Paper short abstract:

In South Sudan, human-elephant relations have often been antagonistic. Yet enmity with elephants also entailed recognising their equivalence with human enemies. Enmity was both constitutive of and constituted by interspecies connections and encounters, in which elephants played an active role.

Paper long abstract:

Elephants have often been depicted as gentle giants in international media and conservation imagery and as the vulnerable victims of the ivory trade by its critics since the nineteenth century. This vulnerability seems all too evident in South Sudan, where elephant populations have been decimated for ivory and meat during the past half-century of armed conflicts. Yet those who can remember elephants describe them as anything but harmless, recalling their capacity to crush and mutilate human bodies and to ‘make war’ on people and crops. This paper argues that we need to understand these antagonistic dimensions of human-elephant relations, not only to expose the broader, well-established disparities between international conservation and local communities, but also to appreciate the complex, ambiguous meanings of elephants in human cultures and more-than-human histories. Making enmity with elephants also entailed recognising their equivalences with human enemies, conveying both opportunities for honour and spiritual risks in their killing. Comparisons with elephants could be made to praise human strength or criticise human power: ‘When elephants fight, the grass suffers’, is a popular saying in South Sudan. The paper will argue that human-elephant enmity paradoxically increased interspecies connections and commensurabilities, and complicated rather than simply facilitated elephant-killing. These ambiguities also connect different cultures, as the paper will show by drawing on nineteenth and twentieth-century European elephant-hunting accounts as well as South Sudanese oral histories, folk-tales and songs. It will emphasise the agency of elephants as well as people in shaping the nature of enmity.

Paper short abstract:

New Zealand’s ecological politics has a core friction between pastoralism, conservation, and invasive species management, but these demarcations are fraying as experiments across bounded domains suggest new futures away from colonialist delimitations, toward a new, potentially post-colonial ecology.

Paper long abstract:

There is tripartite tension between ecological projects in Aotearoa New Zealand: in one corner, there’s the conservation of native biota; in the other, the safeguarding and intensification of cattle and sheep pastures; and, in the third, the elimination of invasive, predatory species. The lines of battle appear clear, but the endemic can become pests, livestock can become native, and the elimination of certain pests can devastate some critical ‘emergent ecologies’ that have developed since European settlement.

These categories are persistent, but frayed, and increasingly so. While in some ways these projects are reaching their zenith with ever-intensifying agriculture, more ambitious projects at reviving ‘pre-settlement’ ecologies, and mass slaughters of entire ‘invasive’ populations, these in fact muddle the categories further. This paper would present findings from ongoing ethnographic work on cases where different groups are attempting to transcend these ambitions and are attempting new socio-ecological praxes toward (potentially) more judicious ends, upsetting these categories and working toward what I suggest could be a ‘post-colonial ecology.’ I will delineate these three ecological projects outlined above, provide some historical context, and discuss my observations and findings regarding how some projects within livestock agriculture attempt to overcome these antagonistic divides (i.e., native/invasive, production/conservation, eradication/accommodation).

This is based on ethnographic work within and around livestock agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand and is a part of a wider doctoral research project into dilemmas around bovids and biodiversity in Aotearoa New Zealand, within the auspices of the BIOrdinary research project at Stockholm University.

Paper short abstract:

Synthetic chemicals (like pesticides, BPAs, plastics) are often regarded as 'unnatural'. The talk clarifies the conept of 'unnaturalness' from a philosophical perspective. It further developes an ecological understanding of the role of synthetic chemicals in the 'natural' environment.

Paper long abstract:

The release of synthetic chemicals (like pesticides, BPAs, plastics) into the environment is one of the six planetary boundaries that 'humanity' has crossed. In public debate about synthetic substances the concept of 'unnaturalness' plays an important role, depicting chemicals as 'foreign' actors in the environment. Strikingly, the science of chemistry has a very different understanding of what 'unnatural' means, reaching back to its scientific tradition in the modern period. Quite often, this leads to conflict in public debates about the status of synthetic chemicals in the environment.

