the blog from Environment and Society
A line of ants walking throughout a 5-liter white plastic recipient, wrapped in black trash bags and trespassed by roots, was my first experience with a landmine. This artifact enmeshed into nature and co-produced a toxic wilderness.
Read More “Weaponizing Nature: the co-production of Landmined Landscapes in the Colombian Amazon”
Renewable energies, green/blue/bio-economies, waste management systems, as well as sustainable agriculture and aquaculture hold within them the possibility of working towards a “Greater Good”, however, “goodness” is frequently built on toxic colonial and capitalist processes that are rendered invisible through sustainability discourse. How can good practices, relationships, and things be cultivated in an environment where toxicants, toxic politics, and toxic relationalities are constantly reproduced? How do toxic production systems—based on extractivism, colonialism, and plantation capitalism—foment new forms of sustainability that cannot be excised from these deadly foundations?
Located in the Southeast of Mexico (Figure 1), the state of Chiapas is among the top 10 states in pesticides use (Bejarano González 2017). Since 2012, I have been conducting research in Chiapas on women’s reproductive healthcare. I collaborated with the Organization of Indigenous Doctors of the State of Chiapas (OMIECH in Spanish) to document the impact of reproductive health policies on Indigenous midwives’ practices. In rural areas, these women, who have acquired knowledge through their own experience of pregnancy birth and postpartum and/or trained with an older midwife, provide daily care to women and their families. As farmers, they are also acute observers of environmental change.
In May 2019, the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas hosted the First Mexican congress on agroecology. During the opening of the congress, voices in the audience started chanting, “Without feminism, there is no agro-ecology” (Figure 2). The group, made of a dozen women — researchers, activists, students, farmworkers, wanted to draw attention on the intersections between women’s rights and environmental sustainability. Later, during a roundtable, the founder of an “organic and feminist” coffee brand explained, “We need agro-ecology to be a choice for life (opción de vida). There can’t be agroecology if there is machismo, if there is violence, if there isn’t food on the table. Agroecology is a choice for our children’s lives.”
In Mexico, over 180 highly hazardous pesticides component are authorized, including many forbidden by international conventions (Bejarano González 2017). Glyphosate residues have been found in industrial corn tortillas and human bodily fluids. A Tsotsil midwife in her late 30s from a village near San Cristóbal, told me she remembered when as a child her father started using pesticides in the milpa (cornfield). His own father told him to stop, but the damage was already done. “Even though he does not use it anymore, there is contamination everywhere. Everything is contaminated.” When “everything” around is contaminated – by mines, pesticides, corporations – what does caring for one’s family and community look like?
Indigenous women at the crossroads of environmental and reproductive justice
Midwives across the continent position themselves as defenders of women’s right to choose how to give birth and as protectors all forms of life – human and nonhuman (Dennis and Bell 2020). Kichwa environmental activist Elvia Dahua, leader of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon described this relationship in an interview for the Tejiendo Cuerpos Territorios (Weaving Body Territories) platform: “Us women, we are those who work the land. The first who chose the water to drink, to feed the children, the husband. This is why us, we know the value of mother-earth, how we can care for nature, how we can care for the earth, the territory, because the territory is our market, the territory is our pharmacy where we can find ancestral medicine.”[1] To express the intersection in which Indigenous women stand Katsi Cook, Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne midwife, coined the term environmental reproductive justice: “Environmental justice and reproductive justice intersect at the very center of woman’s role in the processes and patterns of continuous creation” (Cook 2007:62).
