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.