. Traditional worldviews that embrace an equality among all living beings are not anachronisms. We do not need to speak the same verbal language to understand that destroying habitats and ecosystems is violence without consent towards the residents of those spaces.

Paper short abstract:

During the pandemic, I started a small collaborative map of the disseminated seeds of an oak tree that lives at my mother's garden. As an affective map of our relationship with trees, it might throw some light on my other current research: how to narrate our interconnectedness with rainforests.

Paper long abstract:

While this pandemic’s exacerbated differentiations, I started a small "interspecies ethnography" of an oak at my mother's garden, in which concepts such as "limit", and "scarcity" collapsed: thousands of seeds fell at its foot and buried their roots among other sprouts and rotting leaves. Infected by this excess, I germinated seeds, losing my own notions of useful time and purpose.

Just the month before I was writing a PhD proposal. My aim was to investigate how to audiovisually narrate our co-dependence of the Amazon rainforest, a (surely failed) response to the increasing of deforestation since the partially failed 2016 Peace Agreement. I sought to understand more deeply this systemic co-dependence and tell "Gaia stories" (Latour 2016, Haraway 2016). I wondered, however, if a non-linear way was necessary, given that narration in our Western tradition follows "linear" patterns. Is there no connection between this linearity and the ecological crisis?

That project also came to a halt with the pandemic. Now, with hundreds of sprouting oaks, I am starting a small collaborative project: whoever takes a small tree, creates a georeferenced record of where it is planted, and a story of a tree that he/she remembers especially. My aim is to create a map of the great oak, including all its sprouts/derivations; an affective map of our relationships with trees.

I do not know if these projects converge; perhaps this map is a non-linear device that can bring us emotionally closer to that forest we see so far away.

Paper short abstract:

An experience of producing geopoetic films, with indigenous, quilombolas and scientists about the border they live at Alcantara Lauch Base (rocket lauch). They share the same place, despite numerous popular demonstrations against the expansion of the base.

Paper long abstract:

This is about the frontier between quilombola and indigenous groups, who live in the same space /time as the scientists who work at the Alcântara Launch Base. This base is just below the equator line, which promotes huge fuel savings, so there is a lot of interest in it. American programs do not allow this base to be autonomous and to launch large rockets, the same happened with other countries in South America. At the same time, hundreds of quilombola families who were refugees from slavery or indigenous who were escaping from the whites fight for years for take out the Alcantara Base from there. The fight was against to build in the base in that territory, but many promises were made, including that the area would become touristic and the tourists would consume all the production of the quilombolas and indigenous. But it never happened. Families withdrew from the area close to the sea, also lost their livelihoods. Many boundaries can be assumed in this place, perfect as a location to carry out this transdisciplinary project. We want to create an ancestral-futuristic becoming, a place to discuss the ancestry present in the speech of these peoples, and the scientific discourses that coexist. The idea is to work with the line between science and history, ancestry and future, space technological projects and quilombola/indigenous technologies. It is a transdisciplinar project of science and tecnology social inclusion, but also a technoshamanistic, ancestrofuturist, a geopoetical process at the Alcantara Lauch Base / Brazil.

Paper short abstract:

The worldview that modernism brought led us to the current crisis of survival that we face. This should make obvious the need for a change in the western worldview. To this end, a selection of traditional stories from around the world capable of transmitting a complex-systems worldview is proposed.

Paper long abstract:

Latour argues that any effort to sustain life in the critical zone of the Earth should leave modern epistemologies behind, and adds that the modernist framework permeates even social movements, including those that seek to mitigate climate disaster.

As an activist, I must admit that many times I have suggested similar ideas to Latour's within the social movement in which I am active, Extinction Rebellion, noting that many of us continue to share the same worldview that has brought us to the climate emergency.

On the other hand, as a social scientist, my proposals go beyond non-violent direct action in the streets, advocating the need for a change in worldview that takes us away from the modernism, anthropocentrism, and the mechanism, duality and disjunction of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, to a complex-systmes, ecocentric, organicist, integrative and transpersonal worldview. This would be, in line with Donella Meadows and Gregory Bateson, the most direct way for a transformation which leads humans to feel like one more thread in the fabric of life.

In order to disseminate such a worldview, I propose those educational tools with which the worldview of all cultures was conveyed: myths, legends and folktales. Curiously, and confirming Latour suggestions, the stories from oral cultures showed in my research to have more complex-systems thinking contents than the stories belonging to written cultures.

A selection of stories from cultures around the Earth, with systemic and ecocentric characteristics, is the objective of an international project launched a year ago: The Earth Stories Collection.