This article examines the issue of deforestation on Sierra Leone's Freetown Peninsula, specifically analysing the gap that exists between the rhetoric surrounding the problem of deforestation and the subsequent policies and projects that are implemented to address it. It is argued in this paper that this gap can be better understood by examining how different actors involved in policy and projects interact over the issue of deforestation. Such an examination reveals how these actors produce discourses of blame towards poorer, politically weaker groups, which ultimately results in deforestation 'solutions' that intervene into their lives. These prescriptions of blame and subsequent solutions for deforestation are negotiated through a combination of local realities, which includes the occurrence of deforestation, and global influences such as development discourses and interventions. The analysis here reflects a political ecology framework that also draws from post-structuralist insights and reveals how underlying discourses, actions and actors across a broad political, social and economic spectrum ultimately play a role in influencing the causes, perceptions and solutions relating to deforestation.Keywords: Deforestation, Political Ecology, Freetown, Discourses, Development, Sierra Leone, Africa
Wildlife is persisting in urban areas of Australia even though white settler colonialism has resulted in the large-scale destruction of forested landscapes. While many bird species are in decline, the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo has found emergent opportunities for flourishing within the built environment. Cockatoos are actively generating relationally constituted spaces, drawing humans into urban ecosystems that are 'more-than-human' places, abundant and lively multispecies communities. Beginning in 2011, yellow tags attached to the wings of cockatoos, along with a smart-phone app and a Facebook page, have enabled scientists to collect data about these birds' movements. These tracking technologies were quickly co-opted by an emergent public for their own purposes, including speculating about the personalities, relationships, intentions, and desires of individual birds. Interspecies friendships formed between humans and birds-involving shared understandings, emotional resonances, ongoing social exchanges, and utilitarian arrangements. We used the wingtags and the associated digital infrastructure as an opportunity to experiment with new modes of collaborative research and teaching in multispecies ethnography. Bringing together a flock of academics and students, we explored emergent social spaces involving people and birds. While many participants who fed the birds worried that they would become tame, we found multispecies flocks were fleeting associations where wild and unruly behaviours redoubled as people offered up food. We found that wildness emerged in
This paper explores how social networks and bonds within and across organisations shape disaster operations and strategies. Local government disaster training exercises serve as a window through which to view these relations, and 'social capital' is used as an analytic for making sense of the human relations at the core of disaster management operations. These elements help to expose and substantiate the often intangible relations that compose the culture that exists, and that is shaped by preparations for disasters. The study reveals how this social capital has been generated through personal interactions, which are shared among disaster managers across different organisations and across 'levels' within those organisations. Recognition of these 'group resources' has significant implications for disaster management in which conducive social relations have become paramount. The paper concludes that socio-cultural relations, as well as a people-centred approach to preparations, appear to be effective means of readying for, and ultimately responding to, disasters.
In this paper, we argue that the role of the underground has been discursively absent from contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. We build on recent geographical scholarship that has challenged “surface bias” and call for geographical debate to go deeper into the third dimension; to explore the Subterranean Anthropocene; to embrace volume ontologies. We present three core arguments. (1) The Anthropocene is about our future underground, a geological epoch signifier where stratigraphic signatures will be etched in future rocks. This requires us to critically reflect on how our human identity and practice is entangled with rock stratum, both now and in the future. (2) The Anthropocene is about our subterranean past. It involves the emergence of capitalisation and industrialisation – two major driving forces of epochal change – that are predicated on new technologies that redefine the underground as an epistemological space for economic, social and political calculation. (3) We propose that the Anthropocene is about our current sub‐surface relations. That the underground matters in contemporary society as a resource, as a site of urban infrastructure, as a source of soils for agriculture and as a dump for waste, among many other uses. However, this important protagonist role in society, and hence the Anthropocene, is still somewhat obscured. There is therefore a need for new metaphorical tropes to bring the underground into contemporary environmental discourses. As such, we conclude, subterranean spaces should become more prominent epistemic, physical, technical and conceptual locations for geographical exploration and political geo‐ecological framings.
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