Event

Keywords: extractivism, conservation, Patagonia, sovereignty. Abstract: This paper discusses the resurgence of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as the “Plan Andinia” in the midst of environmental struggle in Chilean Patagonia. Exploring this theory’s delirious resonances at the “uttermost ends of the earth,” it argues that the expansion of the extractive frontier ever deeper (geologically and geographically) into Latin American territories is generating demands for more-than-human forms of justice that the Westphalian logics of the state, with their grounding in two-dimensional space, are unable to address. The Plan Andinia, first “uncovered” in the 1960s by the sons of Adolf Eichmann, supposedly reveals the intentions of Jews (and an array of other shadowy global forces) to establish a second Jewish state in Patagonia, the southern tip of South America currently shared by the
states of Chile and Argentina. In the 2010s, this conspiracy theory began to circulate anew in southern Aysén, then the site of a conflict over a proposed megadam project. Gauchos living in the region began to accuse Douglas Tompkins, an American multimillionaire (and Gentile) and prominent opponent of the dams who had spent the twoprevious decades purchasing millions of hectares of Patagonian land for conservation and parkification, of building a giant house underground on a former sheep estancia he had acquired for rewilding. They claimed that this structure would house Israeli forces awaiting the launch of Plan Andinia. This paper situates these accusations in the context of older fantastical stories about the genocidal colonization of Latin America’s “last frontier,” in which Jews and gauchos appear as parallel figures of lability, errancy, opacity, anarchy, and marginality, distinguished by gaucho Christianity, but nonetheless sometimes cryptically mutating into one another. Showing how the subsoil abode Tompkins was allegedly building appears as a critique of the “digging-in” of forms of sovereignty that have long construed both Jews and gauchos as dangerous to the state, this paper asks what powers are imagined to be unleashed when capital penetrates the depths of the earth. Using the Plan Andinia’s delirious vision of the subsoil to explore wider contests over the power over life in the age of planetary sovereignty, it argues that gauchos invoking the Plan are engaged in a questioning of the borders of the political in the face of the increasingly three dimensional workings of capital accumulation.

