Rupture and the reimagining of nature-society

Presenting author:Jennifer Atchison (University of Wollongong)

The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire disaster witnessed unprecedented wildlife death. A key component of the response was killing invasive life that might opportunistically colonise freshly burnt landscapes or prey on what survived. This paper considers the notion of disaster as opportunity in order to discuss the ontological politics of governing invasive life during and after disaster.

Our focus is twofold: the re-articulation of power over invasive life during disaster reproducing its abjection, and the colonial context in which disaster responses occur. We present new empirical analysis of responses to invasive life during and after the bushfires; through media discourse, we trace the moral geographies of opportunity after fire and the moral status of different species. Then, taking seriously Indigenous experiences, we ask how invasive life might also be understood as other than abject. Contemplating alternative possibilities for multispecies relating we ask: can humans instead make kin with invasive life, as part of Country? Acknowledging these experiences recognises that responses to invasive species and disaster alike are both entangled in the colonial project but that the opportunities of disaster might be otherwise imagined, providing new possibilities for decolonising invasive species governance, and ushering in new obligations and responsibilities.

Presenting author: Raven Cretney (University of Waikato)

Other author: Sylvia Nissen (Lincoln University)

The environmental movement is no stranger to claims of emergency, which have long been utilised to push for bolder and faster action on issues like climate change. However, a growing movement for climate emergency declarations has taken the world by storm, leading to numerous declarations by local and national governments. Often articulated in the absence of defined rupture, climate emergency declarations challenge dominant understandings of the temporal and spatial boundaries of emergency. Emergency also takes multiple forms in its articulation by activists, communities and the state, raising important questions around the 'edges' of emergency in an increasingly crisis-prone landscape.

Our paper explores the emergent space formed by Aotearoa New Zealand's climate emergency declaration in December 2020. Drawing on document analysis of parliamentary debates, media sources and publicly available social media posts, we examine how the declaration was politically constructed by the state and public, and explore the multiple, and at times conflicting, ways in which emergency claims are informing understandings of climate action and policy.

Presenting author: Beck Pearse (Australian National University)

Australia's coal boom has peaked, but the eastern seaboard is littered with 'zombie' coal mine proposals. NSW alone contains 23 new coal mines and extension proposals under review in the planning department's project-by-project assessment regime. Coal mines create the risk of ruptured groundwater systems, and therefore threats to agricultural property. Hydraulic implications of the coal boom for farming is incredibly salient in rural Australia. Underground water table risks in particular, have attracted recognition from public authorities over the last decade. 

This paper asks, how have the risks of hydraulic ruptures from the coal boom been managed by the Australian state? In order to make sense of the situation, I begin with key tenets of critical state theory: that the capital-nature contradiction creates polyvalent  strategic problems for state institutions (Hay 1996); that states are a process, not a thing (O'Connor 1998); and that public authority is always in the making (Lund 2016). I analyse the 2013 'water trigger' amendment to the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. This regulatory shift elevated scientific authority in the assessment of coal and gas mine proposals, and in doing so operated as form of recognition and negotiation for agricultural property holders. However, scientific rationality ultimately fails to make cumulative water table risks an overriding priority for the state. An effective limit on coal capital in line with both water and climate science implies that a deeper set of changes to public authority and property rights will be needed. 

Presenting author: Rupert Legg (University of Technology, Sydney)

Living on contaminated land is a disruptive experience that has adverse effects on residents' mental health and wellbeing. This connection between place and health has received considerable academic attention recently, however, there has been far less investigation of how residents' wellbeing may, in turn, shape place.

This research seeks to address this by drawing on interviews with residents living around sites contaminated by per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in New South Wales. PFAS are a group of chemicals that are considered potentially carcinogenic and were historically used in firefighting foams. Sites where such foams were used heavily, such as Australian Defence Force bases, now have the potential to cause harm to those living in close proximity. Particular focus is placed on examining how the psychological trauma and distress associated with living near the contamination permeates beyond the contaminated site to become entrenched in other places at different scales, such as the body, home and local environment. Ultimately, it is proposed that these other places become sources of distress on their own and require just as much attention in addressing adverse psychological effects as the physical contamination itself.

