Ambiente e Sustentabilidade | Artigos em revistas internacionais / Papers in international journals
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Browsing Ambiente e Sustentabilidade | Artigos em revistas internacionais / Papers in international journals by Author "Aldeia, João"
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- Contemporary extinctions and multispecies thanatopoliticsPublication . Aldeia, JoãoContrary to what Foucault argued, modern biopolitics is inherently thanatopolitical, i.e., it is a politics of life premised on a politics of death. This becomes clear when non-human elements are given greater relevance than Foucault afforded them. Since the reproduction of life results from interdependencies between species and abiotic elements, multispecies relations are at the core of ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’. In modernity, biopolitical interventions in what Foucault defines as the milieu are intended to foster the lives of (certain) human populations, while they are also premised on killing non-human species. This occurs whether these species are needed to make humans live (e.g., as food) or whether they oppose the goal of fostering the lives of human populations (e.g., as pests or weeds). The ongoing proliferation and acceleration of the extinction of non-human species is one of the extreme manifestations of this thanatopolitical drive of biopolitics, showing that biopolitics promotes death to the point of eliminating entities and relationships on which the reproduction of life depends, which makes it increasingly difficult to keep intervening with the goal to ‘make live’.
- Fostering refugia amid unfolding extinctionsPublication . Aldeia, JoãoAccording to Anna Tsing, Holocene resurgence, the multispecies work carried on to enable life among disturbance, and the ability to foster refugia where the living can recover from damage are crucial to oppose modern capitalogenic extinctions. I expand on this argument by looking at the geo-historical role that refugia have played (and perhaps can still play) during the Quaternary in nurturing the lives of survivors amid unfolding extinctions. Refugia have fostered multispecies life in harsh climatic and ecological times, which enabled individuals of different species to carry on the work of resurgence, because they have functioned as homes for refugees, allowing them in to recover from the hardships of the outside world for a (geo-historically long) while before they again went into the world when external conditions became more amenable. If this capacity of refugia to nurture life can be fostered, such sites might be important pieces in a political ecological strategy aiming to oppose the waste of life brought about by contemporary extinctions.
- Life’s potentiality as multispecies giftPublication . Aldeia, JoãoContemporary political ecological problems reduce possibilities for future human and non-human life. These problems are the result of modern capitalist humans’ attempt to break away from multispecies bonds and turn non-humans into resources to be appropriated. These bonds are crucial for the continued generation of life, which can only result from intergenerational and inter- species shared time, effort, and energy. By expanding the works of Mauss’ intellectual heirs and Levinas towards multispecies interactions, this gift of life can be better understood. Life received by newborn humans entangles them in a multispecies gift cycle that obligates them to reciprocate the gift of life’s potentiality. This requires acknowledging humans’ ethical responsibilities for all others, human and non-human, currently alive or potentially born in the future. In turn, this responsibility can only unfold as political ecologically sustainable actions that keep multispecies communities healthy enough to keep giving life’s potentiality to future generations.
- Pestering Capitalism: thinking with Halyomorpha halys about multispecies relations and ecological unsustainabilityPublication . Aldeia, JoãoMany non-human species trouble human-oriented forms of multispecies life, which leads to classifying some of these species as pests. One of the fields of daily life most disturbed by the action of pests is modern capitalist agriculture, leading to different types of pest management by which human beings attempt to eliminate pests' opposition to the anthropogenic appropriation of the life-making efforts and energy of multispecies assemblages, an appropriation which is essential for capital circulation. In dominant modern capitalist cosmologies, the disturbances caused by pests automatically justify and require their attempted extermination. Without denying that pests are troubling, I argue that the technoscientific framing of human relationships with these species is insufficient as a way of understanding and interacting with them. Rather than exclusively seeing pests as a problem, the manner in which humans interact with these species points us to several foundational – and in themselves problematic – aspects of modern capitalist world-ecology. Taking my research on networks concerned with kiwifruit farming and commercialization in Portugal as a basis for my arguments, I look at how actors in these networks propose to deal with Halyomorpha halys, the brown marmorated stink bug, in an attempt to think with this species about the (inextricably connected) socio-ecological unsustainability of modern capitalist world-ecology and the bio-thanato-political strategies of immunization employed to deal with non-human species in this political ecological system.