The Future of the Commons : Interfaces of Nature

The Future of the Commons: Interfaces of Nature and Culture towards a network and research platform at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) February 6-7, 2014 Room: MA796, 7th floor, Södertörn University main building Flemingsberg Organisation committee: Mark Bassin, Professor, History of Ideas, CBEES, Södertörn University Charlotte Bydler, Research leader, Cultural theory, CBEES, Södertörn University Monica Hammer, Research leader, Knowledge and Sustainability, CBEES, Södertörn University Anna Storm, Research Fellow, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University The interfaces of nature and culture define the ultimate life support for human well-being. They constitute a common; they are fundamentally shared. The commons of nature-culture are places which make up everyday language and poetics through landscape metaphors and other common topoi. But the commons have many senses, not all of them commonsensical or commonplace. The adjective common describes something that is in joint use or possession; public, shared alike. In the early 2000s the related legal concept “Creative Commons” was formed to promote – often noncommercial – sharing of otherwise copyright-protected material. The interface of nature and culture is the shared life of ecosystems and creativity alike. This workshop proposes to think about the past and present as well as the Future of the Commons to investigate individual and collective life conditions and cultural production. Here is a field where nature and culture cross: ecological boundaries and ecosystem changes will inevitably affect our established ways of sharing and producing. The human nature is double: both zoon and bios, combining bare life and social life, nature and culture. How to care for forests, waters, landscapes, and cultural creativity – as individuals but also as members of a human collective? Academia and popular culture constantly produce cosmologies where nature and culture combine in either peaceful or hostile ways. Nearly a century ago Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Cosmogenesis, 1922) described the sphere of human thought as the evolutionary “noosphere” alongside with the geosphere and the biosphere. In the 1970s, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis described the evolution of planetary life and ecology as a complex self-regulating global system. And now we talk about the global environmental changes introduced by the “anthropocene”; the present geological era that is for the first time marked by human dominance. The complex human-nature interactions form questions that do not fit traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Nature/Culture workshop The Future of the Commons cuts into an urgent research agenda, with a special interest in developing a platform for investigating these problems at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES). 1 Abstracts Invited speakers: Steven Hartman Professor of English Literature at Mid Sweden University, where he is active in the development of a new interdisciplinary EcoHumanities Hub. A founding member and present chair of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES, http://www.kth.se/abe/nies), he is also a long-term visiting researcher at the Center for Sustainable Development at Uppsala University and adjunct professor in the Human Ecodynamics Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. [email protected] So What Exactly is the Environmental Humanities?: A critical overview of what's at stake in this emerging field of study The increasing visibility of an emergent Environmental Humanities research field offers evidence of a sea change in the very structure and agendas of international research, while also holding the promise of reintegrating the humanities in the scientific production of knowledge. Such a development could have some significant implications within the policy sphere, as well as for the struggling humanities domain more generally. Yet in many ways the Environmental Humanities remains far from a settled field. Drawing upon examples from European and wider global contexts, this talk traces a number of initiatives over the past several years that have served in some measure to clarify this developing field of study. The talk also offers a critique of some of the productive, and at times unproductive, tensions among competing visions of this emergent field that need to be resolved before the Environmental Humanities can realize the impacts many scholars now hope the field may achieve. Marco Armiero Director of the Environmental Humanities Lab, The Royal Institute of Technology/KTH, Stockholm [email protected] Enclosing vs. Occupy. The struggles over commons and the making of the modern world My main idea would be to explore the tension between the attack against the commons (from the state, corporations, etcetera) and the expansion/defense of the commons. By and large the future of commons will depend on the results of this tension. I will do so through a series of historical case-studies on this tension. My idea is to use the following cases: - Hydropower vs. communities. A focus on the case of Vajont dam in 1963, - Gentrification vs. urban commons. Examples drawn from Naples, Barcelona, and New Orleans, - Contamination vs. empowerment. The struggles for environmental justice as struggles for new commons as well as against the enclosure of healthy spaces; discussing specific cases from the USA and Italy, including the garbage struggles in Naples. 