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This abstract draws on the concept of narratives as a powerful tool to produce shared perceptions focusing on both Toxic Narratives (TNs) (Armiero, 2021) and count narratives, that we will call Guerrilla Narratives (GNs). TNs invisibilize, normalize, or naturalize injustice, blame the affected communities and erase even the possibility to think of alternatives. Guerrilla Narrative (GN) are an ensemble of tools and practices aiming to sabotage TNs while proposing alternative narratives (Cayuela & Armiero, 2022; Page, 2021). For centuries we have witnessed the widespread need for the capitalist system to exploit portions of land and sacrifice them to devastation (Barca, 2014). Examples are the resource extraction of raw materials, large energy production projects or large logistical infrastructures (Mezzadra et al., 2020). Recognizing these areas of sacrifice becomes central in reading the mechanisms of exploitation, and they should be considered not as an isolated case but as a complex and widespread phenomenon (Barca, 2014). Even in Italy and Mediterranean Europe, many cases of land devastation have shown a predatory and extractivist attitude. I live and deal with the case study of marble extraction in the Apuan Alps, Northern Tuscany, Italy. The marble industry in the Apuan Alps shows how: the extraction of value from a territory, in violent and predatory terms, produces a cascade of social and environmental issues. These mountains are subjected to very strong predation and are valued while neglecting the environmental, social and economic impact on communities and ecosystems. While there was a time when the local economy was deeply dependent on marble extraction and processing, today, however - due to the globalization of the markets - the situation has changed enormously. The recent globalization of the marble supply chain caused heavy damage to the local economy. Since that moment, marble extracted in blocks from the Apuan Alps is mainly exported elsewhere for being processed. In this phase, the calcium carbonate business, which now involves more than 80 per cent of the extract, emerged as a controversial circular economy project. Currently, mainstream narratives produced by institutions, foundations, and corporations stress this relationship between the city and marble through greenwashing and art-washing events of all sorts. These are mainly financed by the crumbs that the "owners of the mountains" decide to distribute over the territory. Here, environmental issues related to the protection and care of the mountain environment are intertwined with complex issues, such as labour, narratives, financing, and inequality, which affect the land and the communities living there. According to these intricate and correlated concepts, a debate has reopened in recent years around marble extraction, its effects, the mythologies and the toxic narratives it produces on the territory. This research started at the end of 2019 and it is still ongoing. It draws on a decolonial approach, applying methods such as interviews, participant observation, and study of mainstream and counter-narratives. Eighteen narratives that aim to deconstruct narratives toxicity were analyzed in a variety of media -- texts, songs, videos, exhibitions, and theater representations -- and seven in-depth interviews (others shorter) were conducted. The materials coded detected 12 relevant themes, which include death, devastation, work, and property rights. With this contribution, I would like to question how toxic and guerrilla narratives are able to transform reality and how they develop among time in Apuan Alps context.
Key words: Wild boars, Palestine, Political Ecology, Slow Violence
Our story begins in a small village at the heart of Palestine, Iskaka of Salfeet district . Like any other Palestinian place, it has been under different modes of Zionist colonial domination. In the last 15 years an additional layer of rule crystalized when a newcomer joined the ranks and file of the Israeli state. This time it was an animal, a wild boar, introduced by the Israeli state to the Westbank. Within the space of years this animal had bred, its ever-growing presence an epidemic, an animalized technology, which has incrementally afflicted the everyday subsistence of Palestinian families and communities. Protecting agricultural produce from wild boars has proved impossible, especially considering Israeli restrictions and the minimal support from the Palestinian Authority. As a result, a long tradition of seasonal agriculture, especially in summer, has nearly been destroyed, and with it, a particular Palestinian lifestyle. The destruction of this lifeline has not solely affected village modes of production. It has entailed a set of overlapping regimes of violence that work in tandem, interweaving Israeli forms of colonial rule with the Palestinian Authority’s politics of corruption, lethargy, and de-developmental strategies. In this paper, I use Rob Nixon’s 1 notion of slow violence to gauge the long-term development of settler colonialism through the terrain of political ecology. Here, following William Cronon,2 I provide a real-time exploration of the historical and environmental processes which shape this particular settler colonial project and its lived realities. Through the entry and spread of wild boars, village life has been transformed in Salfit district in profound and complex ways, a novel and challenging political-ecological reality. In the village of Deir Istya in Salfit district, a women narrated to me how she sold her dowry, gold accessories worth around three-thousand US dollars, to buy a small plot of land in her village. She made this decision in order to uplift her family, which relied only on her husband’s daily labor to survive. On this land she planted olive trees. However, In the olive season, she was attacked by a wild boar, nearly sustaining a fatal injury. Traumatized by this experience, she felt terrorized and disempowered, unable to continue farming her land. This attack led to her abandoning the plot, which at the point we spoke had transformed back into wilderness. In an adjacent village, another woman lamented the incremental confinement in their homes that she and her neighbors face due to fear of being attacked by a boar. This creeping and growing reality has curtailed women’s mobility, ending a plethora of seasonal and leisure activities which connected them to neighboring villages, as well as to Palestinian gruella fighters, once active in these spaces. Wild boars thrive, feeding on agricultural plots and on the waste from settlements. A community religious figure in another village spoke to me about his relative, a young pregnant woman, who had experienced a novel, mushrooming skin disease, a condition never heard of before in this area, which jeopardized her health and her pregnancy. Its source in his community was the running sewage of Slafit city and the adjacent Ariel settlement, areas of Israeli settlement, which infiltrate the village space. Waste run off from these settlements has created a lake of sewage in his village. This sewerage and its toxic effects have profoundly impacted Palestinian village peoples’ leisure, health, and wellbeing. This lake pours into a valley, now named locally, the valley of sewage. It is in this confluence of conditions in which wild boars, leishmania disease, as well as other airborne diseases spread. In such a precarious place, Palestinian villagers have been narrating stories about the workings of slow violence. In this paper, I would like to capitalize upon the concept of slow violence and explore the production of these stories in the last twenty years, their circulation, and their amplification to an extent where some evolve into myths about the powers of a wild boar. This will be an ethnographic study premised upon a decolonizing story telling methodology.
