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- Convenors:
-
Malgorzata Zofia Kowalska
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Kirsi Sonck-Rautio (University of Turku)
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- Format:
- Panel+Workshop
Short Abstract:
We propose a discussion on the complex relationship between local communities, land and water conservation and resource extraction, hopefully complemented by a role-play session (based on the themes of the papers) with the aim of exploring how researchers might approach the issue in novel ways.
Long Abstract:
There is a growing interest across disciplines in the policies and practices associated with the extraction of various resources, or more broadly, the use of land and water for extractivism, including mining, renewable energy facilities and military operations (many of which are funded by private investment), in areas that are simultaneously 'valuable' and protected natural habitats. It is not uncommon for extraction to take place in close proximity to a protected area, reserve or park. It is our aim to focus attention on this nexus and examine it in detail. This raises the question of how the local environment and its protected status are considered when specific extractive operations are planned, continued or ceased. We also want to understand the political, legal and activist narratives and actions used to negotiate the use of land and resources. Finally, we want to explore whether conservation can also be seen as a form of land and water use.
In light of these questions, we are interested in learning about the localised ways in which extractive practices are justified, enacted and contested. Most importantly, we aim to move beyond analysis and interpretation by asking questions about the potential role and value of scientific engagement in these cases. Can we move beyond interpretation and critique to propose practices that challenge dominant perceptions of land and water as objects for human use, and the instrumental practices that flow from these perceptions?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
Based on fieldwork on river biodiversity restoration projects in Latvia, I explore the competing rationales used to promote the balance between flows friendly to aquatic and riverside life as well as the economy. In these struggles, river politics remain hard to pose in forms beyond extraction.
Contribution long abstract:
In the last decades, there have emerged increasing efforts to remove previously built obstacles to the free flow of rivers. These range from the removal of hydroelectric power plants to restoring meanders and floodplain areas to straightened rivers. These projects of re-engineering and unwriting of modern damages to the environment are often aimed at restoring biodiversity. Nevertheless, restoration of fish populations, constructed wetlands for pollution control, and creation of floodplain meadows are not entirely free from fractions of extractivist thinking. Based on fieldwork on projects that aim to restore the flow of waters in Latvia, in this paper I explore what competing rationales are used to promote the restoration of flows that are friendly to aquatic and riverside life. I show how current frames of infrastructuring for biodiversity compete with other modes of extracting value from ‘nature’. Through the politicisation of flows, restoration projects often end up promoting biodiversity friendly extraction, which is seen as an important step in the process of decreasing environmental losses. While many experts hold ecocentric views on the need to preserve and foster biodiversity, in political struggles they are often used modestly. Thus, while the free-flowing river movement gains it’s traction, river politics do not easily go beyond narratives of extraction. While showing the political stakes of different approaches in biodiversity-supporting river politics, with the paper I also open up to discussion this modesty in drawing on alternative narratives of development and multispecies flourishing in rivers.
Contribution short abstract:
In 2024, Sardinia has seen many protests against wind farms. The presentation will reflect on the ways in which political, environmental and identity issues are mutually reinforcing, and how they are being reworked by permaculturists to disentangle the different meanings of sustainability.
Contribution long abstract:
In June 2024, a large number of people gathered in northern Sardinia, Italy, to protest against the installation of wind turbines in the region. This was led by local committees against the central Italian government's decision to promote the installation of large wind farms on the island. The protest took on the characteristics of a popular uprising against an energy transition perceived as "unsustainable " and led to the collection of 210,000 signatures in support of a citizens' initiative law on the issue. Among the activists in these committees are permaculturists: people who carry on local projects according to the principles of permaculture and who have a strong environmental awareness. Indeed, permaculture proposes a set of tools for designing sustainable systems based on the three ethics of "earth care, people care and fair share of resources" to ensure life for future generations. The paper proposes a reflection on the protests as a paradigmatic example of how political, environmental and identity issues are mutually reinforcing. Indeed, identity discourses in Sardinia have historically been rooted in the use and ownership of land and even today this issue provides the backdrop for public demands for energy sovereignty. Exploring permaculturists' views on this issue provides an opportunity to disentangle the many meanings that the category of sustainability can take on, depending on the cultural frame of reference. The data collected are part of an ongoing ethography on permaculture in Sardinia as a techno-performative everyday revolution based on a different ontology of care and relatedness.
