The Sunshine Coast of southern British Columbia, Canada, is extensively populated by Himalayan blackberries ( Rubus armeniacus ), a species introduced to North America in the late nineteenth century. In their coexistence with other species, humans often categorize nonhuman life forms as either beneficial or detrimental. Yet the Himalayan blackberry challenges this binary classification: while widely recognized as an invasive species that threatens local biodiversity, it also serves as a valuable source of food for birds, mammals, and humans. Moreover, the city of Powell River celebrates this plant as a local emblem through its annual Blackberry Festival. At the same time, the city is engaged in a public debate about renaming itself, due to the controversial legacy of Israel Wood Powell, British Columbia's first Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who the city is named after. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this paper examines three human–blackberry entanglements, representing contrasting approaches to handling multispecies relations that are embedded within the legacies of settler colonialism and its extractive infrastructures. Conceptualizing present-day Powell River as the “Powell River Patch”, i.e., the outcome of imperial and industrial infrastructures, the analysis brings the concept of invasive life into conversation with the theory of ontological security. In doing so, the paper argues for understanding multispecies cohabitation not only as an ecological condition but also as a critical lens for examining contemporary political and societal challenges in the Anthropocene.
A shift is occurring in how the global environmental community understands and talks about rangelands. Long seen as economically unproductive and environmentally degraded environments, rangelands are now being recast as sources of untapped ecological benefit and climate optimism. This is due to growing awareness of the significant contributions rangelands make to biological diversity, carbon sequestration, and nature-based economies worldwide. In this article, we argue that digital technologies and the data they produce are contributing significantly to shifting narratives about rangelands. The rapid advancement of digital technologies have rendered rangelands legible in new ways, transforming rangelands into data that can be acted on to both understand and, purportedly, help transform environmental crises. We identify six areas where digital tools are increasingly applied in rangelands: (1) livestock monitoring and management; (2) livestock market access and information; (3) property and asset monitoring and management; (4) ecological monitoring and management; (5) payments for ecosystem services; and (6) disaster preparedness and management. We then reveal the wider effects of this trend, demonstrating how datafication and smartification contribute to making rangelands more governable, commodifiable, and useful for the global environmental community. Despite the potential benefits and opportunities this shift poses for rangeland users, not all groups are empowered equally by the making of digital rangelands. We caution that as digital technologies rework understandings of what and who rangelands are for, how they should be managed and what purpose they should serve, there is a risk that existing rangeland users and ways of using, managing, and governing rangelands will be marginalised and replaced. Our analysis and argument are developed through a qualitative case study of rangelands in Kenya and informed by the websites and social media pages of 65 organisations in Kenya's rangelands who use digital technologies.
The Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative was launched in 2007 as a Pan-African initiative to plant a belt of trees stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The project aims to restore 100 million hectares of land and create 10 million jobs by 2030. However, implementation is far behind schedule due to political instability, delayed funding, fragmented governance, and other challenges. This paper examines the politics of GGW implementation in Ethiopia, focusing on how the initiative's original “green belt” vision has evolved in practice. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in the Tigray region in 2024 and 2025, we analyse how the GGW vision has been translated into locally specific forms of landscape restoration. While Ethiopia's long history of community-based land management provides favourable conditions for the initiative, the recent war and budgetary issues have severely impacted its implementation. Using the concept of “travelling models”, we demonstrate that, in practice, the GGW initiative is not a coherent policy package, but rather the product of multiple, locally adapted modifications. This includes the rebranding of other existing land management projects as GGW activities to meet donor expectations and transforming the original green vision into a patchwork of restoration projects. Tigray's experience exemplifies how global environmental models are adapted, challenged, and reimagined at the local level.