2 Johan Colding Associate Professor, Theme leader, Urban social-ecological systems and globalization, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University [email protected] Urban Green Commons: Social-Ecological Stewardship of nature in cities The presentation will focus on recent findings on urban common property systems, dealing with urban green commons (UGCs) and elucidate their potential to manage cultural and biological diversity in cities. It will describe different examples of UGCs, i.e. collectively managed parks, community gardens, and allotment areas, with a focus on their institutional characteristics, their role in promoting diverse learning streams, environmental stewardship, and social-ecological memory. It will be argued that UGCs can facilitate cultural integration through civic participation in urban landmanagement and promote cognitive resilience building in urban settings. Julia Lajus Associate Professor, Department of History, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, & Center for Environmental and Technological History, European University at St. Petersburg [email protected] Experts, Fish and (Un)Predictability: An environmental history of resource use in the Arctic Waters Professor Lajus is an acknowledged scholar in environmental history and policy issues in the Arctic and Baltic region. Among her latest publications are: Lajus & Sörlin, 2013. Melting the Glacial Curtain: The soft politics of Scandinavian-Soviet networks in the geophysical field sciences between two Polar Years, 1932/33-1957/58. Journal of Historical Geography. Special issue “Science, Environment, and the New Arctic” (в печати). Lajus, Julia, “Expertise, governance and the marginalization of local users in fisheries: change in practices of description and the use of natural resources in the Russian Empire”, Environment and History. Panelists: Markus Balkenhol, Post-doc, Meertens Institute, Utrecht University [email protected] 'Polderen' – Making land, making the nation In the Netherlands, the idea of the Commons is inextricably linked with the so-called 'struggle against the water' that supposedly unites the Dutch nation. This idea of the Commons is most famously expressed in the concept 'polderen', which refers to both the irrigation of the land (imagined as 'reclaiming' land from the sea), and a political culture of consensus which, the story goes, emerged out of the necessity of co-operating on the irrigation system. However, if this is an idea of the Commons in the sense of something in joint use or a public good, access to it is not always shared evenly. For instance, discourses of autochthony (lit. being of 3 the soil) act as a means of symbolic exclusion, which in turn lead to the physical closure of national boundaries. Refugees, but also black Dutch citizens are subjected to these closures most rigorously. In this presentation I build on my earlier research on the cultural memory of slavery in the Netherlands, in which the trope of the soil, making land (the plantations, but also the canal houses in the city of Amsterdam), and belonging to the nation have been put up for discussion. Descendants of the enslaved, for example, articulate their claims to the nation by reference to their ancestors' labor of the land. I will link this to a new project entitled 'national geography', in which I will look at 'making land' as a trope in current Dutch nationalism. Based on these projects I present some preliminary thoughts on the coloniality of the Commons. Karina Barquet, Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Guest researcher, Dept. of Human Geography, Stockholm University [email protected] Redefining Nature, Redrawing Borders: Transboundary conservation in perspective Transboundary conservation is one of the latest initiatives within bioregional conservation initiatives, which attempt to link landscapes across jurisdictional borders. Transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) are consequently established along borders and their management is shared between two or more countries. Besides nature conservation, TBPAs have come to be considered as potential tools to achieve environmental security and improve interstate relations. The logic behind transboundary conservation is that neighboring states can find a common, less politicized, issue to cooperate upon. Eventually, cooperation over environmental issues will produce a snowball effect to other more contested issues. This paper argues that such assumptions inevitable require the neutralization of nature and depart from a notion of nature being inherently anti-social and thus antipolitical. It portrays nature as existing independent of the human interactions through space and time, and denies the inherently political and societal constructions in the classification of landscapes. This paper explores the discourses of nature used in transboundary conservation and argues that the ways in which we conceptualize nature influence how we treat environmental issues and formulate policy. This is shown through concrete cases where TBPAs have been implemented. Peter Bengtsen, PhD Cand., Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University [email protected] Urban miners: life in the waste-land of the information society There is no doubt that the city with its many inhabitants and resultant consumption constitutes a common which profoundly influences the global environment. However, while the waste produced in cities is often seen as part of a global ecological problem, we might also consider its role as a resource in a different kind of local, urban ecosystem. In an upcoming research project, I plan to look at the work activities and survival strategies of urban miners – people who are situated at the periphery of the established urban job market, and whose function is closely connected to the relative abundance of resources as well as the technical installations which are amassed within the ecosystem of the city. The term urban mining is often used to describe an orderly process of