Contribution short abstract:
This presentation will explore the relationship between conservation and extractivism through empirical evidence and anthropological formulations. It argues that the relationship between conservation and the utilization of natural resources is essential for sustainability.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation will explore the relationship between conservation and extractivism through empirical evidence and anthropological formulations in relation to sustainability. The research material is collected among the Skolt Sami in Northern Finland. It highlights nature-based livelihood activities, nature and natural resources, and related perceptions. The analysis is also based on the state driven classifications of various areas in the Sami Homeland Region, which are divided into "protected areas" and "areas of economic utilization. According to the theory of adaptation, a community's adaptation to its environment is successful when the continuity of both nature and the community is ensured. The history of the Skolt Sami people provides a cautionary example of how the fishing and mining industries squeezed their culture in Petsamo, near the Barents Sea. After the Second World War, extractivism has threatened the biodiversity of the Skolt Sami homeland mainly in the form of industrial forestry. Mining industry is now a potential threat. The paper argues that the relationship between conservation and the utilization of natural resources is essential for sustainability, but the extent to which conservation is needed has remained an open question. It is precisely this that scientific research can help to clarify. The paper highlights elements that may help define the need for conservation and the ways in which natural resources can be exploited. The local rationale for extractive practices brings together the international economic system and the conditions for indigenous survival. The possibility of compensation can be raised.
Contribution short abstract:
My research examines, through anthropological fieldwork and narrative interviews, women's traditional livelihoods and their resilience in the Danube Delta, their lives and works in the context of increasing tourism and a volatile socio-economic environment.
Contribution long abstract:
Having lived for generations in the unique landscape of the Danube Delta (Romania), since 1991 the locals found themselves, overnight, living in a Biosphere Reserve. The subsequent regulations and restrictions related to nature conservation, as well as other long-term transformations of the area (the dissolution of the communist centralized economy and its extractive approach towards natural resources, new economic opportunities, increasing tourism) made their already harsh lives even harsher. Most of the new regulations were perceived by locals as obstructive of their traditional way of life, in which nature has always been an inexhaustible resource. Particularly, women’s lives were impacted by unemployment, migration, more responsibilities in housing and feeding tourists, increased visibility as performers of traditional cultural practices. While fishing has been the traditional livelihood in the area, tourism became more and more important as a seasonal source of income, but it also increased the pressure on an already fragile environment, both ecologically and socially (fishing was re-oriented from livelihood to satisfying incoming tourists, social relations were impacted by economical competition).
I examine these issues through long-term fieldwork (2006-2024), participative observation, and narrative interviews, in Sulina and surrounding villages in the Danube Delta. Using the Ecosystem Services approach, I am interested in how local women have traditionally used environmental resources for family livelihood (feeding people and animals) and creative purposes, how they incorporated nature and environment in their work and life, how these were affected by the protectionist restrictions and, finally, aim to explore women’s vital contribution to nature conservation.
Contribution short abstract:
Do heritagization practices have the capacity to challenge mining-driven land grabbing? We aim to explore this issue in the Barroso region, Northern Portugal, a GIAHS site designated by FAO, where the ICH process might foster the construction of subaltern environmental narratives.