In Chiapas, Indigenous women have been at the forefront of the defense of the territory (Olivera Bustamante, Cornejo Hernández, and Arellano Nucamendi 2016; Valadez 2014). They draw on their multiple experiences as mothers, midwives, farmers and community leaders to raise awareness on the health and cultural consequences of environmental change. Midwives have a close relationship with their environment, in which they find medicine to cure their patients during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021). During a meeting of midwives in Mexico, organizations from various countries of Abya Yala[2] shared a statement highlighting the importance of caring for all forms of life. Their discourse interwove the sacredness of birth and Indigenous peoples’ strong connection to the earth: “Caring for the way we are born means defending the sacred link that binds us to the earth […]. We fully trust women and their babies’ embodied knowledge and the strength of mother-earth. This is why we rely on its [natural] elements to maintain balance and put ourselves at the service of life and its cycles” (Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de México et al. 2018). Contamination threatens this balance in many ways. One of the forms I have documented in my research is the impact on medicinal plants, which midwives use on a daily basis.
Caring when plants disappear
For thirty-five years, the OMIECH has organized community health workshops in Indigenous communities of the state. The goal of the organization is to strengthen Indigenous medical knowledge. The Women and Midwives Section, coordinated by Micaela Icó Bautista, organizes community workshops focused on pregnancy, birth, postpartum and on common diseases in the communities (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021). In these workshops, participants share how they cope with common illnesses, by sharing medicinal plant recipes, massage indications and spiritual ceremonies. Knowledge exchanged during workshops is then compiled into booklets that are shared back in the villages.
In 2014-2015, I helped organize some of the workshops. One of them took place in a community in the municipality of Huixtan, where Micaela Icó Bautista and I met with Doña Lupe, a Tseltal midwife in her 50s, and member of OMIECH. When we arrived, we followed the midwife and her son-in-law into the milpa behind the house, where they searched for medicinal plants that would be used as props during the workshop (Figure 3). As soon as the workshop started, participants listed the common diseases of women, men and children in the community. In the second part of the workshop, all were invited to share their knowledge about local remedies.
A few years later, in 2018, Micaela returned to the same village. When I met with her a few months later, she described how, during the workshop, older midwives like Doña Lupe recalled the chikin burro (“donkey’s ear,” a mix between the Tseltal word for ear, chikin, and the Spanish word for donkey, burro) a medicinal plant used during childbirth and postpartum.[3] Younger women were puzzled about the name, and started laughing, not knowing it was a medicinal plant. Micaela reported, “The parteras they said that before there were plenty of this plant, but now it is becoming scarce. In the hills, there are barely any left.”
In the workshop’s minutes, women attributed the disappearance of the chikin burro to a combination of factors, including deforestation linked to the construction of new roads, a shift in agricultural practices (from family-based to industrial), and the use of pesticides. Chikin burro was not the only plant affected, they added, “Plants like epazote, coriander, green tomato… They are disappearing. They used to grow in the milpa and now they don’t anymore, because of the pesticides. It all started 5 years ago, but only now they are realizing that it is hurting the earth.” During the workshop, Doña Lupe poignantly described the consequences of such a loss, saying, “it is like putting an end to part of community life.” The situation in Huixtan is not unique, and across Mexico Indigenous peoples experience how the loss of plants is also a loss of their language (Arriaga-Jimenez, Perez-Diaz, and Pillitteri 2018).
With disappearing plants, and the health impacts of environmental contamination, midwives are confronted to new diseases while their tools to cure are getting scarcer. For María del Carmen, a 38-year-old midwife who lived nearby the town of Comitán, and who started attending births when she was 17, “There have been changes in women’s health because of bad eating habits. Since childhood, they eat Sabritas (chips), candy, ham, cheese… This is not eating! In the past, we ate a lot of mushrooms from the forest. Not anymore. And women, they don’t even listen to us anymore. From there, complications arise: hemorrhage, miscarriage…”
During my work with Micaela Icó Bautista, I noticed the increasing trouble she faced in collecting recipes when editing the boletines; there were each time fewer people to share recipes, as older midwives passed away and some plants were more difficult to find. But she tirelessly asked midwives about their “secrets” (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021), and encouraged them to start their own medicinal garden, to keep transmitting the knowledge which is essential for the health of women and their families, and the cultural reproduction of Indigenous communities.
