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Contribution short abstract:

In this workshop I will present an initial process of community-based wetland management along the Simeto river, in Sicily, Italy, that challenges top-down projects of nature conservation as much as hegemonic toxic narratives of ‘improvement’.

Contribution long abstract:

In the last two centuries, wetlands and riverine environments, have undergone a systematic campaign of denigration resulting from a cultural prejudice that have privileged, as being more civilised, agriculture over other productive activities. Accordingly, state ambitions of driving political, economic, and ecological progress by disciplining environments and their inhabitants resulted in transforming wetlands and rivers into objects of political mastery, economic exploitation, and scientific scrutiny. These processes have been framed within a ‘toxic narrative infrastructure’ of ‘improvement’ encapsulated in the Italian term ‘bonifica’ (reclamation). Far from turning rivers and wetlands into ‘good’, such an approach resulted in creating wastelands inhabited by wasted beings, redundant to state-led projects of ‘modernisation’, hence expendable on the altar of the ‘bonifica’. In the last fifty years wetlands and rivers have been reterritorialized as global actors to fight the effects of socioecological crisis and climate change with the result of detaching these environments from their historical, social, and economic context, and thus exacerbating their degradation and loss.

Premising on this assumption, this contribution discusses early research findings from the Horizon Europe research project ‘BioTraces’: Biodiversity and Transformative Change for plural and nature positive societies". Particularly, I present an initial process of community-based wetland management along the Simeto river in Sicily, Italy, that challenges top-down projects of nature conservation as much as hegemonic toxic narratives of ‘improvement’.