recycling valuable raw materials which have been used in for instance mobile phones, televisions and computer equipment 4 (see, for instance, http://visual.ly/urban-mining-electronic-waste-gold-mine; retrieved 2013.12.15). However, the focus on the recycling process itself means that the human agency which enables this recycling to take place is largely neglected. One could say that the miners have been left out of the narrative of urban mining. I am interested in precisely the lives and praxes of the people who are at the base level of the recycling process. In recent years, the rough working conditions in landfills and ship breaking yards in for instance Brazil and India has been given some attention. However, while urban mining under these extreme conditions has been subject to debate (and criticism), there has been less debate about the urban miners who exist within the Western cities. By looking at for instance bottle collectors, we might gain an understanding of the city as a mining ground for material resources (other examples include the unlawful removal of e.g. bronze sculptures and drainpipes and electrical train wires made from copper, a process in which the cultural and infrastructural values of the objects are set aside, reducing them to their pure material value). Adam Brenthel, PhD Cand., Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University [email protected] Extreme Weather Events as Moments of Common Caring There is some support for using extreme weather events for the propagation of awareness of global warming in the literature on Climate Change Communication (CCC). It could be useful for the public awareness as “flooding events […] have a dramatic, visual pull, and therefore intrinsic news value“(N.T. Gavin, L. Leonard-Milsom and J. Montgomery, "Climate change, flooding and the media in Britain," Public Understanding of Science 20, No. 3, 2011). But there are also concerns raised that extreme weather as example of climate change can be damaging, mainly due to the lack of causal link between long term climate change and a particular weather event. (S. R. J. Sheppard, Visualizing climate change: A guide to visual communication of climate change and developing local solutions, London, 2012.) Another reason that often is mentioned is the risk of media fatigue on the subject as the vague connection between climate and weather risks stirring new battles between skeptics and advocates. (M. Shellenberg & T. Nordhaus, "Apocalyose Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change," Yale Environmental 360, 2009.) This paper will take its analytic starting point in an unpretentious media analysis performed in Media Arkivet – the analysis was done by combing the name of the particular storm (Simone, Hilde, Sven, and Ivar) with the search word climate (klimat) during 7 days, starting one day before each storm. No proper statistic analysis has been done – which shows that Swedish media seems to be listening to the advice to be cautious. They are very cautious or reluctant to connect extreme weather events with climate change. My preliminary search result of Swedish newspaper articles during each of the major storms during the fall of 2013 shows that the named storm are reported on hundreds of times – Simone 581, Hilde 140, Sven 612, Ivar 162 – but when searched together (AND) with the word climate (klimat) then only a few or even no hits return – Simone 4, Hilde 1, Sven 2, Ivar 0. This reluctance is somewhat unnecessary and, I would say, unwanted since there is scientific support for a discussion on weather events and climate change that could be used by journalist when writing on storms. The IPCC reports are easily accessible and useful for a discussion on the occurrence and severity of future weather events even when the causal link lacks for any particular storm. (C.B. Field et al., 5 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2012.) Furthermore, the visual material produced by journalists is already similar to what the CCC seeks to produce. There is strong isomorphism between the two image corpuses that is striking for anyone working within CCC. In addition to this, there is a production of presence and caring through media during times of extreme weather events that CCC can learn from. The paper will present an analysis of the gap between media and CCC and the potential at hand. Karin Edberg, PhD Cand., Sociology, PESO, BEEGS, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University [email protected] An Appropriate Place for Wind Power? Regardless if seen as symbols of modernity, environmental friendliness and independence, as disturbing obstacles in the natural landscape or as threats to personal interest, establishments of wind power facilities leave few unaffected. Economic, social, cultural and political factors influence negative as well as positive attitudes towards wind power projects. Understanding of its efficiency, alternatives and design just as belief in climate change and need for energy transformation affect the general attitude towards wind power. But are other aspects involved in the localization act? Are wind power attitudes influenced by the perception of the landscape where it is intended to be localized? As a place can serve the purpose of leisure or subsistence, be perceived as a living space for rare species of animals, birds and plants or as a source for raw material and energy extraction, it is filled with meaning by the actors in direct or indirect contact with it. The aim of the paper is thus to analyze the relation between place understanding and wind power attitudes. The empirical material, mainly interviews, is collected in a rural area in Sweden that assembles industrial mining sites, agriculture, nature reserves and beaches. The industrial identity is strong among the