ICS Seminar Series - Céline Granjou

Date: Thursday 27 October 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EA.G.36, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Céline Granjou

(University of Grenoble Alpes, IRSTEA)

Making Nature 'Work': the Biopolitics of Water and Soil in Alpine Wetland Restoration

Abstract

My contribution aims to think of how elements such as water and soil come to matter as "objects" of environmental ethics in relation to situated relations and practices of restoration and conservation. I am especially interested in how categories and qualities of nature functionality are activated in practice. As ecological functionality has become a powerful category justifying the development of a new politics of conservation with a strong emphasis on the functions and "services" rendered by ecosystems and biodiversity, little attention has been to the types of material and affective encounters involved in (re)making nature ecologically functional and productive in the field, and which sort of biopolitics is involved.

I draw on the example of mountain wetlands restoration in Alpine ski resorts. Long considered as unhealthy and unproductive places and, as such, dried up and destroyed in order to make more room for agriculture and, since the 1970s, for the building of huge ski resorts, mountain wetlands have recently become the focus of increasing efforts of restoration and conservation. Crucial to this affective and ethical transformation of wetlands is the emphasis on their functions of water filtration, containment and storage. Embedded within new practical habits and meanings, wetlands come to matter as fragile and functional sites in which water is slowed down and filtered, contained and stored by its complicated journey both above-ground and below-ground, letting flourish an amphibious biodiversity on its way (i.e. frogs, reeds, dragon-flies, cotton grass…). Strikingly, the hydro-biopolitics involved in wetland restoration and conservation is less built on the ordering of species (Braverman, 2016) than on making nature work, including water, soil, plants, animals as components of a same amphibious hydro-bio-geosystem. 

Restored wetlands are small patches of liquid water and amphibious biodiversity within giant ski resorts for which the only productive water has long been that under the form of snow – and whose developers tend to consider wetlands a valuable reservoir for the production of artificial snow. Although they are telling examples of the rise of compromise-based nature conservation, making nature (re)work in wetlands may also provoke us to think more of the vital and active role of water and soil in building our common world, and how we may start to take better care of it.

Biography

Céline Granjou is a senior scientist at the University of Grenoble Alps (Research Institute for Environment and Agriculture) with a background in science and technology studies and environmental sociology. In 2013 she was an honorary appointee at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) for two years.

Her research interests include the politics of biodiversity knowledge and nature conservation with a focus on defining and practicing 'relevant' research on biodiversity and ecosystems through documenting the role of environmental volunteers and nature (park) managers in producing taxonomic and ecological knowledge - alongside official academic labs – and developing the notion of 'epistemic commitments'.

She is currently working on the development of anticipatory practices and technologies aiming to forecast, prepare and preempt environmental changes, including ecological modeling and scenario-making as well as experimental artificial ecosystems. She is also developing new empirical and theoretical research on soil and human/soil relations, aiming for instance to better understand how soil scientists re-imagine soil and soil living beings in the Anthropocene.

She has authored over 30 academic articles and 4 books including Environmental Changes - the Futures of Nature, ISTE/Wiley 2016.