Paper short abstract:

This talk explores how commerce and trade in non-human primates, blood, and viruses reshaped lives and landscapes in the Guinean Forests of West Africa. In the manufactured, multi-species world of Vilab II, new livelihoods, new interspecies relations, and new valuations of life took form.

Paper long abstract:

This talk explores how commerce and trade in non-human primates, blood, and viruses reshaped lives and landscapes in the Guinean Forests of West Africa. Vilab II, established in Liberia in 1974 by the New York Blood Center, was home to more than 400 chimpanzees, a keystone species in the industrial ecologies of hepatitis B vaccine research and production, over the lab’s thirty-year lifespan. The complex relations of care and associated labors performed at Vilab II mutually sustained interdependent worlds: big pharma, biomedicine, ethics, conservation, animal rights, politics, and civil war. Vilab II was a complex global exchange economy of circulating blood, tissues, viruses, labor, and cash. Relationships with chimps, built on notions of viral kinship, gave rise to countervailing affects—joy and suffering, affection and disdain, benevolence and exploitation, compassion and violence. Innuendos and rumors swirled around blood, infection, and vaccine like dust devils sustained by surface frictions and heat. Lives and livelihoods, once unrelated, became intertwined, dependent upon one another for mutual survival. In the quest for a hepatitis B vaccine, new livelihoods, new interspecies relations, and new valuations of life took form.

Paper short abstract:

Wildlife corridors are multi-species landscapes of conflict and compromise. This talk focuses on elephant corridors in Kenya and India, analyzing conservation rhetoric invoking historical precedence, future trajectories, and the status of elephants as keystone species or ecosystem engineers.

Paper long abstract:

The corridor is a key principle in conservation politics and practice around the world, informing land-use governance, international relations, and scientific research agendas. It’s also a notoriously slippery concept. A corridor can refer to (1) preexisting routes of migration, dispersal, and gene flow with deep biogeographical histories; (2) pathways of wildlife mobility shaped by histories of human conflict, such as habitat preserved along borders and in fracture zones; (3) modern state conservation projects such as “stepping-stone” wildlife refuges and strips of habitat linking larger protected areas; (4) built infrastructure such as greenbelts, fence-openings, and highway crossings; (5) and future-oriented initiatives to protect/restore connectivity, often at a continental scale, such as the European Green Belt, Yellowstone to Yukon, and the Terai Arc Landscape. In the Anthropocene, wildlife corridors are sites of socio-ecological contestation and compromise where dynamics of human settlement and development intersect with the pathways of free-ranging animals and the ecological networks they sustain. In a twenty-first century defined by rapid planetary change, corridors will be at the center of conservation politics.

In this talk, I’ll discuss wildlife corridors in a range of global contexts, though my main examples will be elephant corridors in Kenya and India. I’m particularly interested in conservation rhetoric invoking historical knowledge (e.g., “ancestral” routes and ranges, customary “use rights”), future planetary trajectories (e.g., climate change, development, population growth), and the status of elephants as “keystone” and “umbrella” species, “engineering” ecosystems by maintaining cross-territorial routes of migration and exploration used by other animals.

Paper short abstract:

Mobilising novels, entomological studies, and newspapers, this paper examines the origins of the adage, “Either Brazil kills off to the saúva ant, or the ant will kill off Brazil,” as a way to explore the multispecies constitution of Brazilian identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

For over a century now, the debate about Brazil’s political and economic challenges as a nation-state has been partly shaped by a multispecies trope: “Either Brazil puts an end to the saúva, or the saúva will put an end to Brazil.” Supposedly formulated by French botanist Auguste Saint-Hilaire, who travelled extensively throughout the country in the early nineteenth century, the adage calls attention to an existential threat to the nascent South American nation posed by a particular ant genus – the Atta leafcutters, held as a pest since the beginning of European colonization. I address the origins of this trope as a way to explore the more-than-human constitution of Brazilian identity. Rather than mere products of symbolization, the trope and other cultural phenomena express “the construction of reality through communicative and bodily processes” (Roscher, 2018: 53) that include nonhuman animals as political actors. I substantiate this claim by examining various kinds of historical sources (novels, entomological studies, and newspapers, among others) through a biosemiotics framework that draws on Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) theory of cross-species semiosis. This helps me show how the ants interpreted massive deforestation, imposing a regime of encounter and communication with Euro-Brazilian humans that would eventually precipitate as an insecticidal, nationalist trope. Covering the country’s history until the 1950s – after which the advent of toxic baits increasingly attenuated the ants’ plunderings – my account furthers an emerging more-than-human approach to Brazilian nation-building by attending to what Herre de Bondt et al. (2023) called nonhuman “acts of denizenship”.

Paper short abstract:

I analyse transatlantic soy landscapes through their more-than-human entanglements. I ask how soy altered more-than-human relations and shaped ways of inhabiting landscapes. I work with contemporary actors to question my readings of these histories and explore how history relates to current issues.