Keywords: Conservation, Violence, Coloniality, Climate Change. Abstract: On March 8, 2017, a Samburu pastoralist ventured into a wildlife conservancy in northern Kenya to graze his cattle. There, he was shot and killed for illegal grazing by rangers working for the conservancy, which was established by the conservation organization the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT). When his cousin found him three days later, 13 cartridges of ammunition were found on the ground next to him (Lempatu, personal communication, May 2017). This death was among several that involved the NRT, including eleven that were later investigated by an organization, the Oakland Institute (Mittal & Moloo, 2021), In this case, drought and a scarcity of pasture worsened by climate change urged this pastoralist to search for grazing land for his animals, only to then face violence and death at the hands of guards working for the NRT conservancy: the ecocide or terracide that decimated his grazing lands promoted him to move, only to face another life-ending violence.
In this paper, I take this incident of the killing of a pastoralist for grazing on land demarcated for conservation in order to consider the larger problem of violence in conservation and its relationship to the production of space. In his analysis of conservation and violence in Tanzania, Roderick P Neumann writes that “state efforts to control wildlife resources in Africa” are “inherently conducive to violence” (Neumann, 2001, p.306). A wide body of scholarship exists which analyses general and site-specific examples of conservation fueling violence (for examples, see Bocarejo & Ojeda, 2016; Fletcher, 2018; Marijnen, de Vries, & Duffy, 2021). I wish to situate violence in conservation in relationship to the planetary destruction or terracide that is characteristic of our times. Although conservation is considered a response to planetary violence, a way of protecting what remains of the earth’s biodiversity, I argue for a consideration of both climate change and conservation violence together, and suggest that their commonality exists in their consideration of different ways of defining the human. I draw on Silvia Wynter’s concept of the “coloniality of being” in which she argues that the Western European bourgeois conception of the human “over-represents itself” as if it were the entire species of human (Wynter, 2003, p.260), while racialized others are defined as “economically damnés and “underdeveloped” (p.321). Wynter’s notion of differentiated humans finds expression in the language and narratives of conservation groups which argue that “pastoralism is bad for the environment” (Ogada, personal communication, June 2017) and that pastoralists are incapable of managing their own environments (Survival International, 2023). I argue that these beliefs adhere to older ontologies of the human and undergird the exercise of violence by conservation organizations.
I will also attempt to theorize how the socio-spatial contours of land under conservation are formed by violence, in order to separate land into smaller parcels and to cut up ecological relationships in order to sell their constituent elements (Buscher et al, 2012, p.8). By contrast, I will examine pastoralists’ highly advanced grazing patterns and long-standing sets of rules collectively designed and enforced to match changing patterns of rain (Survival International, 2023, p.10). These grazing patterns depend on planetary entanglements between humans and the land, and humans and animals. I suggest a politics for “landing on Earth” (Latour and Weibel, 2020) at a time of the climate emergency requires attending to older geographies of mobility, to humans in movement entangled in a changing earth, and to reinscribing these provocations within the “genre of the human” (Wynter, 2003, p.313).
This paper is based on research conducted between April and June 2017 as part of a documentary in development which I am directing, tentatively titled Wildfire. It also draws on research which I conducted in collaboration with the Oakland Institute for the report, Stealth Game, “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya published in 2021. I wish to show the trailer for the film Wildfire as part of this presentation.
The film trailer can be accessed here: https://vimeo.com/236447291 (password: conservation).
References
Bocarejo, D., & Ojeda, D. (2016). Violence and conservation: Beyond unintended consequences and unfortunate coincidences. Geoforum, 69, 176–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.11.001
Büscher, Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J., & Brockington, D. (2012). Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 23(2), pp.4–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2012.674149
Counsell, S. (2023, March). Blood Carbon: how a carbon offset scheme makes millions from Indigenous land in Northern Kenya. Survival International. https://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/2466/Blood_Carbon_Report.pdf
Fletcher, R. (2018). License to Kill: Contesting the Legitimacy of Green Violence. Conservation and Society, 16(2), 147–156. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_16_148
Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (2020). Critical zones  : the science and politics of landing on earth (B. Latour & P. Weibel, Eds.). ZKM/Center for Art and Media.
Marijnen, E., de Vries, L., & Duffy, R. (2021). Conservation in violent environments: Introduction to a special issue on the political ecology of conservation amidst violent conflict. Political Geography, 87, 102253–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102253
Moloo, Z. (Director). (2017). Wildfire. [Film Trailer]. https://vimeo.com/236447291
Mittal, A., & Moloo, Z. (2021, November 16). Stealth Game: “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya. The Oakland Institute. https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/kenya-stealth-game-
community-conservancies.pdf
Neumann, R.P. (2001). “Disciplining Peasants in Tanzania: From State Violence to Self-Surveillance in Wildlife Conservation.” In Peluso, N, & Watts, M. (Eds) (2001). Violent environments, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 305-327. s
Wynter, S. Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument.” cr: The New Centennial Review, 3, pp.257–337.