Presenting author: Clare Mouat (University of Western Australia)

Other authors: Linda Wilson (University of Western Australia), Andrew Morcom (Director, AC8 Apiaries Pty. Ltd.) 

From folklore to post-industrial times, bees and beekeeping have revealed the wisdom and weaknesses of human-nature conditions and aspirations by acting as boundary objects for humanity's conceptual relationship with nature.

This paper focuses on the (hi)stories of bees and beekeeping in contemporary times and landscapes to explore the evolving public paradigms and narratives.  A thematic analysis (after Braun and Clarke) draws from a range of media (fiction, popular media, policy, interviews, and scholarship) to reveal overarching narratives across various scales and settings andexamine how they reflect and shape dominant paradigms.

We expose how binary antagonisms in conventional policy and scholarship set species against species and either prioritise or exclude humanity (as in capitalist development/conservation narratives). We rupture these systemic and species binary narratives to recast humanity-nature relationships through recognising already-existing alternatives and foresight. Specifically, we witness regenerative stewardship practices of beekeeping in Western Australia's multifunctional landscapes that are already shaped by 'contaminated diversity' (Tsing).

This approach invokes recalibrating institutional resource management regimes using a naturecultural ethos (Puig de la Bellacasa) of care-full stewardship and commoning. Such rupture and recalibration draws on international best practice (IPBES) and promotes regenerative environmental stewardship through sustainable livelihoods in Western Australia and beyond.

Presenting author: Sarah Milne (Australian National University)

Other authors: Sango Mahanty (Australian National University), Carolyn Hendriks (Australian National University)

The analytic of "rupture" can help to explore dramatic and cascading socio-ecological transformations and their consequences. The concept was initially used to study processes of radical structural/institutional change, wrought by colonisation and conflict (Lund 2016). Mahanty and Milne's work in Southeast Asia then took the rupture concept to the socio-ecological realm, as a lens through which the temporal, spatial and generative dimensions of dramatic change processes could be investigated (Mahanty et al, forthcoming).

Now we extend these ideas to the Australian context to interpret and navigate contemporary disruptions in nature-society, such as those caused by the 2019-2020 bushfires. Our conceptualisation shows three things. First, that our current "crises" have not come out of nowhere: they are products of cumulative, cross-scalar and power-laden processes of extraction and enclosure, among other things. Second, we argue that rupture can produce new dynamics between government and communities, with emergent possibilities. Third, as critical scholars suggest, socio-ecological disruption can also be generative, with crises giving rise to new forms of agency and hope. With these three things in play, we explore possibilities to re-imagine nature-society relations, in ways that are sensitive to multiple knowledges and ways of belonging.

Presenting author: Carina Wyborn (Australian National University)

Other authors: Lorrae van Kerkhoff (Australian National University) , Sumithri Venketasubramanian, (Australian National University) 

In the summer of 2018-2019, three 'fish kill' events led to the death of millions of fish in the Darling River, a visceral rupture of a river pushed beyond the limits of ecological health. The events were caused by insufficient river flows, attributed to drought, excessive water diversions, and government mismanagement. Yet since this dramatic event, little has changed in the governance arrangements that contributed to it.

We argue that this event was in the making since Federation, emerging from struggles between consumptive use and hydro-ecological health that have transformed the socionatures of the Basin (Jackson and Head 2020). The broad arch of this contestation remains relatively stable and despite successive signs of rupture, the default position is to continue to look to the state to address the problem. Examining the temporality of the fish kills shapes how we conceptualise agency, state responsibility, and the politics of rupture. While these events can build legitimacy for change, but when imaginaries of rupture perpetuate existing contestation, change is rarely swift and decisive. Turning to the future, the immediate response to the fish kills to highlights how diverse actors frame response-ability to govern change shedding light on emerging antipolitical narratives that may destabilise Basin politics.