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- Convenors:
-
Malgorzata Zofia Kowalska
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Kirsi Sonck-Rautio (University of Turku)
Emily O'Gorman (Macquarie University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Water
- Location:
- Room 23
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel discusses entangled histories of human and underwater worlds. We invite proposals drawing upon transdisciplinary research on past and emerging relations between humans and nonhumans and challenging the hegemonic understanding of environmental management and sustainability.
Long Abstract:
Waterworlds (Hastrup 2009, Hastrup and Hastrup 2015; see also Barnes and Alatout 2012, Bijker 2012) and underwater “world-making projects” (Tsing 2022) are gaining interest among environmental humanists and anthropologists. In this panel, we want to learn about and discuss the entangled histories of humans and aquatic nonhumans (also biotic and abiotic factors). To this end, we aim at “thinking relationships through water” and water beings – i.e. considering them as “generative and agentive co-constituent of relationships and meanings in society” (Krause and Strang 2016: 633). We want to propose thinking of water beings as more than objects or assets, but rather as cocreators of our (social) landscapes and shared ecosystems.
We especially welcome transdisciplinary yet situated (grounded) research on practices, meanings, and multispecies interdependencies. By bringing such research together, we want to problematise and challenge the hegemonic understanding of environmental management, including nature conservation, as well as the notion of sustainability, understood exclusively as maintaining supplies for (growing) human populations. We want to rethink/“re-imagine” (Strang 2021) the community as more-than-human (see also: Tsing 2013). Simultaneously, we hope to see humans as dependent on the biodiverse ecosystems they live in.
Ideally, this session will be held outdoors, preferably by the lake.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper tells the culinary and environmental life story of the saline plant Salicornia, investigating its agency in shaping the tensions and continuities between foraging and farming, commons and commercialization, and underwater and above water across three European coastlines.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we focus on the culinary life of the saline plant Salicornia and its agency in shaping the entanglements of culture, nature conservation, and market dynamics across three European coastlines. A succulent native to salt marshes, beaches, and other brackish ecosystems, Salicornia has a long history of being foraged that has in recent years evolved into a gourmet trend driving its commercial cultivation. Cooked or raw, whole or powdered to produce “green salt,” the succulent has inspired many recipes and answered to many names: salicornia, glasswort, samphire, salty fingers, pickleweed. Yet its growth, harvesting, and commercial availability are all threaded through with complex interrelations between coastal communities, their environments, and their envisioned futures. Using case studies from Venice, the UK, and Bulgaria, we illustrate how salicornia embodies and enables a series of tensions and continuities: foraging and farming; underwater and above; culinary commons and commercialization. By highlighting how salicornia’s slipperiness in tandem with its saltiness challenges hegemonic understandings of environmental management, nature conservation, and even sustainability, our paper contributes to the panel’s aim to discuss and learn from the entangled histories of humans and aquatic nonhumans.
Paper short abstract:
To cultivate a taste for aliens is challenging for humans and fishes. To disentangle the meanings and politics assigned to more-than-human eating, this talk thinks through multispecies invasivorism (eating invasive species) as a solution for controlling alien marine species in the waters of Crete.
Paper long abstract:
This talk thinks through multispecies invasivorism (eating invasive species) and the politics of eating in the context of alien marine species in the waters of Crete. In the last five years, alien lionfish, pufferfish, rabbitfish and sea urchins have proliferated in southern Crete. They are part of the 600 Lessepsian species, i.e. alien marine species entering the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal, which are now transforming local marine ecologies. Why these changes are unfolding now, 150 years after the opening of the canal, is a complex story of entangled human, biological and geological processes. My current research project explores the unruly environmental afterlife of the Suez Canal on land and under the surface through ethnographic work with humans and fishes across the Eastern Mediterranean Basin.
In Crete, invasivorism is increasingly being advocated as a solution for controlling alien populations in the future. Awareness campaigns inform people to “eat responsibly” by putting aliens on the menu. But invasivorism extends beyond human appetites. Marine biologists underline the need for endemic fishes to cultivate a taste for alien inhabitants. This is challenging. Fishes’ learning processes are little-known and local species have highly specialized feeding habits. In contrast to their distinguished taste, alien species are understood to undermine the food chain by “eat everything: juveniles, fishermen’s catch and each other.” Is their unsatisfiable appetite crude cannibalism or diligent invasivorism? To disentangle the meanings and politics assigned to more-than-human eating in this case, I think through concepts like distinction, gluttony, food chains and belonging.
Paper short abstract:
The African seas continue to suffer pollution, which in turn affect the habits of these seas. This research aims to identify the role of literary studies in promoting safe means of waste disposal by engaging a critical textual analysis of African texts with maritime themes.