This article examines the introduction of trout from the northern hemisphere as part of the colonial ordering of Argentine Patagonia. Since 1904, trout have been mobilized not simply as ecological interventions but as tools of state-building that have reshaped rivers and lakes and contributed to the displacement of indigenous peoples. Stocking programs initially provided strategic food during border conflicts with Chile and later anchored projects that aimed to modernize and ‘whiten’ the Argentine nation, through elite tourism and conservation initiatives such as the establishment of Nahuel Huapi National Park in 1934. We argue that these practices reinforced a mode of life that cast Mapuche-Chewelche indigenous communities as outsiders to the nation. Through episodes spanning the so-called “Conquest of the Desert” (1878–1885) to recent disputes over Lago del Desierto, we show how human–trout relations give material form to ongoing asymmetries of power, belonging, and dispossession. By treating trout as agents of coloniality the article demonstrates how ecological change has been inseparable from strengthening national borders, practices of exclusion and the enduring erasure of indigenous sovereignty in Patagonia since the region's military conquest.
This article explores the knowledge controversies within regenerative agriculture in Norway, and how farmers navigate this emerging field based on interviews and participant observations throughout four growing seasons. We employ Thomas Kuhn's classic concept of paradigm shifts and Thomas Gieryn's cultural boundaries of science to analyse the agronomic foundations farmers challenge, the scientific fields they combine, and the social barriers they bridge. Regenerative farmers encountered what we coin the microbial anomaly: knowledge about microbes and natural processes that do not fit within the current agronomic paradigm. It triggered a search for knowledge beyond what is usually included in agricultural science and led farmers to apply knowledge that is accepted within the scientific community but has failed to reach them, and to adopt practices that traditional experts deem unscientific but that experience shows can be useful. Farmers called for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that goes beyond the established cultural boundaries of contemporary agronomy, which has shown to limit both knowledge and future imaginaries that are fundamental to agricultural transformation. The emerging paradigm shift provides novel opportunities for farmer-led research that combines science with local knowledge, and can have significant scientific, political and societal implications. However, the structural support for an agronomy that foregrounds microbially mediated plant nutrition and health, and the potential futures it enables, remains marginal. Whether a large-scale agronomic paradigm shift is underway, or whether the microbial anomaly is successfully assimilated into the status quo depends not only on scientific and agronomic credibility contests. They depend on which, and whose, visions of the future are invested in. At stake are farmer livelihoods and autonomy over how to grow food, and whether agriculture shifts from driving environmental degeneration to its regeneration.
Widespread juridical progress has been made across Latin America in favour of Indigenous and local communities’ participation in resource governance. Nevertheless, existing mechanisms have often proved to be ineffective, contradictory or even complicit in perpetuating extractive violence and territorial dispossession. In this context, Ecuador has witnessed a surge in litigation initiated by Indigenous communities opposing extractive projects and challenging the limits of state-led consultation. This paper explores practices of ontological translation deployed by activists in the context of litigations over Indigenous territories and prior consultation, focusing on the case of Waorani of Pastaza v. Ecuadorian state . Drawing on ethnographic research and court documents, I analyse the strategies mobilised by the Resistencia Waorani to contest the auctioning of a new oil block in the Ecuadorian Amazon and to challenge the legitimacy of institutionalised mechanisms of prior consultation. I argue that through the mobilisation of counter-mapping, personal testimonies, chants, and anthropological accounts, activists engaged in mediated acts of ontological translation that sought to render wao öme - Waorani territory - legible within legal proceedings without fully subsuming it to state territorial logics. The case illustrates how courts can function as sites of partial and negotiated onto-epistemic opening, in which relational understandings of territory gain recognition. It also sheds light on the ways Indigenous organisations and activists strategically utilise litigation and judicial instruments to advocate for a plurinational state. By tracing these constrained openings, the article contributes to debates on the judicialisation of Indigenous struggles and the use of law as a strategic terrain for advancing decolonial environmental justice, particularly within a context where extractivist development continues to be prioritised by the state.
The archetype of rot was conspicuous in the scientific, governmental, and popular imagination of the 1880–1940 period. On plantations, efforts to eradicate the continuous emergence of fungal rot were confounded by the metabolizing capacity of mycelial webs to transform the plantation into the longer continuities of life's intelligence. In this essay, we understand plantations as spaces of multi-species “thinking,” and we present the drive for fungicidal toxification not as a fix or cure, but as the articulation of an “unthought known,” in Christopher Bollas's sense, of ecological ungovernability – a shadow of tacit, and not explicit knowledge – that arose out of the global plantation system. By examining fungal rots across the Caribbean and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the efforts to both understand and eradicate fungal proliferation through chemical governance, this essay is interested in forms of intelligence and resistance beyond the scope of human actors alone, and in the anxieties and strategies of colonialist rule that developed as continuous counterinsurgency. We propose that fungi, as a major cause of plantation rots, can be studied as thinking historical actors, and as a haunt of the colonial imagination.
