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Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
How do we address the threat of social and environmental destruction while creating and maintaining liveable worlds?
Expert scholars from diverse backgrounds unpack the question in this research-oriented, real-world challenges-focused collection.
The authors explore practices of repairing damaged ecologies across different locations and geographies and propose innovative ideas for the conservation, mending, care and empowerment of human and non-human ecologies.
This ground breaking collection establishes ecological reparation as an urgent and essential topic of public and scholarly debate.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
Agroecological networks have long valorized the experience of small-scale farmers and have cultivated processes of in situ experimentation to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of traditional techniques. In this chapter I suggest that this focus on experience and experimentation is vital within broader ecologies of ‘mending’ environmental damage, and to the ideas of ecological reparation put forward by this book. Specifically, I suggest that the loop of collective reflection on experience afforded by the examples I document in El Salvador allow for a supplementation of official histories with small stories; with purposefully censored collective memory; and with everyday expertise. The case presented in this chapter is engaged in experimental soil repair through composting practices and the creation of ‘biofertilizers’ – recipes that use local organic ingredients to boost soil health. I show how agroecological approaches to soil repair place campesino expertise at the heart of agricultural innovation and ecological reparation. Together, these fuller archives allow for a wider array of possible solutions to soil damage, while also enabling contestation to take place over stories told over land, ownership, lives, and communities.
The figure of the circular features in many imaginations of sustainability transition. This chapter takes up one of them, the Fab City Global Initiative, to explore the relationship between DIY activism and ecological reparation. By nurturing people’s technical skills and building networked distributed production systems, the Fab City aspires to render urban collective life a practice of recursively creating its own ground, autonomously, without depending on the state or external material flows. Circular material flows and recycle undergirds this urban autonomy, and the regeneration of the damaged environment is its corollary by curtailing the environmental impact of cities. In this vision of the circular city, the Fab City as an infrastructure for autonomous urban life, appears as an infrastructure for ecological reparation.
Focusing on the southern regions of Cape Town, South Africa, we focus on the landscape around our city’s major waste dump, Capricorn, named for the Sea Goat of astrologers, that is alongside shack settlements, ganglands, a businesspark, a nature reserve and a sewage works. Using images from Google Earth we show how Cape Town’s policies for water and waste management are designed for solid, liquid, and gas, yet the chemical and pharmaceutical industries of our time leach, flow, aggregate, metabolize, sediment and bioaccumulate in bodies and soils, from the dump site and the sewage plant.
Inventorying the material flows in a zone that inscribes both sacred and sacrificial zones in the environmental cosmology of modernity makes it possible to understand how and why the environmental governance paradigm of social ecological systems mediated by dollar values is failing Cape Town. A transformative environmental governance modality would embrace not economic value, but the material and multi-species entanglements with wealth and poverty. Attempting what anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls an ‘anthropocenography’, we propose that reshaping environmental governance scholarship around ‘biogeosocial chemistry’ rather than ‘ecosystem services’, will make possible a reparative ecology based on urban metabolism.
This comic figures potentials for a speculative ethics and politics of drawing breath together. It introduces ‘the Museum of Breathers’, a concept space that gathers human and non-human entities as they reside and respire in their breathing conditions. The curatorial effect is a kind of social statement and prompt to inhabit the simultaneous sharedness and irreducible differences of co-breathing as an ongoing condition of complicity and conspiracy for earth-bound living in the segregating present. Things go smoothly until the Museum’s curator, an autonomous robot, identifies a potential new resident for the collection, a rat employed as a test subject in an unspecified exposure experiment. Their eventual encounter stages a meditation on power and assent, the ends and efficacies of the Museum as method for ecopolitical thought, and what other forms of reparative and disruptive collectivity might transpire when what was gathered as a Museum of Breathers evades its discipline to become a MoB. Put another way, the arc of the narrative is a movement from the Museum of Breathers as a reflective thought space to a query into a potential for a conspiring collective practice.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
This chapter speculates about a situation that often marks the practice of ecological reparation: those moments in which we doubt as we meet alternative ways of defining what ecology means and how reparation is done – other ways of delimiting life from death, other modes of practicing time and grief: an ecological reparation otherwise. I articulate this reflection with and through my collaborations with Likanantai and Mapuche communities as they try to heal lands, waters and atmospheres damaged by settler-colonialism. I do not articulate a proper theoretical programme, nor do I give a thorough account of the multiple hesitations that have punctuated my collaborations. I rather address three concrete situations – which I gloss as theses – that I have elevated as minor yet potentially fruitful analytics to approach ecological reparation and its decolonization. These theses are: ecological reparation in the context of Indigenous worlds entails working in the time, ethical imperative, and material texture of spectres; it involves the articulation of a politics of the unthinkable; and it is practically and spiritually oriented towards the restitution of abundance.
There is an urgency to face the precipice of ecological devastation, take a leap into the fractures of a broken Earth, and experiment with more sustainable and just ways of living. And yet, in spite of incessant calls to attend to multiple fronts of emergency, major obstacles remain. One of them, as many analyses of the hope-shattering failures of COP26 and previous climate agreements have shown, is the recognition of the inescapable entanglement of ecological care with care for people. No justice, no ecological peace. Attempting a modest contribution to efforts addressing this situation, Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair and to remediate both damaged ecologies and persistent inequities in ways that support resurgence against more than human injustice. This book takes up this task from a diversity of theoretical and political fronts, unpacking some of the workings at stake in the conceptual coupling of the ecological with reparation.