Paper long abstract:
The African Sea, a vital ecosystem supporting diverse marine life and coastal communities, is facing severe threats due to pollution. This research explores the role of literary studies in addressing this pressing environmental issue.
Pollution, caused by industrial waste, spills, and improper waste disposal, has led to the degradation of the African Sea's habitats, causing decline of marine biodiversity and hampering the livelihoods of local communities. This study argues that literary studies can significantly contribute to pollution control efforts and the preservation of these habitats.
Through the analysis of selected literary texts, this research provides a unique lens to understand the complex relationship between human societies and the environment. The study shall engage with narratives that shed light on the consequences of our actions, provoke critical thinking, and inspire transformative change.
By studying the works of African authors and exploring environmental themes, one can gain insights into the cultural, social, and historical perspectives of pollution and its impact on the African Sea, which in turn inform policy decisions, community-driven initiatives, and public awareness campaigns aimed at mitigating pollution and conserving the habitats.
Literature has the power to evoke emotions and connect individuals on a personal level with the natural world. By promoting critical understanding, fostering empathy, and inspiring transformative action, literature can serve as a powerful tool to bring about change and ensure the long-term sustainability of this critical marine ecosystem.
Paper short abstract:
Through the agency of a deep-sea creature, a brittlestar, this conference paper discusses watery colonial legacies and mindsets in Western museums. Within the framework of blue humanities and decolonial feminisms the paper explores possibilities to re-imagine more-than-human futures.
Paper long abstract:
Through the history of culture the ocean has been represented as a nonhuman, uninhabitable place, threatening and filled with unknown forces. Sea trade, battles, and wreckage at the surface of the water represents stories of heroic and human-centered endeavors. Such colonial legacies and mindsets are still present in many museum institutions in Europe (Haq 2015). To contribute to a watery discussion on how to resist the reproduction of colonial taxonomies in museums I will in this conference paper turn to the underwater world and think through the visions and materialities of a deep-sea critter: a brittlestar. The narrator of this story was collected by a naturalist in the waters of S:t Barthélemy in the 1800s and transferred to Gothenburg Natural History Museum as part of Sweden’s colonial project.
Feminist philosopher Karen Barad has previously described how the multi-limbed brittlestar can offer an opportunity to rethink the nature of relationships. Due to their specific skeletal system that also functions as a visual system Barad calls them “trans/materialities” which means they transgress divides such as organic and inorganic, machine and animal, macro and micro (Barad 2014). Learning from the brittlestar through the lens of blue humanities I approach the political ontologies of the sea (Alaimo 2019). In this mode I travel with the currents from the Atlantic Ocean and to the Bohus Sea where the brittlestar becomes the more-than-human agent to unpack an abysmal part of Swedish history at the same time as it opens for possibilities to re-imagine more-than-human-futures.
Paper short abstract:
A study of the emotional ecology of Wicken Fen, a last remnant of a vast wetland habitat. Home to many endemic organisms, the extinction of one of them in the mid-19th century--namely, the Large Copper butterfly--stimulated calls to action for the preservation of the fen and its special water-scape.
Paper long abstract:
By the end of the nineteenth century, nature lovers in Britain were experiencing a vague sense of loss, as the destructive effects of humanity upon nature were becoming harder to ignore. The fens, a type of wetland, played an important part in the British narrative of loss. My focus is on Wicken Fen, the last remnant of a landscape that used to cover all of Cambridgeshire (gradually dried through many draining schemes beginning in the 16th century).
Incredibly biodiverse in endemic butterflies, water birds, and water plants, the fen was an important area for naturalists. The extinction in the mid-nineteenth century of the Large Copper, a brilliant butterfly which could previously be found only at Wicken, shook the entomological community and reverberated to other fields of natural history. The Copper became a warning sign and symbol of loss.
Following rumours of the impending drainage of Wicken, a group of entomologists purchased a considerable portion of the land by 1897. Later bequeathed to the National Trust, it was that organisation’s first nature reserve.
This paper will look at the emotional environmental history of this fascinating wetland habitat through three sets of relationships: between naturalists and the fen (sense of loss, why they decided to preserve the fen); between the local people who lived in Wicken Village and the fen on which their livelihood depended (their connection to the fen); and between the naturalists and the local fen-people (who did the fen ‘belong’ to? Who had the right to speak for it?).
Paper short abstract:
Algal blooms haunt the former clear-water Lake Stechlin, Germany. The blooms are caused by legacy nutrients, sedimented over decades of pollution from a nuclear power plant and reactivated under climate warming. After years of denial and amnesia locals demand action to restore its pristine past.
