Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a two-dimensional approach to environmental sustainability. Based on indigenous people’s nature conceptions and a theoretical model of social and cultural anthropology, the paper discusses challenges model construction.

Paper long abstract:

The paper bridges everyday knowledge with scientific knowledge by introducing a two-dimensional way of defining what environmental sustainability might mean. First, it shows empirical material of the Skolt Sami indigenous people’s conceptions about human obligations to nature. Second, related to them, it presents a theoretical model of social and cultural anthropology, in other words, a model of human-environment interaction based on Gregory Bateson’s formulations. It then constructs a model of environmental sustainability based on the empirical material and Bateson's model. The paper considers the challenges of this model formation. For example, how to understand different forms of knowledge and how to handle them? How to deal with indigenous knowledge? The paper argues that different kinds of research processes may honor indigenous people’s knowledge in different ways.

Paper short abstract:

The concept of invasive alien species is a keyword in environmental work. This paper uses the Garden Lupin as an example, showing how management practices are culturally charged, and working as a nexus for a variety of contesting knowledges concerning invasiveness, landscapes and heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decades, the concept of invasive alien species has become a loaded keyword in environmental work. How to manage new and threatening plants or animals propels regulations and actions worldwide. Although framed as driven by ecological considerations, such management is fundamentally culturally charged—up for debate are notions of human responsibility, nature as heritage, and understandings of nativeness and belonging.

This paper uses the Garden Lupin, in a Swedish setting, as example, showing how management practices are contextual, alterable and part of meaning-making processes. The Garden Lupine was introduced as a garden plant in the 19th century. Early on, the lupine began to appear wild. From the 1960s onwards, it has been found in larger wild habitats, often along motorways or railways in the greater part of Sweden. It is understood as both alien and invasive, and as a traditional flower. In several way, it has become a signifier of today used in multiple settings. Also, the possibility to eradicate the species is debated.

The management of eradicating garden lupines works as a nexus for a variety of knowledges concerning invasiveness, landscapes and heritage. The paper will focus on questions like, what are recognized as legitimate knowledge and practice in invasive alien species management, and how this is acted out. This will offer an insight into contesting knowledges revealing ideas about the relationship between the past, present and future in environmental work.

Paper short abstract:

Terrestrial resonance is merging concepts by Bruno Latour and Hartmut Rosa towards an epistemological framework for environmental praxiographies. It is supposed to transgress modernist dichotomies as rationality/romanticism and mediate in the epistemic conflicts of agricultural transformations.

Paper long abstract:

Agriculture and Farmers in Germany are under heavy transformative pressure. New regulations for climate and biodiversity protection, soil health and animal welfare are accompanied by a geopolitical crisis resulting in unreliable global markets and supply chains. The imaginary of a socio-ecologically transformed sustainable agriculture is dividing producers and consumers and political parties as much as the farmers coping strategies. The divide is also if not mainly a divide in (de-)legitimating knowledge cultures. While the environmental und geopolitical crisis is of high recency the divide runs along inherited modernist dichotomies that hinder not only the transformation but also the scientific understanding of such processes.

In the presentation I will focus in certain farming practices and the discursive binary of rationality and romanticism. While rational agriculture is referring to an economy and science based agricultural development some pioneer practices in regenerative Farming are rendered as romanticism. Two concepts that are inherited from late 18th and early 19th century. A period when classical economic theory and just institutionalised disciplines became the foundation for a rational reformation of traditional agricultural (knowledge) practices and was opposed by a counter culture criticising the alienating, objectifying and incapacitating effects of a pure rational mode of relating to oneself and the environment.

Terrestrial resonance is merging concepts by Bruno Latour and Hartmut Rosa towards an epistemological framework for environmental praxiographies. It is supposed to transgress modernist dichotomies as rationality/romanticism and mediate in the epistemic conflicts of agricultural transformations.

Paper short abstract:

A case study from high Arctic Svalbard explores how different ways of knowing (scientific and experiential) entangle and enrich our understanding of changing environments. How can bridging and acknowledging different kinds of knowledge help us navigate uncertainty in landscapes of constant change?