permanent population, while outsiders seek the place for its natural scenery and tourist facilities. As the place is assigned “national interest for wind power” and a small-scale wind power park is planned in the area, the contradictive understandings of the place and its heterogenic character makes it an interesting case. Heike Graf, Associate Professor, Media and Communications, Södertörn University [email protected] The Culture of Nature: Blogging about gardening The topic of garden and gardening has enjoyed high popularity in the media in the last twenty years. Gardening is rich in symbols as well as feelings: It offers both a spiritual and a physical dimension, and can be interpreted in a practical and also decorative way. In contrast to the anxiety rhetoric that generally dominates environmental issues in the news media, the topic of garden and gardening is associated with feelings of pleasure and enthusiasm. With the rise of Internet, garden issues are not longer reserved to mass media, but can also be addressed to a large public by individual persons. This paper examines how garden bloggers, from the angle of gardeners everyday life ‘banalities’, communicate environmentalist issues. The topics of the blogs focus on the intersections between 6 private: the garden as personal, private experience, and the more publicly exposed, geographical location: the garden as part of the common, the natural environment. They also link the domestic, private world (family) to other social systems, such as science (knowledge about the nature), economics (consumption issues), politics (local decisions e.g.), art (garden design), and mass media (reflecting debates in the media on e.g. gardening issues). Generally, photo blogs tend to stress issues of style and pure appearance, which might relate to a garden behavior of constant renewal. Textbased blogs allows for more differentiation, and communicate in favor of doing something for sustainable gardening. In result, environmental issues are mainly addressed from the overarching topical angle of consumption in the market economy and sustainable small-scale production by using frames of pleasure, enthusiasm and mutual agreement. Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Associate Professor, Ethnology, Södertörn University [email protected] Grammars of Kinship: Nature, culture and kinship in the age of assisted reproduction Already in the early 1990s, feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argued that kinship ought not to be understood merely as “the ways in which relatives interact with one another, but how such relationships are constituted” (1992: 5, emphasis added). As both she and others have argued, however, what has been thought of as “natural facts” in traditional kinship studies, have often turned out in the end to be social constructions themselves; or as Strathern expresses it: “What is revealed is another hybrid” (Strathern 1992, 17)”. To this end, this presentation shall discuss three simultaneously existing kinship grammars that articulate the biological dimension of kinship in, which all affect the way in which it is possible to interpret biological inheritance between mother or gestational surrogate and child: the kinship grammar of blood, the kinship grammar of genetics and the kinship grammar of epigenetics. Finally, the presentation shall be concluded by a discussion on how biological inheritance is constituted at the interface of meaning and matter, nature and culture, and contemplate what the paradigm shift of epigenetics may contribute to the theorisation of biological kinship. Jutta Haider, Senior Lecturer, Information Studies, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University [email protected] Green Search: The shaping of information on the environment at the intersection of networked tools, nature and people The project Green Search investigates how environmental information, i.e. information on environmental problems and proposed solutions, is shaped through their representations in search engine results, in social media tools, and in mobile applications dedicated to environmentally friendly living and how users of these tools experience this. The study is situated in a socio-technical framework, seeing technology and society as mutually dependent and co-constructed (cf. van House, 2004; Suchman 2007). Accordingly, the study’s interest lies with how search engines and other tools for retrieving/receiving information shape environmental issues and how people perceive this and make sense of in their everyday life and everyday practices. In line with this, the focus is on the very 7 intersection of technical tools, the environment as a problem space connected to nature and as a doing space connected to people’s doings. Environmental information is not only readily accessible online, it is also very diverse. It includes e.g. official campaigns, social marketing and promotional activities by interest organizations and businesses, media reports, reports by lobby organizations or political parties, and narratives of personal experiences in forums or social media. These disparate sources are combined in search engine result pages or merged with other content social media feeds when representing an issue. Together and with the information spaces they all bring in through their in- and out-links they shape the topic at hand. Furthermore, due to mechanisms of personalization and localization, results differ between different searchers and users. Google, as other search engines and also social media, is not a neutral tool for information retrieval. Rather, since its algorithms control most online visibility it structures how we see issues and contributes to shaping what we regard as important. Ultimately how certain issues are presented in these arenas