An examination of social figures reveals that ecological relationships remain largely overlooked in sociological theorizing. This article introduces the gardener as an ecological social figure that brings nature, materiality, and social relations into an analytical frame. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Zygmunt Bauman, Friedrich Hayek, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Donna Haraway, I trace how the gardener figures different ways of organizing human—nature relations from modernity to late- and postmodernity. In modern accounts, Rousseau and Bauman associate the gardener with education, planning, classification, and control, but in distinct ways. Rousseau figures the educator as a gardener who nurtures children's natural development, while Bauman conceptualizes the modern state as a gardener that cultivates social order through the exclusion and normalization of “weeds.” While the gardener remains largely a metaphorical figure in modern and late-modern accounts, Tsing and Haraway ground the figure in engagements with the materiality of the garden. Hayek, Tsing, and Haraway reconfigure the figure by foregrounding limited human control and nonhuman agency, with Tsing and Haraway emphasizing multispecies relations of care, gathering, and composting. Yet this reconfiguration does not constitute a straightforward historical movement from domination to care. Rather, late- and postmodern figurations remain entangled with earlier logics: Hayek retains control through institutional governance, Tsing reintroduces selection and eradication when invasive species threaten multispecies life, and Haraway retains a central role for human actors and biopolitical regulation. The gardener provides a heuristic for examining the coexistence and negotiation of competing logics of cultivation, control, care, autonomy, selection, and ecological interdependence. Drawing on Auerbach's concept of figura , I argue that social figures need not be restricted to human subjects but can encompass nonhuman beings, materialities, and ecological processes. The gardener thereby opens a post-anthropocentric perspective on social relations while revealing the persistent tensions through which contemporary human–nature relations are organized.
In order to live well together on a damaged planet, more-than-human care scholarship argues for mutual care and collaboration between humans and non-humans for common survival. Research in this area accordingly emphasizes the life-affirming dimensions of mutual care relationships, paying comparatively little attention to acts of forceful eradication, killing, and destruction except as harms to be minimized. The Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras is a network of activists who manually eradicate eucalyptus and acacia in the Galician monte , located in the northwest of Spain, in pursuit of a more diverse and interdependent more-than-human community. Through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, this article examines the situated and historically contingent dynamics by which the Brigadas’ practices of destruction are produced as care. Through ethnographic research in two field sites (the Galician villages of Froxán and Lentille), we explore how a vanguard vision of destruction as care embeds notions of greater collective autonomy and Galician independence from the Spanish state while aiming to restore more-than-human interdependencies. This nascent imaginary is constructed through historical accounts, political subjectivities, and diverse forms of knowledge production; standing in opposition to dominant forestry management regimes. The lens of sociotechnical imaginaries allows us to trace how particular practices are produced as care in historically, politically, and geographically situated ways. The article contributes to more-than-human care scholarship by approaching practices of care as contextually-bound products of collective imagination rather than defined by normative prescriptions of what care is and should be, thus opening pathways to engage with actions that are not self-evidently care-ful.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely used for biodiversity conservation through spatially defined zones that regulate human activity. While contemporary practices increasingly emphasise flexible, participatory, and adaptive governance, they continue to rely on area-based approaches that seek to regulate ecological processes through territorial management. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in southern India, the paper examines how conservation is experienced and operationalised in marine environments where species move, fishing practices shift, and conservation authority extends beyond formally demarcated boundaries. Focusing on interactions between humpback dolphins, artisanal fishers, and state actors, the paper shows how dolphin depredation reorganises fishing locations, gear use and temporal rhythms, redistributing fishing effort across the seascape. Situating these interactions within broader transformations in fishing technology and ecological decline, it further demonstrates how state actors selectively prioritise species protection through surveillance and negotiated enforcement. The paper argues that marine conservation territories are produced not solely through fixed spatial exclusion, but through the interaction of dolphin mobility, fisher adaptations and governance practices, including territorial restrictions, species-based legal protections, surveillance practices, and negotiated enforcement. Conservation effects, therefore, emerge beyond the protected area boundaries through the interaction of ecological processes and governance practices rather than territorial regulation alone. In doing so, the paper reconceptualises MPAs as dynamic conservation spaces continually produced through multispecies interactions and everyday governance.