Paper long abstract:

The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is both a climate change hotspot and a vibrant hub for environmental research and monitoring. Scientific knowledge dominates public discourse and decision making with regard to climate-change adaptation and nature conservation. Earlier research demonstrates that other knowledge systems have limited influence and legitimacy in the management of Svalbard. This paper presents a synthesis of a three-year long interdisciplinary project (SVALUR) mapping how different forms of knowledge contribute to understanding processes of change and shaping Svalbard's environmental memory. Scientific research and long-term monitoring, as well as local/experiential/everyday knowledge of those who live, work and travel in Svalbard play a role in how people navigate Svalbard's changing environments. Accounts shared by technicians working in science logistics, tour guides, long-term residents and visitors shows that uncertainty is inevitable in landscapes of constant becoming. Environments are made sense of through performed activities that differ but also partly overlap for various communities of practice that coexist in Svalbard (such as science, management, tourism, trapping, and recreation). Different ways of knowing and remembering meet, entangle and perform different functions in navigating uncertainties. Generational thinking is under-represented, which is possibly linked with the population's transience as well as a non-existent Indigenous population. Emphasis tends to be placed on subjective and individual time scales, as well as the constructed time scales of different scientific disciplines. Our case study from Svalbard demonstrates how different forms of knowledge overlap and interact, helping us understand the meanings of changing environments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses imaginations of water futures and climate change in Berlin-Brandenburg and how people refer to either knowledge about technical fixes or to nature conservation. It looks at every-day human-water interaction, co-production of knowledge and negotiations on future living together.

Paper long abstract:

Shaped by networks of rivers and lakes, Berlin-Brandenburg is the region with the most waters in Germany, but at the same time the one with the least water. Since this ‘water world’ is recently marked by extreme shortages of precipitation, climate change is politically discussed in the context of increased droughts. The hydro-social spaces are the result of a collaboration of human actors, hydrological infrastructure and water and they are constantly subject of political negotiations. The existing water infrastructures have been and are formed by anthropogenic activities such as water extraction for individual or agricultural use or the flooding of lignite mines. Climate change and the increasing demand for water in the metropolitan area adds to the pressure on water-generating rural areas. Searching for adaptive measures opens ontological spaces, where hydrological knowledge is discussed by several experts: scientists, political representatives and an engaged public.

In this paper I will discuss the different imaginations of water futures, and how they are accompanied by requests of knowledge about technical fixes and anthropogenic alterations of the environment on the one hand, and withdrawal of human influence through nature conservation on the other hand. I look at human-water interaction and the co-production of climate change knowledge in the context of negotiations on possible ways to transform the living together of human and more-than-human actors.

Paper short abstract:

Building upon field research in rural settings in the Czech Republic, the paper studies tricky connections between the concept of climate change and its biographically-based perceptions. How interactions with the environment and the changes it has been undergoing are contextualised by older people?

Paper long abstract:

While the theory of anthropogenic climate change is considered by the overwhelming majority of scientists as an obvious fact, in society, one can find much less certainty about the causes and consequences of climate processes we can witness. This discrepancy fuels debate in environmental anthropology about the link between climate change as a kind of abstract, global and long-term phenomenon and its concrete, locally and biographically-based perceptions. My paper studies these tricky connections from the perspective of ageing people. It asks how interactions with the environment and the changes it has been undergoing are contextualised within biographies that span seven or eight decades. The research my paper is built upon took place in two rural settings in the Czech Republic. Localities of the field research were chosen in cooperation with the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences as places where impacts of climate change are becoming particularly apparent in recent years. Our attention focused on our interlocutors’ memories, attitudes, feelings, experiences, and coping strategies. Four distinctive areas where the connections between individual perceptions and climate change became salient have been identified: decreasing snow cover, the collapse of spruce forests, long-term drought, and the extraordinary appearance of a tornado. However, even in those cases, the scientific theories represented just one possible – and marginal – explanatory framework.

Paper short abstract:

More-than-human entanglements involving fungi can offer vital perspective on the way how different types of knowledges interact. I try to uncover different layers of knowledge that transgress discourses on fungi and open question how could they help us to tackle environmental insecurities today?

Paper long abstract:

More-than-human entanglements involving fungi have been a theme of important research projects in recent years. Ground-breaking Tsing´s book on Matsutake mushroom have offered fascinating analysis of global trade of this luxurious product where people and fungi create strategies of survival in uncertain late capitalist precarious conditions. However, in different cultural settings the fungi are a subject of diverse discourses ranging from popular knowledge of mushroom foragers to professional mycologists. All of them are culturally embedded and historically rooted in what have been called mycophobic and mycophilic cultures, ie. defined on affects relating to fungi. My opening questions here are how these discourses on fungi are related, how are these knowledges negotiated and what are the practices of entangling with fungi they entail? My data come from proclaimed highly mycophilic Czech culture and are based on ethnographic research with different actors engaged with fungi with emphasis on its historical roots. Exactly these cultural settings enable to analyse interaction between scientific and everyday knowledges on fungi that reflect environmental challenges and global uncertainties. I try to uncover different layers of knowledge that transgress varied discourses on fungi, including scientific mycology, “amateur” mycology, mushroom foragers´ accounts, popular culture representations etc. Furthermore, I will trace cultural and historical origins of these layers to better understand how they relate to each other and what kind of sensitivities they mobilize. Finally, my intention is to open the question how could these more-than-human entanglements and their historical embeddedness navigate us in addressing the environmental insecurities of today?