Counting fish: Performative data,anglers’ knowledge-practices and environmental measurement

This paper examines how environmental resources are measured and quantified as objects of environmental science and management and how lay knowledge-producers participate in this process, alongside the state. Using a case study of recreational angling, I show how fish in English rivers and lakes are counted and anglers act as lay or amateur knowledge-producers in the state’s metrological knowledge-practices. As embodied measurement instruments, anglers create data about themselves (as ‘effort data’) and about fish (as ‘catch returns’). These data are combined with other forms of data produced by the Environment Agency in England and Wales and used for fisheries management, thus shaping water bodies and fish ecology. I show how, to support environmental measurement, the state manages not only the environment and fish, but also anglers as lay knowledge-producers, using both regulation and economic incentives; in response, anglers also use data reflexively and strategically. I therefore emphasise the heterogeneous co-productions of environmental measurement as amateur–professional, human–animal and organic–technological, and show how measuring and managing water ecologies also involves measuring and managing humans.     

Environmental learning and the social construction of an exurban landscape in Fremont County, Colorado

Across the rural American West, the restructuring of rural capitalism has transformed production landscapes into those increasingly structured by the development and consumption of natural and cultural amenities. This project used principles from symbolic interactionism, ethnographic methods, and the analytical framework of regional political ecology to understand the role of environmental learning in negotiating the new management regime associated with amenity-based capitalism in rural Fremont County, Colorado. The study found that most amenity residents participate regularly in social learning about the environment through a variety of interpersonal and organizational behaviors. In addition, they are responding collectively to environmental risks and opportunities associated with wildfire, noxious weeds and invasive grass species, prospective uranium mining, and restoration of cultural-landscape features. Ultimately, the practices of environmental learning concern how private properties and assets will be managed relative to the social construction of the environment as an amenity for personal consumption. Conservation and management prospects in this and other rural areas in the postindustrial world can be enhanced by understanding the microsociology of exurban geographies and by engaging the social forms and processes related to this distinctive landscape construction.     

‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as part of individual biographies as well as social structures and life course processes. The aim is to deepen understanding of the social contexts in which aspirations for and by children are generated, paying close attention to family migration histories, dynamic household contexts, and children’s migration networks. The analysis focuses on the time-spaces of migration aspirations, showing the way past, present and future are interconnected. It also emplaces aspirations by focusing on the way aspirations by and for children are constituted in and through particular places. The conclusion reflects on the role of poverty and argues that ‘aspirations’ are about much more than abstract ‘futures’; they orient actions in the present and say a great deal about young people’s current realities and relationships.     

Making the landscape “home”: Narratives of bushfire and place in Australia

This study investigated how the meaning of ‘home’ influences the social construction of bushfire in two Australian communities at high risk. An increasing number of Australians are living in proximity to areas of high bushfire risk due to climate, vegetation and demographic changes. Land and Fire Management Agencies recognise an urgent need to understand what motivates residents to take action to mitigate bushfire risk, and individual decisions whether or not to evacuate when bushfire is imminent. In bushfire policy and management, the home is considered to be synonymous with the house and associated built structures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic research methods, we ‘mapped’ residents’ understanding of ‘home’. The findings suggest that the concept of ‘home’ embraces more than the private spaces of house and garden. Landscape practices such as gardening with indigenous plant species, ecological restoration, and habitual walking extend the home territory beyond the house and garden and into public landscapes. Physical elements of the landscape such as mountains and locally significant species of trees form part of the ‘imaginary’ of home. These findings are important to the on-going study of the meaning of home. The implications are also significant for land and bushfire managers as they suggest that community education programs that focus solely on the house may fail to connect with people’s wider sense of home in the landscape.     