This article develops a fractal paradigm of water as an ontological and analytical framework for rethinking water beyond the modernist conception of H 2 O as an atomistic and ontologically determinate substance. Drawing on the philosophy of movement and new materialist thought which critique ontological atomism and instead emphasise motion, change, and indeterminacy, the article proposes understanding water primarily through its fractal motion: water-as-motion . Building on the mathematical origins of fractals and their grounding in water-related forms (such as waves, turbulence, coastlines, and river meanders), the article expands the notion of the fractal into a broader conceptual paradigm for philosophies and geographies of water – one that arises from water's own materiality rather than being imposed upon it. The paper develops four “fractal curves” as conceptual openings. First, it argues that fractal water redirects analysis toward decentered scalar voluminosity , bridging debates on non-hierarchical scaling and decentered ontologies by showing how water emerges through intra-scalar, self-similar motion. Second, it conceptualises relationality as immanent to an ontology of motion and change: water-as-motion is relational to itself, but also to other matter and life forms, through continuous and collective transformation. Third, it rethinks order and efficiency through the notion of orderly chaos : a form of biophysical order that emerges not from linear causality but from indeterminate, yet metastable self-organisation. Finally, it frames fractal repetition as a source of vitality, suggesting that water's finite materiality becomes life-generative through the temporal and spatial cycles of fractal repetition.
Under climate change, heatwaves are increasing in frequency, duration and intensity, placing hundreds of millions of workers at risk of impacts to health and livelihoods. The human impact of climate-linked heatwaves is thus a topic of growing academic and policy concern. Nevertheless, assessments and responses to heatwave risk are shaped by data and methodological challenges. Analysis of heat stress risk traditionally relies on a combination of intensive laboratory studies and secondary data, leading to a predominance of spatial frames over social ones, such as working livelihoods, despite these being known to shape heat exposure. Responding to this challenge, this paper employs a novel methodology, utilising an array of 20 simultaneous CORE thermal sensor devices in combination with integrated qualitative and quantitative methods, to understand heat stress vulnerability through the frame of industrial labour in global supply chains. This paper draws on data generated in the Cambodian garment industry: a dominant economic sector in a country highly vulnerable to heat stress. This is thus a case study with major relevance to the wider landscape of global work. The garment industry is one of the world's most polluting and carbon intensive industries, as well as one of its biggest employers, with an estimated 70 million garment workers worldwide. Reflecting growing interest in sustainability in garment supply chains, industrial decarbonisation programs are increasingly prevalent and well-funded in the global industry. Yet these initiatives focus overwhelmingly on carbon mitigation within the primary supply chain, leaving the impact of climate change on garment sector workers largely absent from policy in the sector. Drawing on 135,701 minutes of thermal data, or 75 hours for each of the 20 workers participating, this paper presents one of the first bodies of scientific data on heat stress vulnerability amongst garment workers, including formal, informal and piece rate work within the sector.
This theme issue introduces the concept of capitalogenic flows to explain how ‘fragile landscapes’ are forged across , and signify, the Middle East through infrastructures of extraction, militarisation and global supply chains. Drawing on critical political ecology and Capitalocene scholarship, we show that environmental degradation in the region is not inherent but produced through historically specific circuits and spatialisations of capital. In this sense, capitalogenic flows reveal the metabolic dimension of capital accumulation, where the circulation of commodities is inseparable from the circulation of toxicity, waste and ecological degradation. A capitalogenic perspective shifts attention from discrete sites of extraction to the circulatory relations through which value, devaluation and contamination are co-produced and unevenly spatialised. The contributions trace how such flows circulate and settle across Lebanon, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Tunisia through ethnographically grounded studies of petro-chemical pollution, contaminated hydrological flows, agricultural runoff, waste infrastructures and surplus commodities. In doing so, the issue challenges Orientalist narratives that frame the Middle East as inherently fragile, instead situating emplaced socio-ecological degradation within wider circuits of global capital accumulation.