is an inherent part of the very issues at stake (Eklöf & Mager, 2012) and of their perception. The empirical focus is on two areas important for everyday life and its practices, both central for the discursive, social and material organization of environmentally friendly living in Western consumer societies (1) Food (2) Housing/the home (cf. Humphery 2011; Lewis & Potter, 2012). The project applies a mixed method approach, with qualitative methods (focus group interviews) being supplemented with quantitative elements (web analyses). The project is in its early stages with material collection to start 2014. It is a further development of a previous project (Haider, 2012; in press 2014 ) which investigated the production of environmental information in social media out of personal narratives around everyday life practices for greener living. I will present Green Search as work in progress discussing it with a focus on the interconnection between theoretical starting points and empirical focus not least with a view to material collection. References: Eklöf, J. & Mager, A. (2012), “Technoscientific promotion and biofuel policy: how the press and search engines stage the biofuel controversy”, New Media and Society. 35(4), 454-471. Haider, J. (2012). Interrupting practices that want to matter. The making, shaping and reproduction of environmental information online. Journal of Documentation, 68 (4), 639-658. Haider, J. (in press, 2014). Taking the environment online : issue and link networks surrounding personal green living blogs. Online Information Review. Humphery, K. (2011), “The simple and the good: ethical consumption as anti-consumerism”, In: Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (ed. by Terry Lewis & Emily Potter) London: Routledge, 40-53. Lewis, T. & Potter, E. (2011), “Introducing ethical consumption”, In: Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (ed. by Terry Lewis & Emily Potter) London: Routledge, 3-23. Suchman, L. A. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van House, N. A. (2004), Science and technology studies and information studies. In: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ed. by Blaise Cronin), 38, 3-86. 8 Tora Lane, Researcher, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University [email protected] Digging into Common Grounds: The nature of culture and the culture of nature in Platonov's The Foundation Pit This paper is about the novel The Foundation Pit by the Soviet Russian writer Andrei Platonov. In it I will explore the way that the novel invites us to think about how concepts of nature and culture fuse in our being in the world. I will focus on literary topoi where concepts belonging to our understanding of nature are transferred to culture and vice versa. The story line of the novel is the fate of the very concrete digging of a foundation pit at a construction site, but in the depiction Platonov constantly fuses the concrete and the metaphorical, making the story into an ambiguous allegory over the construction of the new communist state. It is an ambiguous allegory, because there is a constant ambivalence in the novel between the description of the work that actually takes place and its abstract meaning, and both levels intermingle constantly. For instance, the main character Voshchev asks while digging into the earth: “Could a superstructure develop from any base? Was soul within man an inevitable by-product of the manufacture of vital material?” Platonov not only evokes the Marxist theory of the relation between ground and superstructure, but also asks into the interchangeability between nature and culture, and in particular with respect to such disputed phenomena as feelings and the soul. Platonov thus also digs his way into the questions of how common culture exposes its nature or common nature its formation through culture, and, in the end, what the common really demands of us in order to for us to understand its nature-culture. Kari Lehtilä, Professor, and Vesa-Matti Loiske, Lecturer, School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Södertörn University [email protected] Socio-economic and Landscape Changes After Agricultural Intensification Through Investment in Irrigation It is often postulated that agricultural intensification decreases the pressure on land elsewhere. According to this line of thought, farmers should substitute extensive farming for intensive farming, decreasing land area needed, or abandon own farming for salary from jobs created by intensified agriculture. However, intensification may as well increase land pressure in the surrounding areas. We describe a case with the latter type of development. Small-scale farmers of Mawe Mairo village in Babati District, Tanzania, have had an irrigation farming since colonial times, but the irrigation system was upgraded in 2004 with funding from international developmental aid. Increased agricultural productivity enhanced economic activity. The availability of jobs increased in-migration and local population growth, which has resulted in a considerable landscape change through expansion of rain-fed agriculture around the irrigated area. The development has produced strong contrasts between different sub-villages. Two sub-villages with irrigation system have received direct benefits from the economic development. One of the two sub-villages without own irrigation has also benefited from irrigation farming due to new job opportunities. The other sub-village has, however, not experienced a similar economic boost, because its livelihood systems, such as pastoralism, have been incompatible with day-labouring in irrigation. Further changes and possible adaptation to new socio-economic conditions are expected even in this sub-village, because 9 pastoralism is disappearing when there is very