Mounia El Kotni (PhD, SUNY Albany 2016) is postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the Cems-EHESS Paris, and 2019-2021 Fondation de France grantee in environmental health (grant n. 00089806). She has conducted research on maternal health policies in Mexico, and the consequences on traditional midwives’ practices since 2013. Her current research is focused on the gendered politics of environmental contamination and environmental protest in Chiapas. Contact: www.mouniaelkotni.com
References
Arriaga-Jimenez, Alfonsina, Citlali Perez-Diaz, and Sebastian Pillitteri
2018 Ka’ux Mixe Language and Biodiversity Loss in Oaxaca, Mexico. Regions and Cohesion 8(3). Academic OneFile: 127-.
Bejarano González, Fernando, ed.
2017 Los Plaguicidas Altamente Peligrosos En México. Texcoco, Estado de México: Red de Acción sobre Plaguicidas y Alternativas en México, A. C. (RAPAM).
Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de México, Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de las Américas, Nueve Lunas S.C., Oaxaca, et al.
2018 Pronunciamiento. Foro “Partería, Cultura, Ancestralidad y Derechos”. Oaxaca, México.
Cook, Katsi
2007 “Environmental Justice: Woman Is the First Environment.” In Reproductive Justice Briefing Book; A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change Pp. 62–63. Pro-Choice Public Education Project.
Dennis, Mary Kate, and Finn McLafferty Bell
2020 Indigenous Women, Water Protectors, and Reciprocal Responsibilities. Social Work 65(4): 378–386.
Icó Bautista, Micaela, and Susannah Daniels
2021 OMIECH: Traditional Maya Midwives Protecting Women’s Health. Cultural Survival Quarterly 45(1): 26–27.
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/omiech-traditional-maya-midwives-protecting-womens-health
Olivera Bustamante, Mercedes, Amaranta Cornejo Hernández, and Mauricio Arellano Nucamendi
2016 Organizaciones campesinas y de mujeres de Chiapas. Movimiento Chiapaneco en Defensa de la Tierra, el Territorio y por el Derecho de las Mujeres a Decidir. Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas, Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica.
http://repositorio.cesmeca.mx/handle/11595/877, accessed May 30, 2018.
Valadez, Ana
2014 Saberes Femeninos En El Ámbito Comunitario Campesino. Contrahegemonía, Defensa Del Territorio y Lo Cotidiano En La Lacandona. In Más Allá Del Femenismo. Caminos Para Andar. Márgara Millán, ed. Pp. 145–154. México, D.F: Red de Femenismos Descoloniales.
[1] Interview available at https://youtu.be/pzqkOdb76A4
[2] The Kuna word for territory, used by Indigenous activists to refer to the American continent in a decolonial position.
[3] I was not able to retrieve the Latin name of the plant.
Rains, rivers, tides, wells—waters, in their multifarious forms, have long shaped social worlds in and across Asia, as indeed in other parts of the globe. As the recent scholarship on its privatization, commodification, and trade, reminds us, water is a vital resource for human life. But it also exceeds such functions. Water mediates, reveals, nurtures, and obstructs social processes, as a site of mobility and immobility, cultural relationships and meanings, as well as political contestation and negotiations.
In a previous post to EnviroSociety we described the immediate impacts of a huge earthquake on Edolo people of Papua New Guinea. At the time we wrote, the people were in desperate straits, with minimal access to government services and reliant on support from several mission-connected NGOs. In this sequel, three years later, we write of ways in which the people themselves have been re-establishing a hold on what had been, and in places still remains, a shattered landscape.