Conflicts over free-roaming cats are often presented as technical disputes about management tools. This article argues that they are rooted in substantial disagreements about cats, territories, and obligations while routed through a governance apparatus that is not designed to host them. Drawing on scholarship in political ecology, STS, environmental humanities, and human–animal studies, and informed by ongoing research in the Canary Islands, we reread cat governance as a territorial and relational problem: urban colonies, peri-urban margins, working rural landscapes, or conservation hotspots enact different cats and different claims to belonging, harm, and care. We show how dominant approaches—whether eradication or “consensual coexistence”—frequently operate through a post-political logic that narrows legitimate disagreement, treats dissent as a deficit to be corrected, and leaves the killability of certain animals as an unspoken underside of governance. To move beyond this impasse, we develop a conceptual vocabulary for multispecies governance beyond post-politics, centered on agonistic coexistence and non-eliminatory normativity. Rather than promising harmony, it makes lethal measures explicit and contestable, holds together incompatible goods (welfare, biodiversity, neighborly order, and rural livelihoods), and treats human-cat conflicts as symptoms of territorial plurality rather than failures of compliance. Cats thereby become a lens for analyzing how governance produces nature-in-space and for developing principles that can travel to other contested multispecies relations.
This paper examines how competing and contested understandings of nature and human-nature relations shape approaches to pewen ( Araucaria araucana ) conservation in Chile. Drawing on fieldwork observations, interviews, and analysis of conservation debates, three distinct perspectives are explored: the ecologists’, geneticists’, and the Pewenche approach. The ecologists’ approach, aligned with neoprotectionist conservation, views nature as separate from humans and advocates for protected areas to exclude human activities. The geneticists’ approach, reflecting new conservation ideas, embraces human intervention through ex-situ conservation and assisted migration, supported by the forest industry. The Pewenche approach, grounded in Indigenous relational ontologies, sees humans and pewen as entangled, focusing on broader socioeconomic and governance issues. These divergent perspectives lead to conflicting conservation strategies, with the ecologists’ approach dominating policy discussions whilst disregarding Indigenous rights and knowledge. The geneticists’ approach is advancing practical interventions through industry partnerships. Meanwhile, the Pewenche perspective, despite its historical relevance to the species, remains marginalised. This research illustrates how ontological understandings of nature influence conservation practices and reinforce power inequalities, particularly impacting Indigenous communities. It argues for the importance of recognising diverse nature ontologies in crafting more equitable and effective conservation policies.
This article examines how irrigated agribusiness interests in western Bahia, Brazil, are capturing the infrastructure of water governance itself — the basin committees, digital monitoring platforms, and fee structures through which water becomes visible and governable. Drawing on Gramscian theories of hegemony and James Scott's analysis of state legibility, we develop the concept of ‘legibility grabs’ to describe how dominant actors appropriate not only resources but the institutional mechanisms that render those resources objects of governance. Based on documentary analysis and 48 interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2024–2025, we demonstrate how agribusiness has waged wars of position within participatory institutions, achieving disproportionate representation through institutional multiplication, positioning industry-produced data as authoritative through new digital platforms, and configuring water use fees to subsidize rather than constrain irrigation. A massive mobilization in 2017, in which local communities broke into a large-scale farm and destroyed irrigation equipment, followed by thousands protesting decades of regulatory inaction, forced the creation of governance instruments that are now themselves subject to capture. The analysis contributes to debates on water grabbing, digital environmental governance, and the state in political ecology, demonstrating how control over what the state sees shapes whose interests it serves.