Sensory pollutants, such as light, noise and smell, are a major feature of urban life. Their immaterial nature means that they have often been overlooked in favour of material pollutants, whose harms and impacts might be more immediately apparent. Yet sensory pollutants produce real environmental and social damage, enacted on both human and non-human life. Research has often considered sensory pollutants in isolation from each other, but this paper sets out a vision for a project which gathers these pollutants together. In so doing, a focus on sensory pollutants allows us to understand planetary urban life and feeling. Specifically, sensory pollutants tie our affective, sensorial experience of the city to the environmental destruction of the Anthropocene, within which the city is the most environmentally damaging anthropogenic landscape. A focus on sensory pollution draws attention to some of the uniquely urban ways in which environmental damage happens. As with material pollutants, sensory pollutants are unevenly distributed in cities, with their harmful effects most commonly falling on the poorest or on non-human life without a voice, making their resolution a key but overlooked element of social and environmental justice. The paper will also draw attention to the ways in which sensory pollutants are tied to material pollutants, showing how global environmental crisis is embedded into ways in which planetary urban life is experienced. Studying sensory pollutants collectively, rather than in isolation, allows us to start to see common problems, challenges and injustices across all forms of sensory pollutants. Yet sensory pollutants provide a unique challenge in that their absence may also be problematic too. Sensory pollutants are central to the vitality, density and vibrancy which defines what many critical urbanists have argued make up the ‘good city’. The paper will outline ways in which the very nature of the city is sensorially ‘dirty’, and as such will argue against a vision of urban life in which noise, sound, light or other sensory pollutants are unduly governed or restricted. Indeed, processes such as gentrification, regeneration and neoliberal or imperialist urban development tend to involve processes of sensory sanitization and homogenization, a process which this paper describes as “affective bleaching”. This term evokes deliberately “coral bleaching” an environmental process which destroys the vitality of ecosystems in coral reefs. Similarly, the affective bleaching associated with high end neoliberal urban spaces also kills the creativity and vibrancy of those cities. This exclusion of pollutants is itself therefore correlated with an exclusion of people. A picture of a divided urban world emerges, where there are sensorily polluted cities or spaces within cities with associate health and environmental damage, and affectively bleached cities with the associated death of urban life. These challenges make sensory pollution a classic example of a wicked problem, and to eliminate sensory pollutants entirely is not desirable. Turning to Douglas, who described material pollutants as “matter out of place”, the paper starts to think of sensory pollutants as “sensations out of place”, not conceived of as pollutants when properly located or regulated, but damaging when in the wrong place, time or quantity. As such, responding to sensory pollution is not a matter of removing the pollutants, but shifting governance of them away from current regimes which seek to displace sensory pollution in the interests of capital and power, towards regimes of governance that look to reduce the socio-environmental harms of sensory pollution. The paper will end with a framework for researching sensory pollutants, exploring the proposed case studies and drawing tentatively from early fieldwork on these. Keywords: pollution; affect; Anthropocene; sensation; urban

Keywords: Justice, activist art, scale, temporality, space, legal systems. Abstract: The violence of colonial capitalism reverberates across space and time in the effects of climate change (Sultana, 2022). Atmosphere, land, and ocean temperatures are warming, while concurrent extreme heat events, including tropical cyclones, droughts and heatwaves are becoming increasingly frequent (IPCC, 2023). These effects are overwhelmingly concentrated in the global South (IPCC, 2023), and compound interwoven economic and racial forms of marginality for ‘othered’ communities across the globe (Sultana, 2022), who have historically contributed little to nothing in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (Hickel, 2020). Meanwhile, global North states, whose populations bear historical responsibility for climate change, having developed and then exported, through development institutions, a model of societal carbon-dependence contingent on the violent theft and exploitation of land, people and resources (Chakrabarty, 2017), are shielded from its worst impacts by forms of environmental privilege (Pellow, 2018). The notion of climate justice is used across an array of academic, legal, institutional, and activist fields to highlight and contest these uneven power geometries (Jafry et al., 2019). However, legal systems in particular have historically enabled governments and the corporations they are entwined with to pursue projects of colonial capitalism, while protecting them from taking responsibility for the fallout of their actions (D’Souza, 2018). While the notion that legal processes reproduce and uphold injustices in favour of the privileged is not new or controversial for ‘other’ racialised and marginalised socio-economic groups, whose relationships with such institutions are badly frayed (Whyte, 2019), many activist groups calling for climate justice appeal to liberal imaginations of the legal system (D’Souza, 2018). Simultaneously, the scalar complexity of climate change provides cause to redefine what might constitute justice for different stakeholders, who is included as a stakeholder, how justice should be delivered, and by whom. The ‘slow violence’ of climate change, which connects disparate actors across space and time (Nixon, 2011), therefore demands that conceptions of climate justice be developed which engage with scale in a critical way in order to attend to the uneven economic, racial and geographical power geometries exacerbated by climate change. In this context, an important question which arises is how might we carve open spaces for dialogue about climate justice which bridge these power geometries in ways which are politically productive? In this paper I frame the ‘Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes’ (CICC) exhibition, which ran from September 2021 to February 2022 at Framer Framed Gallery in Amsterdam, as one such intervention. Through a series of public hearings, the exhibition connected place-based struggles in Peru, Mongolia and DR Congo, among others to the present and historical acts of Dutch corporations and the Dutch state, functioning as a critique of the Dutch legal system. Using my first hand experiences of the hearings and exhibition space, and interviews with the activists, artists, and legal professionals who helped bring the exhibition to life, I use the CICC to explore the political capacities and limitations of ‘activist art’ as a means for carving out space for dialogue around questions of climate justice.