Paper long abstract:
Lake Stechlin, Germany, was known for its fabulous transparency. Until the late 1960s transparencies of more than 15 m were not uncommon. Summer guests admired its crystal-clear water and its lush underwater meadows of stonewort, rich in perch and pike. The lake, to this date is home of its own endemic cisco (Coregonus fontanae). But the extinction of the Fontane cisco is imminent, and the extensive underwater meadows are long gone. Today transparencies of more than 5 m are rare. The lake has transformed. It served as a cooling-water reservoir for a nuclear power plant (NPP) from 1966-1990. During this time its waters not only absorbed the excessive heat from the plants reactor but ingested a soup of dead algae, produced during the passage through the heat-exchangers, and the sewage of the NPP-personnel. Over decades the waste sedimented silently on its bottom.
Today, under climate warming, the NPP-legacy comes to light again, causing year after year colorful mass blooms of green and red cyanobacteria. After decades of denial and amnesia the locals now demand for a lake restauration. That ambition, if realized, would require a long-term management, not much different from the treatment of the plants nuclear waste. The lake would transform into a landscape-machine with the promise to be an immortal, primordial lake of tomorrow. Yet, in this sad story subtle signs of accepting the irretrievable are visible, signs of a search to attune with the lakes transformations and to develop better, less violent relations with its non-human inhabitants.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the maintenance of risk discourses in relation to flood events and how the perceived risks of flooding legitimize certain ways of engineering rivers. The aim is to challenge hegemonic understandings of river management, and to highlight human entanglements with water bodies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the creation and maintenance of risk discourses in relation to river management practices, and in particular flood events. Flood events are commonly emphasized in order to amplify the dangers of the untamed nature; they are often regarded as imposed on humans (rather than by humans) and subsequently turn rivers into objects of extensive engineering. Rivers then, are socio-environmental systems (Pritchard 2011) in that they are subjected to human cultivation, most often in terms of regulation and control. Regulatory practices and instances of control nonetheless respond to (the thought of) certain risks and threats (rather than others), and as such, they serve as stepping stones for political, national and economic interests (for example, see Boelens and Dávila 1998; Swyngedouw 2004; Kaika 2005; Pritchard 2011; Trombley 2018). These practices are thus part of the politics of water, where nature emerges as “the universal appendage of capital” (Smith [1984] 2010, 155), highly invested in the logic of production and accumulation.
Investigating the creation and maintenance of risk discourses in relation to flood events, the aim of this paper is twofold: a) to challenge current, hegemonic understandings of river management, which largely build on regulation and control, and b) to initiate discussions concerning human entanglements with water bodies and other, non-humans in times of flooding. Taken together, these two aims initiate alternative ways of thinking about river management as they speak to possibilities of adapting to the actuality of rivers, as well as retreating from their course.
Paper short abstract:
Tibetans understand waterworlds as non-human realms, proscribe fishing and fish-eating, and limit interactions between humans and fish. This environmental history and conservation biology paper asks how and whether terrestrial Tibetans must now be held responsible for their aquatic neighbours.
Paper long abstract:
There is a long-standing proscription against fishing and fish-eating in Tibetan society. Tibetans see waterworlds as the abode of capricious aqueous beings called lu who will punish humans who enter or exploit their realm. This worldview is supported by their socio-ecological experience. The Plateau's most plentiful fish, snow trout, can be poisonous, and their stocks do not replenish quickly, making them a dangerous and unsustainable food source.
One outcome of the Tibetans’ widespread aversion to fish was that they did not develop the same knowledge traditions about fish that they do about yak, horses, and other animals. British officers and scientists were the first to conduct extensive surveys of the region’s fish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese, Indian, and international biologists exponentially increased studies of the Plateau’s fish from the 1990s. Along with research, these outsiders changed fish community structures by introducing new species, encouraging aquaculture (fisheries and brine shrimp) and, more recently, fish conservation measures. In response to this influx of fish culture, fish-eating or refraining from fish-eating has become an identity marker on the Plateau, as has the Buddhist practice of tsetar (life release), during which Buddhists release multiple, often invasive fish species into Plateau rivers, often adding to the influx of invasive species in this fragile aquatic environment.
This paper combines environmental history with conservation biology to ask how or whether a society that only engaged with the aquatic world sparingly and carefully should or could be involved in safeguarding the lu’s realm.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss the International Seabed Authority mining code, a framework to regulate deep-sea mining, and consider how re-framing underwater more-than-human kin within the code may lead to more sustainable futures and stronger kinships with our oceans.
Paper long abstract:
Currently, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) council meets three times a year to negotiate on draft exploitation regulations, or the so-called mining code; a document that outlines a framework for mining polymetallic nodules on the deep seabed in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). As the many state representatives meet for two weeks in March, July and November, many points are addressed: how will mining take place? How can contractors' work be monitored? what environmental thresholds should be respected? etc. State and NGO representatives also meet via Zoom to discuss a few different topics; one of these is currently a discussion on "In/Tangible" Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) and its place within the mining code. During these discussions, different voices are heard, more than in the ISA council meeting room itself, which is structured in such a way that some activists may not always be heard. On Zoom, however, the discussions develop further and many Pacific Indigenous Leaders have started to question the terminology of "In/Tangible" UCH.