Contribution long abstract:
This communication aims to demonstrate how heritagization practices, guided by the principles of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, can empower communities to craft ecological integrated narratives that challenge the dominant extractivist discourses tied to the energy transition. The Barroso region is recognised as a Global Important Agricultural Heritage Systems by the FAO. At the same time, Covas do Barroso, a pillar parish of the Barroso landscape, have been under scrutiny for lithium extraction for over two decades. Its common land (baldios in Portuguese) is officially threatened with land grabbing. This rationale relies on a process of devaluation - a cheapening of people, their territory and their system of knowledge - that follows patterns of colonial dispossession threatening livelihoods globally. As a resistance strategy, the local authorities and the commoners decided to inventory the practices and knowledge of their baldios for an inscription in the Intangible Cultural Heritage National Inventory. Working with the socio-environmental research startup, the RHE Initiative, this effort revealed that such living heritage made of agropastoral practices and commons’ management, is vital for landscape conservation and climate resilience. Not only, those same practices are bearers of environmental values deeply embedded in traditional landscape management, they also provide livelihood for the local community. Through the intangible cultural heritage concept, communities were empowered to speak off their own subaltern environmental counter-narrative, based on a dwelling perception of the environment, challenging extractivist paradigms of development.
Contribution short abstract:
I examine the ways in which a protected mire threatened by a mining project, the local hikers, the mire's species, and the infrastructure of the protected area come together in practices of care. What is the care directed at a protected area and vice versa, and what are its practices?
Contribution long abstract:
Protected areas are considered to require human care, which manifests in practices such as decisions to protect these areas, but also in duckboards that guide hikers along designated paths, thus preventing the erosion of terrain. Caring for nature also includes other infrastructure that directs human activity, such as hiking facilities and hiking guidance, which is shared on social media. At the same time, protected areas offer recreation: "care of the self".
The aim is to unwrite interspecies care—or to examine what kind of care happens in the assemblages considering humans and nature conservation areas. Protected areas are placed under institutional power as objects of care, which involves both untouchability and subjection to management and restrictions. In considering the concept of care, we draw on the notion of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari; Tsing 2015): we therefore ask what forms of care emerge within these assemblages, which include both human and non-human actors or participants. How is awareness of interdependence reflected in the visual imagery of social media (e.g., Instagram) and its associated hashtags? What forms of care can be interpreted based on this material?
The empirical analysis is based on materials collected in the DigiFREN project (2023–2024), which studies the digital aestheticization of fragile natural environments. The materials include walking interviews and observational data (audio recordings, videos, and photographs), and Instagram images concerning two mires in FInland, Patvinsuo and Viiankiaapa. The contribution is based on a joint article with Juhana Venäläinen and Kirsi Laurén (sent).
Contribution short abstract:
This comparative study aims to demonstrate how ecological and national issues become interconnected, examining the dynamics through which nationalistic arguments intertwine with environmental concerns, and shedding light on the intriguing phenomenon of econativism.
Contribution long abstract:
Countries in Southeast Europe are undergoing significant environmental and energy transitions, particularly in the context of EU integration and the European Union's own developmental trajectory in these sectors. Existing studies highlight a rise in environmental activism and offer various perspectives on the intersection of politics and environmental concerns in the region. To explore how national rhetoric and activism influence environmental advocacy, and to analyse how the mix of environmentalism, nationalism, and populism manifests itself on the ground, this study compares the findings of ethnographic research conducted in two settings. Gornje Nedeljice, a village at the centre of a significant environmental and social conflict due to its Jadarite reserves and the proposed lithium mining operations, serves as one case study. In contrast, Pljevlja, one of Europe's most polluted towns, is currently engaged in a growing debate regarding the future of the coal-fired Pljevlja Thermal Power Plant and the economic concerns associated with its potential closure, offering a second case study. In econativist narratives the care for nature of the local area progressively takes on the traits of concern for the future of nation or identity in general. Since in Gornje Nedeljice the struggle for environmental preservation is closely intertwined with efforts to safeguard Serbian culture and identity, while in Pljevlja the fight for clean air forms part of the resistance against the imposition of a new and undesired Montenegrin identity, this study will place particular emphasis on analysing the differences in how econativism manifests in these two distinct contexts.