References
Chakrabarty, D. (2017). The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society 34(2-3), 25-37.

D'Souza, R. (2018). What's Wrong with Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations. London: Pluto.

Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. Lancet Planetary Health 4(9), e399-404.

IPCC. (2023). Synthesis Report of the IPCC sixth assessment report. IPCC.

Jafry, T., Mikulewicz, M., & Helwig, K. (2019). Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor . Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press.

Pellow, D. (2018). What is critical environmental justice? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Sultana, F. (2022). Critical Climate Justice. The Geographical Journal 188(1), 118-124.

Whyte, K. (2019). Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points. WIREs Climate Change 11(1), 1-7.

The socio-ecological crisis has brought about various pathways to rethink mainstream development thinking and its consequences especially in relation to capitalism. With various perspectives on how to resolve the socio-ecological crises, different schools of thought have emerged to offer prefiguration in tackling these multiple crises. One alternative development pathway that has emerged in the Global North is degrowth which is defined as “a voluntary transition toward a just, participatory, and ecologically sustainable society”. (Degrowth Declaration of Paris, 2008).


As with any other development alternatives, degrowth merits critical examination. As a global alternative path towards socio-ecological transformation, degrowth needs to be explored because it engenders alternative conceptualizations and practices of development that highlight its cursorily examined yet significant social and cultural dimensions. Current studies and experiments of degrowth, as an explicit agenda in the global South, however, are lacking and can be attributed to the mainstream notions of development which are still tied to the tendency to measure development through a growth-based economy. At the same time, there are parallel ideas to degrowth in the Global South in current locally-led experiments which seek to subvert growth-based economies and amplify community-led alternative development pathways.


These movements’ articulation of resistance and in prefiguring alternative development pathways will help movement-produced theories. As articulated by Schlosberg and Craven (2019) in their work on sustainable materialist movements, questions like on how these initiatives can be enabled, what socio-political conditions are needed to make this happen, and what new economic forms are appropriate and vital are the key questions scholars trying to understand the emergence of these movements should be asking. Do movements like these see themselves as anti-capital or can they exist within capitalism? What about movements addressing the problem brought about by the excesses of material flows of capitalism? Simply put, at the crux of the politics behind these alternative development movements are the tasks of “imagining, producing, circulating” better material flows (Schlosberg and Craven, 2019). While alternative practices of development are deemed and oftentimes lauded for being more nuanced, participatory, and just, a deeper analysis on how it is being translated on the ground merits a study.


The paper explores these questions and the intersections of critical alternative development in the Global South through degrowth. Using qualitative methodologies, it tries to situate these theoretical underpinnings from the lens of community-led zero waste management sites in Central Philippines and the movements behind these who are trying to address material flows of capitalism in an era of Wasteocene (Armiero, 2020).


Keywords: alternative development, degrowth, zero waste, Philippines, socio-ecological crises.