Paper long abstract:

Since the mid twentieth century, the Dutch livestock industry relied on soybeans imported from Brazil to feed its animals. Soybeans, therefore, have connected landscapes of soy plantations in Brazil and farmlands in the Netherlands. In my PhD, I investigate these histories to rethink connected agricultural landscapes as more-than-human co-productions to shift perspective beyond perceiving them in terms of their anthropogenic purpose and spatial boundaries. In my work, soy as a plant, feed, carrier of nutrients and embodied in manure becomes an entry point to interpret the more-than-human entanglements of connected landscapes in the past and the present. In this paper, I focus on the Dutch region De Peel, a drained peatland marked by intensive livestock agriculture that has been associated with various land use controversies in the past century. I conduct fieldwork to find material and discursive traces of the more-than-human processes soybeans shaped to highlight De Peel’s historical entanglement with landscapes elsewhere. I connect these insights to archival and oral history investigations of how soy contributed to the intensification of livestock agriculture and how various agencies (soils, pigs, unruly plants) interpreted and co-constructed the materialities that emerged from the growing presence of soy. Methodologically, in investigating a historical issue that is connected to several contemporary socio-ecological threats, I engage with (more-than)-human actors to make explicit the present concerns informing my historical research. In doing so, I contribute to debates about how environmental history can address present-day ecological issues, and how various agencies become co-constructors of historical knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

Litter-raking stands as unique cultural landscape emerged as the result of the entanglement of humans, livestock, bracken and soils. Following “the arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015), this paper focuses specifically on the bracken as a somewhat controversial plant and its multispecies relationality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines a specific cultural landscape, known as litter-raking stands, which has emerged as the result of the entanglement of human activities related to subsistence land cultivation, grazing animals, plants seeking suitable habitats in their circle of reproduction, and the composition of the soil itself. Litter-raking stands consisting of scarcely grown silver birch trees with undergrowth comprising mostly common bracken are unique to the Bela Krajina region of Slovenia. They gave the landscape such a special appearance that, according to one explanation, the region even got its name from the white trunks of birches. Calling for attention to a “more-than-human sociality” (Tsing 2013), I have acknowledged the agentive, co-constitutive role of humans, livestock and bracken inhabiting the litter-raking stands, as well as the role of soils and topography in shaping and maintaining these patches of land as specific ecosystems with great biodiversity. With the abandonment of animal husbandry and litter-raking practice since the 1970s, the overgrowing has occurred with gradual succession of oak and common hornbeam woodlands. Yet evidence shows that litter-collecting stands that are still maintained have greater biodiversity than successive phases. Following “the arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015), this paper focuses on bracken and its multispecies relationality in the history of litter-raking stands. Bracken is a somewhat controversial plant worldwide, often considered a weed and an aggressive colonizer that rapidly invades abandoned areas and causes habitat loss and alteration of soil properties. What can we learn from its multispecies history in litter-raking stands?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a history of multispecies landscapes and cultures through the braided lives of crabs, mangroves, and Filipino scientists in the twentieth century. It yields new methods for doing transdisciplinary research and new ways of knowing/storying a more inclusive environmental history.

Paper long abstract:

In 1949, Eulogio P. Estampador (1895-1982), a Filipino carcinologist, made history: he made biodiversity history. Based on specimens collected from markets in Manila as well as from mangroves around Malabon, Estampador described a new species of mud crab. While his description brought the number of the world’s mud crab types to four, a number that has not changed in almost 75 years, it also did something more, something far more productive for thinking about a history of multispecies landscapes and cultures. In particular, it was the name that Estampador gave this new species—and the vernacular, economic, ecological, and biological worlds it embodied—that serves as the subject of this paper. Estampador named his mud crab Scylla paramomosain following the local taxonomy of Tagalog fisherfolks who called it momosain. They referred to this crab as momosain because it burrowed in holes among the mudscapes and mangroves of Quezon province and coastal Luzon more generally. In Batangas, a region just west of Quezon province, momosain were known as alimango sa butas, or crabs in holes. In contrast to momosain, Tagalog fisherfolks used the term banhawin or bulik for mud crabs that inhabited, in Estampador’s words, “a roving life.” In braiding the lives of crabs, mangroves, mudscapes, and vernacular scientists, this paper shows how following species across cultures, ecologies, and languages can yield not only new methods for doing transdisciplinary research, but also, and perhaps more urgently, new ways of knowing and storying a more inclusive environmental history in the age of biodiversity.

Paper short abstract:

A Japanese coral island has been subject to dramatic landscape modification. This paper is an exercise in the political geomorphology of coral reef land/seascapes, that is, historicizing how human and more-than-human landscape-modifying projects shape coral reefs in and above the ocean.

Paper long abstract:

Kikai is one of the world’s fastest uplifting islands. Yet, this geologically unique Japanese island has been subject to dramatic landscape modification. This paper is an exercise in the political geomorphology of coral reef land/seascapes, that is, historicizing how human and more-than-human landscape-modifying projects shape coral reefs in and above the ocean. In Kikai, agriculture and infrastructure have altered the island’s coral reef terraces. Yet, these land projects’ impacts trickle all the way down to living coral reefs, too, and it is through groundwater that we can understand this invisible land/ocean connectivity. To think relationships through groundwater is also to foreground a local history of landscape modification, of which humans are not the only architects.

Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper thinks with three geo-historical timescales. First, the island’s geological history invites us to imagine the protracted, hundred-thousand-year process through which coral reefs emerge above water and generate habitat for more-than-human terrestrial life. This scale overlaps with the second, colonial period over the last four hundred years: a feudal domain turns Kikai into a site of sugarcane plantations and forced labor. In the third, postwar time span of the last seventy years, this colonial crop becomes fully dependent on underground dams. These human land-use projects have been disrupting and contaminating groundwater flowing into the coastal coral reefs. Yet, humans are not exceptional in their ability to shape a landscape; reef-building corals do it, too. What kind of land/seascape architects might corals be teaching us to become in the Anthropocene?

Paper short abstract:

Approaching animals as embedded within landscape assemblages enables an understanding of local populations as distinct groups with their own histories. This paper draws on fieldwork, archives and scientific literature to look at the shaping of Highland red deer ways of life through landscape change.

Paper long abstract:

Red deer herds living in the Scottish Highlands today find themselves ensnared in a mirror-crisis to more common Anthropocene woes. Unlike many wild animals, they thrived through nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial monocultures, selected as they were by big-game hunters as a prize species to be preserved in a landscape managed in their favour. Instead, it is contemporary environmentalist attempts to right the wrongs of the past and bring back pre-Anthropocene landscapes that threaten red deer ways of life. While in the current crisis moment the Scottish government pushes for higher and higher deer culls and rewilding landowners dubbed ‘Green Lairds’ take drastic measures to remove deer from their hillsides, a closer look at deer landscapes reveals a pattern of displacement stretching back into the post-WWII twentieth century. Working with a Tsingian conception of landscape as a ‘moot’ of living and non-living beings (Tsing, 2017), this paper explores how the twin landscape infrastructures of deer fencing and plantation forestry have shaped and altered deer ways of life. Methodologically, it draws on fieldwork, archival sources and scientific literature to find out what happened and mattered to Highland red deer, understanding them as historically situated herds with their own ways of living within landscapes – as “life forms with a form or way of life” (Van Dooren, 2014). Ultimately, this paper follows red deer into a complex multispecies landscape history, one where recent attempts to confront a litany of past injustices, both social and environmental, are breaking and remaking animal worlds.

Paper short abstract:

I discuss the long-term consequences of the flooding in 2021 in the Netherlands through the prism of river sludge. By turning my gaze towards a substance that is part of the river and how it interacts with other lifeworlds, I adopt a posthumanist perspective in the study of disasters.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2021 the Midwest of Europe was terrified by torrential rains, resulting in severe floodings that killed 220 people. In this paper, I discuss the less visible, long-term social and ecological consequences of these devastating floodings that hit Belgium and the Netherlands through the prism of river sludge. By taking river sludge as point of entry I adopt a post-humanist perspective, concentrating on how non-human elements, like rivers and sludge, impact human life and vice versa (Cohn and Lynch 2017:285). I perceive rivers here as ‘non-human’ living creatures and turn the gaze towards a substance that is part of the river, as something that a river absorbs and secretes, and how it interacts with socioecological life worlds. Sludge is considered here an active agent with consequences in the world.

By looking at its composition and the way sludge is entangled with human and non-human entities I unravel not only narratives about contemporary and past ways of living, but also bring together different temporalities and inform critical debates about industrial histories, contemporary pollution, and the way these impact the ecology and social life along riverbanks. Reckoning with these multiple encounters, seeing the way they are (partly) linked to each other, and how they impact current and future lifeworlds can help to make “political sense of the Anthropocene” (Mathews 2018: 387), and gives deeper insights into the way the human and non-human are intertwined (Tsing, Mathews and Brubandt 2019) and can no longer be separated in studies on natural disasters.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the flows of global capital that have shaped possibilities for life for the endangered Camden White Gum - a Eucalypt found in the Sydney region, Australia - since the 19th Century. It is particularly attentive to the changing relationships between the trees and their landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

The Camden White Gum (Eucalyptus benthamii) is an endangered species of Eucalypt found in the Sydney region, Australia. While the species faces a range of threats, in recent years its future has become even more uncertain with a proposal by the state government to raise the wall of the Warragamba Dam, and in so doing drown the largest remaining population found in the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. A few scattered stands of these trees can also be found elsewhere, growing along the Nepean River in what is now a predominantly rural and suburban area in Western Sydney. But they too are threatened in a range of ways, including by the reduced germination of their flood-reliant seeds as a result of the changing hydrology of this landscape. This paper uses Anna Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt’s concept of the “patchy Anthropocene” to examine the more-than-human histories and futures of the trees. It does this by tracing the flows of global capital that have profoundly shaped and reshaped possibilities for life for the trees since the early nineteenth century, with a focus on the changing relationship between the trees and their wider landscapes. It particularly explores how past and contemporary settler Australian relationships with water, and its control and regulation, are unravelling possibilities for ongoing life for the species in a way that is likely to only increase in an era of escalating climatic uncertainty.