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Ecological Globalization and the Challenges of Decolonizing Landscapes

A collaborative workshop co-sponsored by the EcoGlobal project and the University of Oslo Anthropology Department.

Info about event

Time

Wednesday 9 January 2019, at 10:00 - Friday 11 January 2019, at 10:00

For millennia, humans have moved animals and plants during their long-distance travels. But today, plants and animals are traveling at unprecedented rates – with new and sometimes unexpected effects. As ships and planes move growing quantities of goods, they connect ecological regions that have had little biological exchange between them. These exchanges have roots in European colonial expansion, but have dramatically increased with the expansion of transcontinental capitalism.

Long-distance supply chains typically transport more than they intend: jellyfish travel in ballast water, grass species in packing crates, and insects on nursery plants. Some scientists have referred to such events collectively as the emergence of a “New Pangaea” (Rosenzweig 2001). Yet in contrast to the crustal plate movements that formed the super-continent Pangaea on a scale of millions of years, this New Pangaea’s emergence has been distinctly sudden, with its patterns of species dispersal following paths of colonial settlement and industrial development.  

This workshop focuses on what we have termed ecological globalization – i.e. on how practices of trade, development, and management remake landscapes by connecting geographically distant places. By centering landscapes, we seek to give serious attention to more-than-human worlds and expand social science engagements with ecology and other natural sciences. Our goal here is to begin to explore how decolonial efforts might extend to landscapes that have been shaped by violence, frontier accumulation, and inequality.

 At the same time, we also want to continue to probe what the social sciences in particular can contribute to conversations about widespread ecological damage. While such efforts are not new, we hope to explore some less traveled paths by returning to literatures on globalization. Anthropology offers up a unique scalar method that helps us to think about the “global” in new ways: How do long-distance connections produce ongoing difference rather than homogenization? How are “global” phenomena relentlessly place-specific and diverse at the same time that they span large swaths of space? In the 1990s, anthropologists studying globalization developed further tools for thinking about scale and the relations between the “global” and “local.”  (Eriksen 2003, Eriksen 2016). The global, they argued, was not “global” per se; rather it was composed of scale-making projects and specific lines of connection among markedly different worlds (Tsing 2000). 

Recently, a growing number of humanities scholars have begun to center “big” environmental problems in their work (i.e. the Anthropocene and climate change), but these efforts have not drawn on these earlier approaches to globalization as well as they might. To better think about the “global” of environmental issues, we propose to draw on “world systems theory”(Wallerstein 1974) and anthropological work inspired by it (Wolf 1982, Mintz 1985).  When natural scientists and environmental policy makers speak of “global environmental change,” their use of the “global” is significant: it asserts that we are in a time of widespread alterations of our planet – a time when we are no longer dealing with a series of discrete problems, but with major world-shaping shifts. But as humanists have been quick to point out, such “global” thinking often obscures as much as it reveals. Global environmental problems are not the same around the world; thinking in terms of universal “global” problems often homogenizes profound differences; “global” climate change, for example, is not the same for northern Greenlandic communities as it is for those living in island southeast Asia. Yet, while no given “global” problem is singular, neither are its multiple instantiations wholly unrelated. This tension between multiplicity and the need to pay attention to connections (yet without imposing global universals) is the challenge from which this workshop begins.  

Our aim is to create a toolbox for research at the interface of political economy, multispecies scholarship, and ecological change. Key questions include:

  • How might we do a better job of conceptualizing environmental problems in varying locales that are at once fundamentally linked and markedly different? 
  • How does one study the ways that transnational political economy and relations of power remake concrete ecological patches - often through new spatial connections?
  • How can we better describe the ways that imperial damage affects lives and landscapes?
  • How can we build alternative tools to those offered by existing Anthropocene debates?