Landscape care paradoxes: Swedish landscape care arrangements in a European context

Contemporary European agriculture has a number of additional aims beside of food production, such as safeguarding environmental services and conservation values. Substantial efforts at official levels are aimed towards sustainable development but also towards maintaining values of what may be termed vanishing landscapes. Selected areas and landscape features are set aside for protection or restoration. Individual efforts of this type have a long history in Sweden, and the issue has recently received increased attention, primarily due to more ambitious government goals concerning biodiversity conservation and Sweden’s ratification of the European Landscape Convention. This has resulted in an increased scientific and official interest in vanishing values in the rural landscape, where parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Maramures district in Romania, have been used as model examples of land use regimes which in the past was common in Sweden. In this context, the dilemma of romanticizing peasants’ use of land is highlighted and discussed more than has hitherto been done. This paper sheds light on some paradoxes inherent in official policies in relation to land use practices concerning the management of rural landscapes in Sweden, and relates the Swedish situation to a contrasting example of landscape practice in Romania. We discuss the concept of landscape care in relation to the construction and perception of landscape values and valuable landscapes through the lenses of rural realities and official policies. When Swedish authorities engage in the promotion of landscape care, they tend to work with slices of land, specific predefined values and individual farmers, and they often disregard the need to treat the landscape as a socio-ecological complex dynamic in space and time. We discuss how environmental policy generally could be improved through the adoption of a more inclusive and flexible approach towards aiding the different aims inherent in multifunctional rural landscapes.     

Materializing post-colonial geographies: examining the textural landscapes of migration in the South Asian home

This paper considers the role of visual cultures in understanding the value of landscape to post-colonial migrants living in Britain. The paper also considers these visual cultures as prismatic devices which refract lived landscapes of South Asia and East Africa into British domestic scene. The visual cultures are investigated using a materialist lens. They are positioned as materials that allow embodied connections to landscapes experienced pre-migration, including sensory connections with past homes, natures and family life. These then become artefacts symbolising relationships with past landscapes, made meaningful in their presence in Britain homes. Using this materialist lens, visual cultures in the British Asian home, such as photographs, pictures, and paintings, are given meaning and value beyond their textual content. This paper is an exercise in reading visual cultures in the everyday through a materialist lens which allows for an examination of their place in the process of ‘making home' for South Asian women in Britain. In particular, objects presence the migratory experience of the South Asian community, importing ‘other' landscapes (previously shaped by colonial governance) into Britain, and help to shape environmental values, landscape imaginaries and South Asian landscapes of belonging in the post-colonial period.     

Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia

This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how ‘hydrocarbon modernity’ is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the IndoMet project in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, exploring how assemblages of protest have challenged the material effects, discursive practices and regimes of accumulation attendant within the coal industry. In both countries, campaigns seeking to ‘end coal’ have built dynamic geographical alliances, and as collective challenges to mining activities have unfolded, we consider how movements targeting specific sites of extraction have sought to disrupt the industry’s 'dis-embedding' of coal from the landscape. Drawing on accounts of how hydrocarbon politics shape societies, the approach we present draws attention to changing linkages between economic, environmental and social advocacy while illuminating the varied ways in which coal mining can compound and perpetuate inequality.     

Markets and Mutations: mosquito nets and the politics of disentanglement in global health

Malaria management involves the continuous calibration of micro-environments, namely of the entangled habitats of mosquitoes, parasites and humans. This article focuses on humans and mosquitoes as unruly actors of environmental management. Drawing on economic sociology, I show how framing mosquito nets as ‘humanitarian goods’ disentangles particular economic and ecological realities. Juxtaposing politico-economic processes of mosquito net production and distribution with the emergence of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes I show how their disentanglement creates unintended social and disease realities. This suggests rethinking the spatio-temporal politics of environmental management of mosquitoes and malaria, and nuances the patterns of how exactly humanitarian goods ‘do good’.     

Bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of Heck cattle

In the early 1980s the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera began an ambitious ecological restoration experiment on a polder in the Netherlands. He introduced herds of ‘back-bred’ Heck cattle and other large herbivores and encouraged them to ‘de-domesticate’ themselves and ‘rewild’ the landscape they inhabit. His intervention has triggered a great deal of interest and controversy. It is being replicated and adapted across Europe as part of a wider interest in ‘rewilding’ in nature conservation. This innovative approach rubs up against powerful and prevalent practices of environmental management. This paper examines these frictions by mapping the character and exploring the interface between different modes of nonhuman biopolitics – in this case the powerful ways in which modern humans live with and govern cattle. Focusing on the story of Heck cattle and the bovine biopolitics of their rewilding it attends in particular to the character, place and promise of monsters. It first outlines a conceptual framework for examining nonhuman biopolitics and teratology (the study of monsters), identifying fertile tensions between the work of Haraway, Derrida and Deleuze. It then provides a typology of four prevalent modes of bovine biopolitics – namely agriculture, conservation, welfare and biosecurity – and their associated monsters. This paper identifies rewilding as a fifth mode and examines frictions at its interfaces with the other four. Developing the conceptual framework the paper examines what these frictions tell us about the understandings of life that circulate in the ontological politics of contemporary environmentalisms. In conclusion the paper critically examines the monstrous promise of rewilding, in relation to tensions between the convivial aspirations of Haraway and Deleuze.     