Following these discussions, this paper wishes to investigate the implications of what "In/Tangible" UCH means in the context of the mining code. It will focus on the UNESCO definition, its limitations, and put it in dialogue with Pacific Indigenous Leaders' comments on the impossibility of disentangling "tangible" and "intangible". This paper suggests that by considering marine life as more-than-human kin, following the Pacific Leaders' suggestions, we may be able to reframe our connections to the seabed and challenge objectifying policy language to envision more sustainable futures.
Paper short abstract:
In the Colombian Arenal river, guaduas play a vital role in caring for the waterbodies of the region amidst techno-scientific and extractive logics. Through arraigo, this paper explores the human-vegetal encounters along the river as people learn with guaduas how to regenerate wounded waters.
Paper long abstract:
Tangled between the culms, rhizomes, and leaves of a guadual forest in the Arenal river basin in the Central Andes of Colombia, there are myriad affects, ways of life, memories and imaginaries striving to live a little better with the river amidst the living conditions set by the extractivist and techno-scientific logics of hydropower, extensive livestock farming, mass tourism, and deforestation.
As a vegetal archive, a teacher, a water caretaker, and a companion of life-sustaining endeavours, guadua angustifolia is a key actor in the regeneration of a territory adapting to slow and sudden socio-ecological changes. Following the human-vegetal watery encounters on the banks of creeks and streams of the basin through the notion of arraigo (rooting), this paper will show how making-territory-with the guaduas for peasant and environmental activists, of the basin —many of them recently returning to the territory after years of displacement— is a task of revitalizing old and imagining new caring practices. Just like guaduas, people are slowly returning to the territory after years of displacement, to encounter, talk, observe, and learn with the more-than-human community that also lives-with and makes the river. Holding water and holding ancestral knowledge of the territory, guaduas are teaching people how to live with a wounded and fragile river. Thus, through these vegetal stories, the notion of caring for the waterbodies of this territory appears as an always collective exercise shaped by the territorial relationships of intimate conviviality and arraigo with the river.
Paper short abstract:
Using the temporal narratives of two study cases, seagrass protection in the Mediterranean and toxic algal bloom management in the Baltic Sea, this paper discusses how stories of care, abuse and responsibility emerge at the cross-roads of science, politics, economics and everyday life interaction.
Paper long abstract:
The way humans interact with the sea and its nonhuman inhabitants is mediated by a long history of coexistence. Often, reports about marine ecosystems and call for actions in public campaigns introduce such coexistence though temporal narratives that describe a distant past of human negligence and abuse; a more recent past of international effort and environmental regulations; and a series of futures that depend on how those interventions continue to develop. This paper combines ethnography and documentary analysis to investigate the temporal narratives of two study cases: seagrass protection in the Mediterranean and toxic algal bloom management in the Baltic Sea. These situated cases illustrate human dependence on aquatic nonhumans: from everyday life practices to their key role in supporting dominant industries, societies rely on a good balance of life and death among marine life. In the management of marine life, the growth of different forms of life is promoted or constrained according to different visions about economic growth and more-than-human health. These are therefore sites of contention, while some actors and collectives defend removing existing human pressures and engaging in degrowth strategies, others defend the development of technologies and management strategies that make possible the continuation of extractive relations between humans and marine ecosystems. These stories of human negligence, recent realization and hopes of a better future help us to understand how care, abuse and responsibility emerge at the cross-roads between science, politics, economics and everyday life interaction between humans and marine ecosystems.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the highly productive ecosystems of stonewort meadows as the main engineers of conservation sites rather than as valuable objects. This perspective is ecological (Bateson 1972) rather than agentic and therefore rethinks people, lakes and macrophytes as related and intertwined.
Paper long abstract:
Stoneworts are ancient and pioneering species of complex-structured algae that form highly productive meadow communities in transparent hardwater mesotrophic glacial lakes. They are an indicator of high water clarity, but they are also ecosystem engineers – dense beds of algae trap carbon and nutrients in the benthic zone, providing bottom-up control of phytoplankton. In Poland, the meadows are protected habitats under Natura 2000, but few outside the natural sciences are aware of their role as co-creators of the ecosystem.
This paper draws upon anthropological research and proposes to think of the protected site primarily in ecological terms, focusing on how the ecosystem is created and sustained by and in multi-species relations, rather than as a result of environmental management. It argues against backgrounding nature (Plumwood 1993) and asks how, by changing the narrative, scientific writing might promote thinking of humans as connected to and dependent on an ever more-than-human sociality (Tsing 2013) rather than conservation expertise.