The covid-19 pandemic led to rapid and large-scale government intervention in economies and societies. A common policy response to covid-19 outbreaks has been the lockdown or quarantine. Designed to ...slow the spread of the disease, lockdowns have unintended consequences for the environment. This article examines the impact of Colombia’s lockdown on forest fires, motivated by satellite data showing a particularly large upsurge of fires at around the time of lockdown implementation. We find that Colombia’s lockdown is associated with an increase in forest fires compared to three different counterfactuals, constructed to simulate the expected number of fires in the absence of the lockdown. To varying degrees across Colombia’s regions, the presence of armed groups is correlated with this fire upsurge. Mechanisms through which the lockdown might influence fire rates are discussed, including the mobilisation of armed groups and the reduction in the monitoring capacity of state and conservation organisations during the covid-19 outbreak. Given the fast-developing situation in Colombia, we conclude with some ideas for further research.
This paper explores how the use of new monitoring technologies, including drones, are being incorporated into forest conservation, with emphasis on what is at stake politically for forest-based ...communities. This is a critical area to consider, as the cheapness and easy availability of drones has fostered their rapid proliferation in conservation practices, for activities as diverse as wildlife counting and fire prevention. Many have raised political concerns about these technological developments, and their potential to be used for the surveillance and spatial discipline of minority groups. For example, recent scholarship within political ecology, human geography and conflict studies makes clear that the regulatory frameworks of international conservation are being appropriated by states to pursue racialised agendas of social exclusion in former conflict zones – often with the support of international environmental actors. By justifying increased military presence; surveillance technologies; and stop-and-searches, conservation frameworks have facilitated the containment of “risky” populations and the production of new kinds of borders. However, few have yet explored what it will mean to incorporate drones into the production of territorial claims that can protect commons-based livelihoods and resist new forms of spatial enclosure. By examining the introduction of drones in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the Petén region of Guatemala, I reveal how satellite technologies and drones are also being used as part of community-led resistance to dispossession. Here, drones are used as part of everyday conservation practices, as part of a socio-legal process that I describe as the configuration of a vertical politics of contestation. Following the history of technological innovation in the MBR leads me to show how, despite their associations with military containment, such technologies can be used to rework spatial orders imposed by states, international actors, the army and the national elite.
This paper addresses the tension between the need to create spaces for unsettling feelings as part of a decolonisation of the curriculum in Higher Education, and the need to create a sense of safety ...in the classroom. Decolonising the curriculum, here, means exploring how histories of coloniality structure educational institutions, established canons, and socio-natural relations, and cultivating collective practices that move beyond oppressive patternings. As part of this process, as we find ourselves imbricated in the struggles of others and as our emotional grip on the world is unsettled, we - students and teachers alike - may find ourselves experiencing discomfort. This raises an important question, for it is clearly part of the responsibility of an educator to create spaces that feel "safe" for students, and do not induce or trigger trauma. Drawing on experiences in the university classroom and lecture halls, this paper develops the concept of "scaffolding" as the basis for an ethos for embracing discomfort pedagogically. The affordances of physical theatre, film, and visual culture are considered alongside particular tactics as ways to foster the transformation of "settled" fabrics of feeling in care-full ways.
Rapidly evolving drone technologies are taking the conservation sector by storm. Although the technical and applied conservation literature tends to frame drones as autonomous, neutral technologies, ...we argue that neither drones nor their implications can be adequately understood unless they are grounded, conceptually and methodologically, in the context of broader societal structures that shape how drones and the data they produce are used. This article introduces the value of a political ecology framework to an interdisciplinary audience of biophysical and social scientists interested in the multiple possibilities and complications associated with conservation drones. Political ecology provides the tools for studying and critically engaging with drone use in conversation in ways that are politically engaged and attuned to power relations – historic and present, local and global – in a more-than-human world. In making this argument, we point to four conceptual tools in political ecology that offer a framework for unveiling the power relations and structures that surround drones in different contexts: political economy, territoriality, knowledge and expertise, and more-than-human relations. Using empirics from our work across Latin America (Colombia and Guatemala), Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Mozambique), and North America (the US and Canada), we illustrate the salience of this framework and demonstrate why evaluating what drones do in and for conservation requires first understanding the complex set of power relations that shape their use.
Drawing on qualitative analysis and anthropological histories, we argue that deforestation rates in the Inter-Andean Valleys and in the Amazon Belt of Colombia reflect the specific role of the ...military in different articulations of the political forest along with new connections between conservation and the war on drugs. This paper examines the increase in deforestation in Colombia in 2020 that partially coincided with the “lockdown” imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19. Early media analysis linked this with the redeployment of military forces away from forest protection to impose lockdown restrictions. However, closer investigation reveals significant regional variation in both the reorganisation of military groups, and in the rate at which deforestation has materialised; military presence has increased in some regions, while in others deforestation has increased. To explain this, we unpack the “biopolitical” dimensions of international conservation to show how the specific deployment of military groups in Colombia reflects an interplay between notions of the protection of (species) life, longer colonial histories, and more recent classification of geographies in terms of riskiness and value.
