Feral Coasts: Thinking about Coastal Biodiversity Restoration through Indigenous South American Modes of Appropriation and Care

Tuesday 1^st August, 2023

Professor Marc Brightman and Associate Professor Vanessa Grotti from the University of Bologna presented a seminar on ‘Feral Coasts: Thinking about Coastal Biodiversity Restoration through Indigenous South American Modes of Appropriation and Care'. The seminar was chaired by IILAH Director Professor Margaret Young.

Coastal areas are critical zones where multiple dynamic ecological and human processes meet, both concentrating and confounding human efforts to control nature. Projects for nature restoration are challenged by uncertainty over future conditions, spatial fragmentation and the influence of multiple uncontained processes on diverse scales (e.g. climate change, pollution, invasive species). Restoring diverse and uncertain worlds requires taking seriously the agency of nonhumans as well as – and through – engagement with indigenous and local communities, cultivating an ethic of care for social and ecological reproduction. To better understand what this means, Professor Marc Brightman and Associate Professor Vanessa Grotti first briefly described two coastal areas – the Po Delta and parts of Belize – and efforts to address threats to ecological processes. They then outlined how the practices of appropriation and care among Trio people of Suriname carry implications for characterisations of the ‘more than human’: for them, species categorisation (or a human/nonhuman dichotomy) is not fixed by nature, but contingent on relationships, the cultivation of which allows life to flourish. The presentation ended with a discussion of what lessons such insight might offer to coastal nature restoration efforts.