Through the early months of 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, and a swarm of subsequent shocks, had devastating impacts on the land, rivers and people on and near Mount Sisa, in Hela Province, Papua New Guinea (Figure 1, Zahirovic et al. 2018). Edolo-speaking people living on the steep southern slopes of that extinct volcano were seriously affected (Dwyer and Minnegal 2018). Some were buried under huge landslides (Figure 2). Most abandoned their small villages (Figure 3) and fled to either Dodomona or Huya, the only places with airstrips and radio connection to the outside world. At these two villages populations increased from a few hundred men, women and children to one and a half thousand.
Nearly all food of Edolo people comes from a diverse array of practices that include gardening, arboriculture, sago processing, pig husbandry and hunting (Kelly 1977: 32-64, Dwyer 1990). Access to store-bought foods, though desired, is limited and intermittent. In 2018, the rapid increase in population at just two locations meant that local food supplies were overwhelmed. For months, people needed supplementary support from outside relief organizations (ADRA 2018).
Three years have elapsed since those earthquakes. Here we draw on satellite imagery to describe responses by Edolo people who lived at, or relocated to, Huya.1 Many people made gardens south of Huya, in an area that had seen little use over several decades. For them, this shift in the geography of garden locations may have far-reaching effects on overall subsistence practices and, indeed, on concomitant social practices and health.
Huya
The Huya airstrip was made over a period of 10 years. The first plane landed there in early 2003 and, since then, it has been served by planes associated with Summer Institute of Linguistics and Mission Aviation Fellowship. By 2016, the population at Huya was 192 men, women and children.
The first earthquake struck on 26 February 2018. Through the next weeks men, women and children from Galoma, Aya, Fufuleya, Fau, Damalia, Namosado and Bobole (Figure 2) sought refuge at Huya. Many built temporary houses alongside the airstrip and made small garden plots near these (Figure 4B). Through the next two years the refugees built more than 100 houses on ridgetops near to, and immediately west of, the airstrip (Figure 4C).
The location of gardens, 2018
Soon after displaced people arrived at Huya they commenced fencing and felling areas of forest to establish gardens that were secure from both wild and domestic pigs. In 2018, people felled 62 ha in an area of approximately 525 ha near Huya (Figure 5). In 2016-17, they had felled only 2 and 5 ha, respectively, in the same area.
In the years 2014 to 2017, the area of forest cover loss associated with the villages of Galoma, Aya, Fufuleya, Fau, Damalia, Namosado and Huya was equivalent to 0.085 hectares per person per year for approximately 950 people. Virtually all this will have been the result of clearing forest to make gardens. However, when village sites remain in much the same place for a decade or more some gardens, made in relatively young regrowth, will not be detected as ‘forest cover loss’ in satellite imagery. With allowance for complications of this sort we think that the 62 hectares felled near Huya in 2018 will have provisioned 400 or more people through a 12-month period. This effort, therefore, reflects a capacity of Edolo people to respond relatively rapidly and effectively to disastrous circumstances.
By late 2018 at least eight small gardens had been cut into advanced regrowth near Bobole (Figure 6). Some people either remained at Bobole or returned there soon after the earthquake. An early return is not unexpected. Many more people lived at Bobole than at the other communities which relocated to Huya. Further, for more than five decades, exchanges of goods and people between Edolo and the highlands has been through Bobole and it continues to be a focal way-station for highlanders who walk to and from Kiunga, more than 200 km to the west, to explore prospects for employment at the Ok Tedi mine, to engage in alluvial mining or to exchange marijuana for guns with people from the Indonesian province of Papua.
The location of gardens, 2019-20
In 2019-20 people commenced clearing forest to make gardens at greater distances from Huya. In these two years they felled only 26 and 12 ha respectively in the area of 525 ha near Huya but felled an additional 44 (2019) and 39 (2020) hectares within 3 km of the airstrip. Much of this was to the north of Huya (Figure 5).
By October 2019 some forest areas south of Fau were being fenced (Figure 6) but, other than at Bobole, it is not until late 2020 that we detect unambiguous signs of substantial areas of garden being prepared near previously abandoned villages. This was most striking near Galoma and indicates resettlement of this area.