Drones are unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) whose technology has evolved rapidly over the past 15 years. Increasingly used in conservation to manage and monitor biodiversity, drones offer rich ...capabilities to observe in difficult terrain, have relatively affordable hardware costs and are likely to continue to proliferate rapidly in the years ahead. Drones are useful for tasks as diverse as monitoring wildlife poaching and illegal timber extraction, managing ecotourism and disaster responses, and tracking the regeneration or degradation of forests, and offer potential for more specialised tasks as their sensory payloads are developed. However, although associated technical issues and applications have been explored in wide-ranging ways within conservation science, there has been relatively little social-scientific engagement with drones to date. This leaves a gap surrounding the potential social benefits and risks of drones, as well as in interdisciplinary conversations. This introduction is the first of four papers under the heading ‘Drone ecologies’, building on an interdisciplinary workshop held under the same name at the University of Bristol in July 2021. Expanding from the plenary dialogues that opened this workshop, this introduction explores what interdisciplinary perspectives on drones can offer in addressing global social and ecological challenges, drawing on expertise from the fields of conservation biology, human and physical geography, rainforest ecology and environmental systems. Setting out the aims of the overall special collection, we review here the ways that drones are being used, and might be used, in biodiversity conservation, setting out important considerations to minimise risks of inadvertent harms.
In El Salvador a growing permaculture movement attunes small-scale farming activities to principles of ecological observation. The premise is twofold: close-grained appreciation of ...already-interacting biophysical processes allows for the design of complementary social and agricultural systems requiring minimum energy inputs. Secondly, the insistence on campesino smallholders as actors in the design of sustainable food systems directly addresses decades of "top-down" developmental interventions, from Green Revolution experiments in the 1960s and 1970s to international food security programmes in the 1990s. Permaculture connects food insecurity to the delegitimisation of smallholder innovation and insists that, through sharing simple techniques, campesino farmers can contribute towards future-oriented questions of environmental sustainability. This repositioning is brought about through the mobilisation of pedagogical techniques that legitimise the experiences and expertise of small-scale farmers, while standardising experimental methods for testing, evaluating and sharing agroecological practices. Like food sovereignty and food justice movements, Salvadoran permaculture links hunger with longer histories of (uneven) capital accumulation and dispossession and renders campesino farmers its protagonists. By modelling a form of expertise premised in intimate involvement with specific environments, permaculture goes still further, seeking to dislodge a pervasive knowledge politics that situates some as knowers and innovators, and others as passive recipients. This grounds human rights in an ethos of caring for the "more-than-human" world and places emphasis on a corollary right as part of food justice, increasingly being demanded "from below": the right to know.
In this policy intervention, we recount the process of producing a policy briefing targeting researchers and practitioners who use drones in biodiversity conservation. We use the writing process as a ...springboard to think through the ways that interdisciplinary exchange has and might further inform the ethical use of new technologies, such as drones. This approach is vital, we argue, because while drones may be deployed as tools that enable or empower forest, wildlife or habitat monitoring practices, so too can they be variously disruptive, repurposed and/or exceed these applications in significant ways. From questions of surveillance and capture, data ownership and security, to noise disruption, drone use requires careful and critical reflection, particularly in sensitive contexts. Yet, interdisciplinary exchange attentive to the ethical, social and experiential dimensions of drone use remains patchy and thin. To this end, this intervention reflects on the process of a group of scholars from ecological, environmental and social science backgrounds coming together in an interdisciplinary project grappling with diverse issues around responsible conservation drone use. After recounting our methodology, including the surprises and learning that emerged in practice, we contextualise the key themes we chose to foreground in our published policy briefing. We conclude by connecting our collaboration with wider actions and energies in the context of existing (conservation) drone policy and practice, while underscoring our contributions to existing work.
Quantifying resilience of socio-ecological systems (SES) can be invaluable to delineate management strategies of natural resources and aid the resolution of socio-environmental conflicts. However, ...resilience is difficult to quantify and the factors contributing to it are often unknown. We provide a theoretical and conceptual framework to quantify resilience in a long-term context. Our approach uses elements from interdisciplinarity and network perspectives to establish links and causalities between social and ecological variables and resilience attributes. The evaluation and modeling of SES structure and function are established from the analysis of dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN). DBN models allow quantifying resilience through probabilities and offer a platform of interdisciplinary dialogue and an adaptive framework to address questions on ecosystem monitoring and management. The proposed DBN is tested in Monquentiva, a SES located in the high Andes of Colombia. We determined historical socio-ecological resilience from paleoecological evidence (palynological diversity, forest cover, fires, and precipitation) and social-economic factors (governance, social organization, and connectivity) between 1920 and 2019. We find that transformation processes in Monquentiva are mainly related to social change (e.g., social organization) and increased ecological diversity that in turn have fostered SES resilience between 1980 and 2019. The ability to predict the SES response over time and under cumulative, non-linear interactions across a complex ecosystem highlights the utility of DBNs for decision support and environmental management. We conclude with a series of management and policy-relevant applications of the DBN approach for SES resilience assessment.
Since the mid-1990s, appeals to "Madre Tierra" Mother Earth have united activists and campesino peasant networks globally as part of political claims of food sovereignty and agrarian rights. ...Positioning this paper as a contribution to feminist theory, here I explore what Madre Tierra does in political-aesthetic terms, specifically within situated struggles in Central America. Seen from (white) eco-feminist perspectives, the rise of Madre Tierra could be seen to perform new kinds of exclusions: in this resonant figure diverse indigenous cosmologies seem to collapse; agrarian struggles are rendered "feminine," and both women and land-workers are placed in the realm of nature-which is to say, far from meaning-making. However, when the everyday practices of agrarian activism are thought through Latinx and Chicanx theories of queer kinship and black womanism, a more radical, and specifically decolonial, vision emerges. Through ethnographic vignettes I illustrate the ways that masculinity/femininity, nature/culture, and the relationships between them are being reworked.
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