2 William Cronon, “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.” New York : Hill and Wang, 1983.
1 Rob Nixon,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” London :Harvard University Press, 2011.
Writing and reading fiction has long accompanied my research practice as a political ecologist of land justice and conservation. Sometimes the two threads have developed at a remove, and sometimes they have nourished one another. While my research has focused on the intersection of global conservation agendas with long-standing conflicts and dynamics of social exclusion, I have constantly returned to explore the ways that words conspire to make worlds. Environmental conflict can be better understood, I have argued, through the ways that environments themselves are multiply 'worlded' and narrated. Meanwhile, it is clear that resistance movements are often animated by fresh ways of narrating and feeling relationships with ecologies and lived environments. My interest in historical resistance movements brought me to archives linked with movements resisting the Clearances in historical Scotland, between the 1500s and 1900s. The Clearances were a major form of land enclosure and dispossession driven that primarily involved moving Highland communities off communally-managed land onto smaller plots, to make way for sheep and agriculture. The English played a key role in driving the Clearances, although they made alliances with powerful Highland leaders in the process, leading to the formation of the 'Crofting' system, that saw poor communities obtain small rented plots on which they could grow subsistence crops, while remaining vulnerable to the whims of their Landlords and their sub-tenants. Many communities emigrated wholesale to Australia, Canada, and the United States as a result of conditions, sponsored by the Landlords. In this context, I was particularly interested to learn more about how and when communities succeeded in resisting or reworking attempted evictions, the imaginations that animated them, and what this could bring to wider contemporary political ecologies of land justice and enclosure. Early in the process of writing a young adult novel about a character who grows up 'in between worlds', leading to conflict in her sense of place, I fell upon an unusual case that caught my imagination. A movement on the peninsula of Coigach, in north-west Scotland, had five times managed to resist attempts to serve them eviction notices, in a resistance led by women. Although the evictions were led by powerful families, usually in collaboration with the military, Coigach had stood. I began to piece together the material in the archive to research my YA narrative, soon entering into dialogue with local community groups who were also seeking to commemorate the struggles through the making of a sculpture. This paper tells the entangled narratives of the emerging fictional story, the oral histories that surfaced through my interactions with the Coigach community, and the search to establish a research methodology that could bridge between the two. I focus on particular on the way that collaborating to make fiction established different collectives and sensibilities than other forms of research I have experienced, as well as the ethical decision-making process that accompanied the emerging research design. I conclude by emphasising the focus on 'worlding' and 'felt worlds' between political ecologies and fictional accounts of resistance and suggest the new perspectives Fictional Political Ecologies might bring to wider fields of study.
Keywords: Marronage, Black Ecology, Outsides, Sound Studies
My paper offers a reading of Esteban Montejo’s chronicle of his experiences of enslavement and marronage--in which he lived in the forest for several years-- in Cuba at the end of the 19th century. My reading focuses on Montejo’s ecological practices of listening to Nature (a term he uses in the text) to break through the forced estrangement from the natural world produced by enslavement and life in the barracoons. My paper draws on critical work on marronage, the “outside,” black ecology, and sound studies. In the presentation, I will incorporate sound and poetics to offer a creative-analytical understanding. For Esteban Montejo, the most lacking from the barracoon, in which colonial settlers contained enslaved African people, is the presence of the natural environment. He writes, “There were no trees either outside or inside the barracoons.” (22). The suffocating partitioned and surveilled space broke the ecology between the enslaved of African descent and the ‘outside’ of plants and animals—for even the “horses and goats did not go inside the barracoons.” (22) Montejo laments: The Negroes could never get used to this. The Negro likes trees, forests [...] Africa was full of tress, god-trees, banyans, cedars [...] (24) When Montejo escapes from the plantation, after several “failed” attempts, he takes up residence “outside” the adjacent forest for several years, entering into a radical community with the plant and animal life already residing there. Montejo listens to the trees speaking, describing the tree’s sounds as: “uch, uch, uch, ui ui, ui, uch, uch” (57). Montejo’s radical ecological listening rejects this estrangement from Nature, an alienation from listening to interspecies sound often reduced to “noise” and existing in relation with a diverse array of beings. As an enslaved African, Montejo was estranged from the human category and thus found a home outside in connection with plants, animals, and other beings subject to the terrors of industrialism and colonialism. Montejo’s vision and practice of marronage as one of living outside in an interspecies ecology is maintained throughout his time in the forest. These are choices that he proclaims, “I did nothing except listen to the birds and trees and eat, but I never spoke to a soul.” (59)