In 2019 and 2020, however, people made more extensive use of forest areas south of Huya than they had done in the previous decade. In Figure 5 the dotted white line encloses an area of 5.64 kha south of Huya. Forest cover loss from this area averaged 5.43 ha/year for the period 2011 to 2017 and, thereafter, increases from 22 ha in 2018 to 48 and 53 ha in, respectively, 2019 and 2020 (Figure 7). The 53 ha of garden in 2020 may have been enough to satisfy much of the agricultural requirements of 300 or more people across 12 months. It appears that many of the families who were displaced to Huya chose to relocate to areas that had been least damaged by landslides.
Concluding remarks
Three years after the earthquakes of 2018, the spatial patterning of Etolo subsistence gardens does not yet resemble earlier patterns. By late 2020 gardens had been made in the vicinity of most former villages but many people remained at Huya and some, probably several hundred, had redirected gardening effort to the south, well away from the escarpment near which they had lived before. For these people, long-term outcomes may be significant.
The 1974 Sisa topographic map (PNG 1:100,000 Topographic Survey, Sheet 7485, Series T683), compiled from aerial photography and colonial government patrol reports, does not show a single garden site, area of regrowth or house between 250 and 760 m ASL in the area between Giwa and Sioa rivers. Thus, some Edolo people are currently establishing a foothold on land that has been free from residential impacts for at least five decades.
To make gardens in this area people will be felling trees in primary forest rather than advanced regrowth. This will entail considerably more effort for each hectare of garden that is made. They will be planting crops in soils that overlie volcanic rock rather than sedimentary rock and this is likely to influence patterns of both crop selection and garden production (cf. Sillitoe 1998). At the lower altitudes, conditions will be less favourable than before for sweet potato and more favourable for taro. Sago palms, fish and wild pigs will be more accessible than before but because the forested slopes of Mount Sisa, north of the escarpment, will be further from living places opportunities to hunt and trap game mammals will be reduced (Dwyer 1990: 69-84). At lower altitudes, too, exposure to malaria will be increased. All these impacts will, ultimately, call for modifications to ways in which people schedule subsistence tasks and allocate tasks between men and women (Dwyer 1986).
To the extent that relocation to the south is sustained, people may well be tempted to redirect some social contacts to Kaluli-speaking communities who live south of Sioa River, and who, for many years, have been better placed for access to the outside world than those who live on the precarious slopes of Mount Sisa.
Coda: or a little of what we don’t know
Satellite imagery has allowed interpretations of some post-earthquake gardening practices by Edolo people who live in the vicinity of Huya. Those images, however, do not provide any information about impacts on three other important practices – sago processing, marita pandanus (P. conoideus) orcharding, and pig husbandry.
North of Huya, some groves of sago palms and some pandanus orchards will have been destroyed by landslides.2 Sago palms will be available at lower altitudes though here, for newcomers, issues of ownership will complicate access. Marita, however, does not grow wild and will not be immediately available in forests south of Huya. In 1979-80, 109 people at Bobole maintained about 10 ha of pandanus orchards. The oily fruit was abundant from November to May (Dwyer 1990: 61-63). It is likely that, by late 2018, people who had relocated to Huya made excursions to their orchards to harvest fruit. But for those who settle to the south it will be three or more years before newly planted marita bear fruit.
As is common elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, pigs are important to Edolo as a feast food and in many social exchanges. In the late 1960s and 1970s the ratio of domestic pigs to people at Gabulusado (since relocated to Aya) and Bobole approached parity and most of the animals were allowed to roam freely through areas of regrowth (Kelly 1988, Dwyer 1990: 55-61). When people moved to Huya immediately after the earthquake, women may well have carried small piglets with them but most animals will have been left behind. Some domestic pigs were probably killed in landslides, others may have become feral. Pigs, however, are highly valued. It is likely that as refugees became established at Huya, and anxiety levels subsided, some visited former living places to check on the well-being of surviving pigs. Certainly, in the months after the earthquake some people travelled out from Huya to harvest gardens and retrieve abandoned chickens (Jan Gossner, pers. comm.).