little common grazing land left after the expansion of agricultural area. Whereas studies of governance and management of irrigation often centre on the direct economic and environmental impacts of food grain production and water use, this case study demonstrates that indirect effects may be substantial. The effects of irrigation farming should thus be studied in several different scales. Max Liljefors, Professor, Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University [email protected] Non-Human Horizons This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Samuel Pufendorf workshop, “Grounding Wars”, in May 2013 at the Faculty of Law, Lund University. It will be part of a forthcoming book with the three keynote lectures from the workshop, by Gregor Noll (Lund), Daniel Steuer (Essex) and myself, followed by a concluding discussion chapter. Ours is a time, which has seen the advent of visualization technologies with capacities extending far beyond the range of human perception. A recent example is the imaging systems carried by UAV:s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), or drones, increasingly employed in warfare by the US, and in border monitoring across the globe. These imaging systems produce immense sets of visual data, the analysis of which requires a new generation of pattern recognition algorithms, designed to recognize not only singular objects but whole chains of events captured by the UAV:s cameras. In late modern warfare automated image analysis has become an increasingly important foundation for decisions over human life and death. My article takes drones as the starting point for a broader discussion about the use of advanced, “non-human” imaging systems for monitoring and controlling human behavior, e.g. biometric databases, aircraft and satellite based remote measuring of environmental changes, etc. I will argue that traditional anthropomorphic metaphors, like the “gaze”, are inadequate to describe this new form of artificial visual intelligence, which increasingly shapes our understanding of human behavior. In an attempt to outline its nature, I will “read” it against three pictorial programs from different historical periods – one Medieval, one modern, one late modern. They represent visually the humananimal divide, or human-animal continuum, and at the same time express fantasies of an omniscient gaze, each from its own historical viewpoint. In my conclusion I will reflect on the paradox of the image of the human today. On the one hand, as frighteningly powerful, bringing about a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. On the other hand, as a life form which increasingly defines itself from non-human horizons. Kati Lindström, Researcher, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia Board member of the Estonian Centre for Environmental History, Tallinn; Post-doctoral fellow (Jan 2014-), Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden [email protected] Interplay of aesthetics, national nostalgia and sustainability in the protection policies of the rice paddy landscapes in central Japan Rice is equated with self on many levels of Japanese society and during the nation-building process, Japanese national character became defined through climate and rice-cultivation. Not surprisingly, the Japanese traditional rice agriculture systems, the satoyama, enjoy a high prestige both among the public and the scientific experts also today. Because of extensive resource cycling and remarkable 10 biodiversity in these semi-natural landscapes, the satoyama is celebrated as the core example of sustainability in traditional Japanese landscapes and lifestyle and the embodiment of the ancient Japanese wisdom. While remarkable biodiversity is a fact, a fully sustainable self-contained resource circulation between different landscape elements (rice paddies, water, fish and its manure, secondary forest etc) is true only partially. Such incongruences, however, get hardly ever attention in the atmosphere of general national nostalgia for the countryside. In extremely urbanised Japan, it is the 50-60+ year old men and women (mostly Tokyoites) who are admirers of satoyama. With the exception of a numbered few that contribute regularly to their maintenance (village population in remote areas is often too old for attending terraced paddies themselves), most of satoyama eco-tourists make sporadic trips to remoter rice paddy areas, to enjoy the beauty, smell and taste of Japan. The public image of these symbolic landscapes is aesthetics oriented and infantile, centred on the enjoyment of taste and beauty, but excluding hardship, work or suffering. The danger in preserving biodiversity or traditional landscapes on the bases of nationalist or infantile imagery consists in creating valuable, but museal and unsustainable landscapes, where people go to work but nobody wants to live, together with the danger of overprotecting such agricultural systems in areas where they are in fact extremely recent. Cultural concepts, national imagery and protection policies are intertwined in a way that promotes segregation into residence, museum and production landscapes. Vesa-Matti Loiske, Lecturer, and Kari Lehtilä, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Södertörn University [email protected] Prerequisites to successful participatory natural resource management – the case of community-based forest management in Babati, Tanzania Community-based natural resource management has been a popular approach in recent decades, as a part of to a general trend where local participation has become a dominating paradigm in the rhetoric of development discourse. However, the track record of participatory projects, where communities have received the main responsibility of management of natural resources, has been