Pudrición del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador's palm oil industry

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America.     

Scaling the Anthropocene: How the stories we tell matter

Ongoing debates in the Earth, planetary, and social sciences examine the merits and implications of traces in the stratigraphic record that would indicate that humans are now one of the ‘great forces of nature’. Candidates for key marker horizons in such a stratal section include noted changes in carbon and nitrogen concentrations, plastics, radionuclides, and metals. Candidates for determining calendar age, include the tipping point in land cover from wildlands to agriculture and the first nuclear detonation. Here we offer a critical review of recent literature contributing to delineating an Anthropogenic stratum, by exploring their interpretation as initiating, sustaining, or indeed ending an Anthropocene epoch. We also offer a reflection on the layer not representing a new period, any more than, for instance, iridium marks a ‘meteoritic’ epoch between the Cretaceous and Palaeogene. We examine temporal scales for their accord with geological methods of definition and delineation, and for the opportunities and constraints each presents for understanding and responding to transformations in the Earth system. Our thesis is that increasingly fortified stances on the ‘right’ definition of the Anthropocene epoch follow traditions of linear and authoritarian historical accounts, and prevent discovering epistemes of human-environment interactions that are open for coexistence. The co-existence of many key transitions will sustain ongoing and fruitful deliberations over human-environment interactions that the Anthropocene proposal has initiated, promoting research that can work with the many scales, discourses, and narratives of environmental change.     

Knowing wildfire risk: Scientific interactions with risk mitigation policy and practice in Victoria,Australia

Over the past decade, major landscape wildfires (or ‘bushfires’ in Australia) in fire-prone countries have illustrated the seriousness of this global environmental problem. This natural hazard presents a complex mesh of dynamic factors for those seeking to reduce or manage its costs, as ignitions, hazard behaviour, and the reactions of different human and ecological communities during and after hazard events are all extremely uncertain. But while those at risk of wildfire have been subject to significant research, the social dimensions of its management, including the role of science, have received little attention. This paper reports on a case study of the Barwon-Otway area of Victoria in Australia, a high wildfire risk area that has recently been a pilot site for a new risk mitigation strategy utilising the wildfire simulation model PHOENIX RapidFire. Against simple equations between ‘more science’ and ‘less uncertainty,’ this paper presents results from interviews and a workshop with practitioners to investigate how scientific research interacts with and informs both wildfire policy and practice. We suggest that attending to cultural and social specificities of the application of any technical innovation—such as next generation modelling—raises questions for future research about the roles of narrative, performance, and other knowledges in the sedimentation of science.     

“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Land sharing not sparing in the “green economy”: The role of livelihood bricolage in conservation and development in the Philippines

In Southeast Asia’s green economy, conservation interventions intensify the production of resources as commodities through land sparing activities and zoning in extensively used landscapes. Such initiatives encounter problems where poor resource users diversify livelihoods in multi-functional landscapes over time. In terms of ‘livelihood bricolage’ – the mixing, matching and building of portfolios – we describe how forest users enhance security by building dynamic livelihood portfolios based on the economic and socio-cultural considerations of place. Philippine case studies show how disrupting livelihood bricolage in multi-functional landscapes with ‘intensifying interventions’ spatially constrains livelihood security and conservation objectives. We conclude that more equitable forest governance supports land sharing with diverse, extensive livelihoods in varied landscapes.     

Flows,system boundaries and the politics of urban metabolism: Waste management in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile

In this paper we examine two central concepts of urban metabolism (‘system boundaries’ and ‘flows’), and explore how to approach them as a means to politicise urban metabolism research. We present empirical findings from two case studies of waste management, in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile, looking at: the materiality of waste flows, the actors involved in them, and how waste flows relate to issues of environmental justice. We argue that urban metabolism, as a methodology to understand urban sustainability, has the potential to produce knowledge to trigger urban transformations, and to analyse the social, political and environmental aspects of waste management in urban areas.     