In future post-pandemic times, it may be possible to ground-truth, revise and enlarge upon these observations of ways in which Edolo people are responding to a devastating event in their lives. This would have positive outcomes both in identifying ongoing needs of those people and in addressing questions about the relative success, over a span of years, of practices people adopt when seeking a path to secure living after experiencing extreme perturbation.
Notes
Thanks to Jan Gossner, Sally Lloyd, Anton Lutz, Luke Mahoney, Peter Pyandea and Russ Stephenson for valuable help and information.
1. ‘Global Forest Change’ (https://glad.earthengine.app/view/global-forest-change) provides annual depictions of forest cover loss ‘defined as a stand-replacement disturbance, or a change from a forest to non-forest state’ (Hansen et al. 2013). In regions dominated by rainforest, such as those where Edolo live, most forest cover loss is the result of clearing for gardens, village sites and airstrips or landslides, storm-related tree fall and, less often, fire. ‘Global Forest Watch’ (https://www.globalforestwatch.org/) is a companion site that allows forest cover loss to be tracked and, for defined areas, quantified on a year-by-year basis or, cumulatively, over a series of years. Planet Explorer (https://www.planet.com/explorer/) provides monthly collations of satellite imagery that for the Mount Sisa area date back to 2016. These allow cross-referencing when interpreting imagery provided by Global Forest Change, Global Forest Watch, Google Earth, Bing Maps and Satellites.pro. We have drawn on all these resources in the present analyses.
2. Many sago palms are visible below the collapsed escarpment on the righthand side of the photograph that heads this article.
References
ADRA (Adventist Development Relief Agency) 2018. “ADRA responds to PNG earthquake.” https://www.adra.org.au/adra-responds-to-png-earthquake/
Dwyer, Peter D. 1986. “Living with Rainforest: The Human Dimension”, pp. 342-67 in J. Kikkawa and D. Anderson (eds), Community Ecology: Pattern and Process. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Melbourne.
Dwyer, Peter D. 1990. The Pigs That Ate the Garden: A Human Ecology from Papua New Guinea. Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press.
Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. 2018. “Refugees on their own Land. Edolo People, Land and Earthquakes.” EnviroSociety, 9 June 2018. www.envirosociety.org/2018/06/refugees-on-their-own-land-edolo-people-land-and-earthquakes
Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R. Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice and J. R. G. Townshend (2013) “High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change.” Science 342 (6160): 850-53.
Kelly, Raymond C. 1977. Etoro Social Structure: A Study in Structural Contradiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kelly, Raymond C. 1988. ‘Etoro Suidology: A Reassessment of the Pig’s Role in the Prehistory and Comparative Ethnology of New Guinea’, pp. 111-86 in J. F. Weiner (ed.), Mountain Papuans: Historical and Comparative Perspectives from New Guinea Fringe Highlands Societies. Ami Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mahoney, Luke, Richard Stanaway, Sandra McLaren, Kevin Hill and Eric Bergman (2021) “The 2018 Mw 7.5 Highlands Earthquake in Papua New Guinea: Implications for Structural Style in an Active Fold and Thrust belt.” Tectonics https://doi.org/10.1029/2020TC006667
Sillitoe, Paul 1998. “Knowing the Land. Soil and Land Resource Evaluation and Indigenous Knowledge.” Soil Use and Management 14: 188-193.
Zahirovic, Sabin, Gilles Brocard, John Connell, and Romain Beucher 2018. “Aftershocks Hit Papua New Guinea as it Recovers from a Remote Major Earthquake.” The Conversation, 9 April.