mixed. One of the few success stories of participatory approach is community-based forest management in Babati, Tanzania that started in the 1990’s by the initiative of aid agencies and District administration. During the formation of the management system, an important part of the responsibility and power over forest management was devolved to village level. Positive effects have been documented in empowerment of local communities and recovery of ecological services such as tree growth, water availability, local climate and biodiversity. The participatory approach that started in one forest area has now spread over eighty forests in the Babati District. The outcome contrasts with many other community-based forest management projects in Tanzania and elsewhere, where the management system has collapsed or has not fulfilled its goals. We will discuss possible reasons for the outcome, especially from the point of view of characteristics such as pre-colonial management structure that have contributed to the legitimacy of the management system among local people. 11 Ulrike Plath, Professor, Baltic German History and Culture, Institute of History, Tallinn University & Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences [email protected] , [email protected] Things, Bones, Plants – Including the Uncommons in Baltic environmental history In Baltic history writing (in the narrow sense the history of Estonia and Latvia) Baltic German, Estonian and Latvian historians have been excluding for an amazing amount material culture - the history of things, stuff, bones, plants etc. Both the leading Baltic German and the local national cultures of the Estonians and Latvians have been reflected mostly as political and ideological constructs that had to be investigated by using archival sources. The material part of Baltic German culture, however, and with this of Baltic history in general has been excluded from real history writing. Sure, to some extent is has been part of art history (manors, décor, clothing) and literature studies, but still real historians have problems with accepting other than archival sources. This has major impacts on the way how cultural history and the history of technology have been written (or to a greater part not have been written). Establishing environmental history as a new way of how to think and write about Baltic history allows to stress the importance of a new turn toward material history including the uncommons in Baltic history as things, plants, nutrition, bodies, plants, germs, soils, fertilizers and engines etc. They are uncommons mostly because it is not easy on the first glance to link them with the still prevailing national focus of history writing. How to define what a Baltic German chair, apple, engine or the Estonian soil could be? The inclusion of all kinds of material sources as for example also archaeological and anthropological findings as bones and pottery fragments opens up new ways of interdisciplinary co-operation and transnational concepts of Baltic history writing. They also make necessary to rethink the impact of materialism in Baltic philosophy of history. Writing the history of material commons allows also see more clearly the fundamental features and problems in transcultural communication and culture transfers between Germans and Estonians/Latvians/ Russians. Fred Saunders, Post-doc, School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Södertörn University [email protected] The Anthropocene - At the threshold.... again The implications of the Anthropocene proposal involve scientific, moral and political dimensions. The core of the Anthropocene idea is that humankind, through its industrialising activities, is transgressing planetary boundaries, which is resulting in changed conditions that threaten to unravel human progress or at worst, survival. The Anthropocene concept, offers a new way to look at the past, diagnose the present and a normative platform to influence the future. The growing status of the Anthropocene proposal potentially makes it a highly influential organising concept that seems to contain within it aspirations to dramatically reconstitute the relationship between society and the environment - thereby transforming the politics of sustainable development. However, this paper shows by examining the plight of the planetary boundaries proposal in 2015 Post Development Agenda planning documents that divisions reminiscent of older North/South environment and development tensions that arose during the Limits to Growth debate around the role of experts, democracy and the Right to Development are still present. These tensions (among others) are 12 threatening to impede the adoption of the planetary boundaries concept into global environmental governance arrangements. This suggests that even after 50 years or so of environmental politics, that a key global public policy dilemma still to be resolved is how to reconcile social justice and environmental limits (or boundaries) agendas. Staffan Schmidt, Artistic researcher, Senior Lecturer, Design in Theory and Practice, K3 Malmö University [email protected] Commons as Connectability Different narratives contest over one stretch of land, and even though the facts on the ground could be topographically and cadastrally determined, different use of land continues to exist – and this process of determination is itself a representative of a narrative. Differently imagined spaces leads to different use of space: it means that space can be analyzed as mode of political thinking.So, an acute question here is what can be gained politically from thinking with, about and through commons? I would here argue that one productive way of looking at commons is through addressing the aspect of connectability: what and who they connect – and what and who