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This chapter interrogates the capacity of the concept of reparation to intervene in the current complex ecological crisis. Although many projects on the ground are obviously relevant and important contributions, I argue that what it takes to repair and its consequences are hardly discussed. This renders other species, elements or ecologies that are depleted, polluted or let die because they are considered resources to remediate another ecosystem invisible. So, what would ecological repair look like if conceived from an ecological lens and, therefore, recognizing the interdependency between entities? To respond to this question I draw on the construction process of Yellow Dust, an air pollution remediation DIY infrastructure. To detect and unpack how these interdependencies work in practice, I suggest the notion of involvement, and demonstrate its potential as an analytical tool to unpack the interdependencies between elements, compounds and ecologies, and the multiple and specific ways in which, in Yellow Dust, air and water – among others – involved each other. In addition, I suggest that involvement is also a form of ethics for repair/ation, because it puts at the centre the ethical decisions involved in every intervention with/in ecologies.
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.
In this chapter and interview Sam Siva presents the work of the British Black and People of Colour collective Land in Our Names (LIONs), unpacking the centrality of land reparations to any project of ecological reparation. LIONs work supports Black and People of Colour in reconnecting with land through food growing and claiming access to nature. Putting access to land at the centre of ecological justice is also about affirming the interconnectedness between ecological repair, healing and concrete reparations for damages done to people and non-humans through imperialism, colonialism and extractivism, as well as about understanding the centrality of racism to these enterprises and their persistent inheritances in the present. Together, this text and a follow-up conversation connecting the personal and the political, struggles and hopes, demonstrate the deep connection of exclusionary dynamics to contemporary concerns of justice at the heart of ecological reparation – such as climate change, the whiteness of the countryside, the rise of malnutrition and poor mental health.
In this article and interview Sam Siva presents the work of the British Black and People of Colour collective, Land in Our Names (LION), unpacking the centrality of land reparations to any project of ecological reparation. LION’s work supports Black and People of Colour in reconnecting with land through food growing and claiming access to nature. Putting access to land at the centre of ecological justice is also about affirming the interconnectedness between ecological repair, healing and concrete reparations for damages done to people and non-humans through imperialism, colonialism and extractivism, as well as about understanding the centrality of racism to these enterprises and their persistent inheritances in the present. Together, this text and a follow-up conversation connecting the personal and the political, struggles and hopes, demonstrate the deep connection of exclusionary dynamics to contemporary concerns of justice at the heart of ecological reparation – such as climate change, the whiteness of the countryside, the rise of malnutrition and poor mental health.
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.
Microbes increasingly feature in narratives and practices of ecological repair across contexts and scales, from intimate bodily processes to expansive global systems. This chapter explores two approaches to mending damaged ecologies with microbes. First, therapeutic efforts to ‘rewild’ human microbiomes through the restoration of mutualistic microbes (hookworms and bacteria) to treat diseases of microbial absence and imbalance. Second, synthetic biology endeavours to engineer microbes to assimilate greenhouse gases and produce sustainable chemicals in circular carbon economies. Drawing on scientific, social scientific and popular literatures on helminth and faecal microbiota transplant therapies, and ethnographic engagement with synthetic biology for gas fermentation, the chapter explores what might (and might not) be afforded by ecological, multi-scalar thinking, fixing and caring in these contexts. In concluding, it explores the analytical lens of ‘ecologies of participation’ (Chilvers et al, 2018) to account – and perhaps also make space – for diverse modes of engagement with ecological reparation.
How to become a companion of the Earth by taking part in more than human communities of food? This is the open question that accompanies the making of alternative forms of living in the Genuino Clandestino network. In this chapter, I explore three key dimensions of becoming a peasant: farming ecological practices, food communities that links countryside and urban spaces and civic and collective use of land. By exploring the peasant return and its culture of eco-sharing, the development of self-organized peasant markets in Bologna and the community of Mondeggi Bene Comune, Fattoria Senza Padroni, we will scout the multiple practices of mending and ecological reparation that animate the everyday politics of Genuino Clandestino.
Environmental citizenship scholarship has pointed out liberal rights as the focus of eco-political action. However, agroecological practices in Colombia, understood as modes of ecological reparation, broaden the scope of environmental citizenship since obligation and obeying life are key. Through an ethnographic account – in the mode of empirical philosophy – this chapter conceptualizes agroecological practices as belonging to an ecology of abundance that resists the liberal humanist understanding of environmental citizenship and economies of depletion (fuelled in this case by industrial ornamental agriculture). As a consequence, obligation is practiced as a relation that is established by a place’s dynamic unfolding, foregrounding practices of ecological reparation and an ethic of abundance.
This chapter thinks from care and repair towards a worldly form of hope. Reclaiming the concept from its salvationist roots, it offers instead a deflationary account in which hope functions as an ordinary feature of being in the world – and one which deepens rather than reduces our entanglements with the nature-cultures around us. It advances several propositions. Hope is not predictive (and therefore cannot be falsified or disproved). The measure of hope is not accuracy, but efficacy: its ability to hold more meaningful forms of action in the world. Hope may be expressed in change and transformation, but also more modest forms of patience and enduring. While often called to the fore in moments of crisis and transition, hope is above all a property of ordinary work, from whence comes it depth and power. Finally, hope is a collective accomplishment – something we do together in the world, in concert with others and with things.
In this chapter I describe the practices of farmers who are rearing beef cattle exclusively on the forage of grass pastures as ‘mending ecologies’. To mend ecologies requires intimate observation of what has broken down, as well as specific spaces for experimentation, collaboration and repair. I describe how this mending, and the new ecologies that emerge as a result, involve a gradual re-materialization of the whole body of the farm, in a way that counters the mode of production of industrialized livestock agriculture. Farmer members of the Pasture Fed Livestock Association (PFLA) are deliberately making spaces for this re-materialization: their farms are accommodating new forms of attention and human labour, new multi-species interactions, and new configurations of infrastructure and expertise. Such re-arrangements are risky and fallible. But they are, at the same time, a hopeful reclamation of the socioecological fabric – part of what our editors have called the ‘unfolding, relational and inter-connected movements of ecological reparation’. As such, they brim with a new sensual repertoire – bringing new sounds, colours, textures, rhythms and emotions to the material practices of the livestock farm.