Peter Dwyer is Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Monica Minnegal is Associate Professor of anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Since 1986, they have conducted research among Kubo, Febi, and Bedamuni people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, with a particular emphasis on social change and, most recently, impacts of the PNG LNG project on people’s lives. Their book Navigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea was published in 2017 by Australian National University Press.
“Where we live, work, and play.” That’s the phrase environmental justice advocates have used for decades to reimagine the dominant meaning of nature. It’s meant to challenge the stubborn conception that the natures worthy of care are limited to unspoiled virgin forests and exotic creatures in the wild. The expression tries to interrupt the unthinking assumption that the environment is where people are not. It reasserts the truism that a human life is as sacred as a clear vista on a high mountain top.
In 2020, the world watched as climate, public health, economic, and racial justice crises converged. It has become increasingly evident that failures of collective and public policies around health and the environment have perpetuated individual suffering. If ever there was an opportunity for the collective to re-think business as usual… it is now. We are firmly situated in the Anthropocene: a time in which human activities are arguably driving our climate and changing environment. The ocean is not exempt from these human influences. Indeed, human energy demands and associated carbon emissions, unsustainable extraction of living and non-living marine resources, land-based activities, and natural processes are contributing to significant changes in marine and coastal environments. These changes include the persistence of plastic waste in most, if not all, ocean ecosystems and species, reduced oxygen and lower pH levels in coastal waters, unprecedented shifts in the range and distribution of marine species, and sustained elevated ocean temperatures over time and space, among others. These conditions exemplify what we are now calling the Anthropocene Ocean. The Anthropocene Ocean is also occurring amidst rapidly changing societies and associated limits to land-based industrial expansion; feeding an emerging narrative about the economic potential of the ocean and its resources (Campbell et al. 2016). Our rapidly changing ocean is also now perceived as the next frontier for growth and expansion of our global economic system.
“More to Sea” is a photojournalism project I engaged in May 2018 to June 2019. This project was an independent project, which was done after I graduated in a marine governance course. I’m currently a PhD student at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Technology in Sydney where I study livelihood sustenance of small-scale fishers and local food systems. With More to Sea, I aimed to learn how small-scale fishers were doing. Photographs were combined with fishers’ stories and published on a website (moretosea.nl) and social media. An ebook is about to be launched by Too Big To Ignore, which discusses problems faced by fishers, solutions found, and future scenarios. For the EnviroSociety blog, I have created this short video which shows a number of quotes and photos of fishers that illustrate relations to fishing livelihoods, and people’s knowledges of their environment.
The 1949 Fisheries Law in Japan underwent a historic revision in 2018, which went into effect in December 2020. The revision included the further application of science-based resource assessment, the introduction of the Individual Quota (IT) system, the expansion of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to more commercially targeted species, and the loosening of the entry restrictions to open fisheries to private companies. While the inclusion of scientific knowledge and approaches could deepen our understanding of oceans and marine species in the Anthropocene, most coastal fishing communities in Japan, whose fishing operation is local and cooperative-based, could find this revision a threat to their communal livelihoods due to its emphasis on rationalized single species-oriented approach to management, rather than a relational multi-species approach for their community wellbeing. This short essay aims to supplement and contextualize my recent article in Environment and Society (Hamada 2020) with the current state of Pacific herring fishery in Japan.
The sun beats down from a muggy, overcast sky. It turns the small hummocks of a calm ocean to a hammered pewter sheet as far as the eye can see. I sit towards the front of the boat with the harpooner’s assistant squinting out at the waters of the Savu Sea. It’s the end of a long hunting day on the water and we will soon call it quits and head home to Lamalera empty-handed after following a pod of sperm whales moving eastwards. We’re the farthest I have been out this season, but as I look north to the island, we are still directly south of the small peninsula of Atadei, on Lembata’s southern coast. At this moment I realize the endurance of Lamalera’s previous generations of marine hunters: as far as we have come, we are nowhere near the edge of the community’s historical hunting range.