they disconnect, what this connectability allows for, and aggravates. If one applies Henri Lefebvre's trifold tool to the discussion on commons one gets a glimpse of an interpretation, which attaches romantic notions of nature and freedom and body to the commons. If we instead are looking at the spatial Common from a historical perspective, one can in a Nordic context find it as early as in the first century BC, a distinct area is established centrally surrounded by farmsteads and other buildings – and if you look around in the medieval villages in Scania where I live, you will be able to detect round, oval or rhomboid stretches of land, still not fully parceled and developed, a village common surviving up until today. My modest claim is that commons are always connected to ownership. Ownership that must not be confused with what it have come to mean today, but something close to a right of use, that is maintained by hävd, by customs. Nothing can be privately owned without connectability, and the same is true for what is collectively owned, as commons, they must both be understood in terms of what they connect, and what they disconnect. Paula von Seth, Visual artist and film maker, Stockholm [email protected] Oracle Actions This paper presents artistic methodologies and artworks that visualize and re-invent commons. It points towards new interpretations of the concept commons and practical models for commoning in the interfaces of nature and culture. I explore how co-creative artistic processes in sustainability can trigger positive new modes of transformation. In Oracle Actions I continuously develop with artist Andrea Hvistendahl “pluralism as method” in which new sustainable behavior patterns are encouraged. In 2013 I was invited by architect Carin Smuts and a local committee to conduct a series of art workshops which were to be steps towards building a new cultural museum in Hawston, east of Cape Town. Smuts is well-known for her long-term participatory processes that form shared ownership. Hawston is deeply affected by 13 an unbalanced use of natural resources such as the endangered abalones and fish for the global market. A part of the museum project deals with the indigenous Khoisan people. In my investigation I found that performative and interventionist art techniques can enable novel ways of experiencing, understanding and creating commons. I explored the carnival as an act of and a metaphor for commoning. It is a dynamic self-organizing systemand collective rejoicing that invades common spaces and in-betweens such as beaches and streets. I introduce into the vocabulary of commons the traditional South African philosophy “ubuntu”, translated as “togetherness” or “I am who I am because of what we all are”. What does this wider perception of responsiveness mean in today’s urban and rural landscapes which are so heavily under pressure? If we want to grapple with the dynamics of the politics of commons, an attention to the multilayered local specificities is required. What resources are there for commoning and who is invited to participate and make use of the commons? Christina Wainikka, LL. D, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University [email protected] Are You Patentable and Is Your Culture Copyrighted? Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), such as patents and copyrights, are legal constructions to create monopolies through exclusive rights. These constructions are to a large extent based on international conventions such as the Paris Convention and the Berne Convention. As all legal constructions they are created to balance between different interests. A copyright protection must for example balance writers’ right to their works with the freedom of information. A patent protection must for example balance the interest of the patent holders’ to control the market and the interest of a marketplace open for competition. These points of balance are challenged over time. Technical development leads to other balancing points. Societal development leads to new views on the balancing points. Different IPRs are constructed in different ways and have different balancing points. According to the European view on copyright, there is a need to not protect expressions of folklore. These expressions are to be available for everyone. During the last decades there has been an international discussion regarding the creation of a legal protection of folklore. The aim is to create a protection that for example prevents fashion designers from using patterns that are a part of folklore. Another issue that is under discussion internationally is what has to be done to create “copy left”. Copyright protection is granted to without registration or other formalities, according to the Berne Convention. Copy left is only possible if the copyright holder steps down from his/her right. What is needed in different countries varies, which makes it necessary to act according to several sets of rules. This makes it easier, in the field of copyright, to create a monopoly than to create a common. In the field of Patent Law the monopoly is created only when the patent is approved by a patent office. A decision not to patent is an easy way to create commons regarding patentable inventions. Patent Law is however under discussion, due to the fact that there are strong opinions regarding the patentability regarding certain kinds of innovations. The patentability of genes is one example as well as the patentability for certain kinds of medicines. The effects of the TRIPs agreement (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) have been under discussion for several decades. The aim with this paper is to discuss the legal contructions and the balancing points. Is there a need to create better possibilities to create commons? 14