This article examines how rural youth in the Arenal River, Colombia are forging modes of arraigo [rootedness] through care practices amidst overlapping violences. Through action-research with young people engaged in community-tourism, we explore how care for the river enacts an ethico-political practice that confronts what we term ‘water violences’: the accumulated effects of the modern/colonial order materialized in hydroextractivism, armed conflict, and mass tourism. Engaging with an interdisciplinary framework that draws on Latin American decolonial and feminist thought, alongside care scholarship and political ecology, we introduce the notion of ‘cracks of care’ to address how everyday practices and relationality open spaces of resistance and river-making. These cracks reveal emergent subjective formations among rural youth who articulate their connection to the river through living arraigo from a situated understanding of care. By learning to live with —rather than simply in— the river, youth are actively resignifying and recomposing their lifeways and their river-worlds, negotiating the present and afterlives of water violences while crafting alternative territorial imaginaries. Our analysis shows how cracks of care unfold as an entanglement of practices, emotions, memories, and stories, that expand existing understandings of river-worlds, care, violence, and rural youth subjectivities in contexts of multifarious crisis.
The ongoing expansion of renewable energy goes hand in hand with the opening of new commodity frontiers. While academic literature has historically focused on extractivism enabled by (post-)colonial states in the Global South, the growth of renewables entails a reshoring of these frontiers to the Global North. Using Belgium as case study, we develop two arguments on these emerging manifestations of the relationship between the state and the commodity frontier: (a) we situate wind as a natural resource within a broader complex of entangled “innovative” commodities, and (b) we draw on Jessop's strategic-relational approach to unpack the varied ways state power is exerted in frontier-making. Belgium was an early adopter of offshore windfarms. By 2020, it had the second highest installed offshore wind energy capacity per capita in the world, meeting approximately 10% of its electricity demand. We show how the Belgian offshore frontier got its distinctive form through state interventions in the establishment of control over offshore wind resources and the entangled commodification of green electricity and technical know-how. Our analysis highlights marine spatial planning and the expansion of the electricity grid as key manifestations of the state's territorial power, illustrating the interplay between its discursive, legal-institutional, and infrastructural dimensions. Throughout the analysis, we emphasise that the state is not a singular, unified actor; rather, its interventions emerge from negotiations among diverse social actors exerting power through the state. The Belgian frontier-making process has been contingent on the opportunities created by the convergence of environmental sustainability and economic innovation agendas, whose alignment required careful mediation to sustain broad support for the transformation of marine territory.
Whether the future offers the arrival of environmental catastrophe or the worsening of an already existing climate crisis, articulations of (post)apocalyptic environmentalism rely on straight time. In the discourses of climate change, straight temporalities unfold linearly, working hard to universalise the future and place the world along a singular timeline. Sticking with moments of uncertainty and frustration, this article examines how marginal futures disrupt and unsettle the dominance of (post)apocalyptic environmentalism. Drawing from 20 speculative arts interviews undertaken with Extinction Rebellion UK, I show that activists anticipate a future otherwise, even as they cannot fully articulate what such a future would look like. The future arises here not as located out there ahead, but as a surplus that is affective and anticipatory.
This article examines the suspension of the Yucat & aacute;n Solar PV park, a 70 MW utility-scale project halted through a grassroots legal injunction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Yucat & aacute;n, the study situates the project within Mexico's hydrocarbon legacies, uneven geographies of electricity provision, and histories of infrastructural neglect. Conceptually, the paper approaches infrastructure as a spatiotemporal and affective entanglement, emphasizing how promises, absences, and suspension reshape present and future geographies. The analysis unfolds across four dimensions: the embedding of solar infrastructure within existing hydrocarbon energy landscapes framed by promises of clean energy transition; the everyday labor of retrofitting neglect and infrastructural absence; the displacement of responsibility through solar siting and uneven benefit distribution; and the material and affective afterlives of suspension. The article argues that infrastructures exert political power beyond their operational life. The case demonstrates how suspended solar infrastructure reconfigures land, labor, socio-ecological relations, and future expectations even in the absence of energy production. In doing so, the paper contributes to critical scholarship on energy transitions and infrastructure studies by foregrounding infrastructural incompletion as a constitutive condition through which low-carbon infrastructures are experienced, governed, and contested.