“One needs to be very brave to stand all that”: Cycling,rational dress and the struggle for citizenship in late nineteenth century Britain

The article discusses changing ideas around citizenship through an analysis of first person accounts of women cyclists in Rational Dress in late nineteenth century Britain. A close reading of personal correspondence provides a sense of how it felt to cycle while dressed in new mobility costumes, such as bloomers, in urban and suburban English landscapes. Such attired and independently mobile women affirmed or unsettled onlooker’s understandings of how middle and upper class women should look and act in public. Some viewers subjected them to verbal and often physical assault. Others, in awe of their socio-technical sophistication were more supportive. Taking a ’bloomer point of view’ provides a unique socio-material way of gaining a deeper understanding of what enabled and also inhibited women’s claims to citizenship and freedom of movement, especially at a time when women were not citizens in a legal sense. I argue that through these richly described accounts we gain insightful glimpses into how individual sensory, embodied and political experiences collectively illuminate the becoming of ’citizen’ as it relates to mobility, gender and landscape.     

Distinctive and comparative places: Alternative narratives of distinction within international student mobility

Moving beyond the ‘world-class’ institutional model of international student mobility, this paper examines alternative narratives of distinction relating to place of study. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with international students at universities in the UK, Austria and Latvia, we illustrate how students inside and outside mainstream reputable higher education institutions narrate and reconfigure markers of distinction to validate their international mobility and location of study, in part to compete with peers at other (more prestigious) institutions. We demonstrate the importance of lifestyle and experiential places within a global differentiated higher education landscape and argue that many students engage in comparative narratives of place of study to authorise the symbolic capital associated with international education. The findings also consider how experiential places and mobility capital are used for distinction not only during educational mobility but within post-study aspirations.     

Too hot to handle: Depoliticisation and the discourse of ecological modernisation in fire management debates

The management of fire within landscapes is a topic of increasing contestation. This is particularly the case in relation to the practice of ‘prescribed burning’, which aims to exercise a form of control of wild fires through the application of science-based techniques that putatively reconcile the conservation of biodiversity with the protection of human life and property in particular places. The belief in possibilities to solve environmental problems by scientific approaches and in outcomes that do not involve harm or vulnerabilities is an element of a trend called “Ecological Modernisation” (EM). Various studies have shown how discourses of EM have come to dominate the ways in which many contemporary environmental problems are approached. We argue that highlighting the presentation of such discourses as neutral and non-politicised precludes a critical examination of the ways in which the knowledge claims upon which they rest can be seen to reinforce only particular sets of constructions of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Through an analysis of knowledge claims made in relation to recurring topics such as the use of fire by Indigenous Australians and the adaptation of species to fire, we illustrate that behind the discourse of ecological modernisation sit deeply engrained variations in terms of where people locate vulnerability in relation to the pressing problem of wildfire and fire management. We argue that the depoliticisation of the topic sustains specific types of relationships between people and nature while delegitimising others and obscures the fundamentally different notions about relationships between humans and non-human nature upon which the debate ultimately pivots.     

Early and Middle Pleistocene Faunal and hominins dispersals through Southwestern Asia

This review summarizes the paleoecology of the Early and Middle Pleistocene of southwestern Asia, based on both flora and fauna, retrieved from a series of ‘windows’ provided by the excavated sites. The incomplete chrono-stratigraphy of this vast region does not allow to accept the direct chronological correlation between the available sites and events of faunal and hominin dispersals from Africa. It also demonstrates that hominins survived in a mixed landscape of open parkland with forested surrounding hills. In addition, the prevailing environmental conditions are not sufficient to explain successful adaptations to new ecological niches away from the African savanna of the bearers of ‘core and flake’ and the Acheulian industries, The differences in knapping and secondary shaping of stone artifacts probably reflect the learned traditions of different groups of hominins. The current distribution of lithic industries across Eurasia is undoubtedly incomplete due to lack of cultural continuities as well as paucity of field research in several sub-regions. This observation supports the contention that what we view as a constant stream of migrants was actually interrupted many times. The continuous occupation of southwestern Asia by the makers of the Acheulian is in contrast with neighboring regions such as the Iranian plateau and Eastern Europe. A more complex model is required to explain the recorded Eurasian archaeological–cultural mosaic.