In my talk I outline the different concepts of 'unnaturalness' that the public versus the chemical sciences have. I highlight the ecological shortcomings of the modern chemical understanding of 'nature'. I further try to reconcile intra-chemical discourse with public critique and environmental concern, primarily on a philosophical level.

A constant emphasis of the talk lies on the fact that chemical substances have an ambiguous stance in the natural world. They are neither alive, like plants, bacteria or fungi; yet they pursue our daily lives with an uncontrollable autonomy that makes us perceive them as vivid actors instead of 'dead', passive matter. This ontological and phenomenological ambiguity gives rise to the appearance of chemicals as 'intruders' into our bodies, foods and environments. The debate about the 'unnaturalness' of synthetic chemicals, I argue, must therefore also include a theory of 'foreignness'/'alienness' in order to holistically understand the perception of synthetic chemicals as 'unnatural enemies'.

Paper short abstract:

As a case study of ’natural’ enmity, the paper approaches cancer critically as an effect of Anthropocene necropolitics, but it also suggests an undoing of the ’enemy’ image through a posthumanist, new materialist and immanence philosophical framing of cancer.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will draw on my present research on cancer ecologies, and discuss how cancer spells out multilayered aspects of ’nature as enemy’ discourses and their relation to material practices. Firstly, I focus critically on the discrepancy between mainstream cancer discourses, focused on ’war’ against a ’natural enemy’, instead offering an ecological understanding of cancer as primarily a disease, produced by Anthropocene necropolitics, in particular the tsunami of carcinogens that have been spread all over the planet as part of the chemicalization of capitalist production, agriculture , household practices as well as modern war technologies since WWII. I foreground how public anti-cancer campaigns testify to this discrepancy, insofar as they most often are directed towards socalled lifestyle factors (smoking, drinking and obesity), while human-induced carcinogenic toxification of enviroments are kept in the background as reason for the current worldwide cancer epidemic. Secondly, I discuss how cancer, in contrast to ’attacks’ from viruses and bacteria that are perceived by human subjects as coming from ’outside’, are threatening human self/other distinctions, when modern cancer biology tells us that cancerous processes are set in motion by our own cells going awry (being blocked in performing apoptosis, programmed cell death). I shall make clear how cancer, in this sense, comes to stand out as a very ’intimate enemy’. Thirdly, I shall philosophically undo the ’enemy’ image, reontologizing cancer within a posthumanist, new materialist and immanence philosophical framing of life/death, becoming/decomposition as intense, dynamic continua rather than opposites.

Paper short abstract:

To understand the environmental shift in the history of rivers and the declining model of fighting with rivers and disciplining them through modern hydroengineering, this paper reconstructs some warning signs flooding rivers transmit to us via literary sources and monstrous historiography in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

What stories do rivers tell when they flood and what stories do humans believe in they tell? Rivers’ symbolic functions are deeply embedded in European literary traditions, providing insights into their historical significance. However, the modern history of the global hydromorphological and hydraulic transformation of rivers (18th-20th centuries), including major European arteries, has not been juxtaposed with their monstrous literary accounts on flood events.

The phenomenon of ‘millennium’ or ‘unprecedented’ floods, which occur and escalate once per century (e.g., the Vistula’s floods in 1813/1844; the Neva’s 1824; the Danube’s 1838/1926; the Seine, Aar, Morava, and others’ 1910; Thames 1928, the Vistula-Dunajec’s 1934; the Odra, Vistula, and others’ 1947; the Rhine’s 1995 or the Odra-Nysa’s 1997), is now being explained in climate science. Rising sea levels necessitate a re-evaluation of epistemic models regarding the modern management of rivers. By examining the unconquered and undisciplined rivers through literature, this paper will activate the historiosophical and non-anthropocentric contexts that have been marginalized in the reconstruction of modern Europe’s flood history.

By incorporating literary sources, like the powerful narrative of the animated Danube in The Willows (1907) by A. Blackwood, this paper aims to distort the symbolic and realistic representation of modern rivers and show how the monstrous is inevitable part of flood narratives. Exploring how rivers are depicted as powerful entities in flood events, distinct from modern constructs, will challenge the global anthropocentric historiography and revitalize the knowledge preserved in literary works about rivers conceptualized as real natural elements beyond human control.