Environmental Crisis and Higher Education by Lesley J F Green
Reclaiming African Environmentalism: Ecological Struggles for Wellbeing and Habitability, 2025
A Cosmopolitical Challenge: Activating uBuntu in Partnerships between Environmental Governance Sciences and the Humanities
Environmental humanities traces and stories relations of all kinds—bio-geo-socio-techno—with the ... more Environmental humanities traces and stories relations of all kinds—bio-geo-socio-techno—with the broad goal of shifting modernist consciousness from human exceptionalism and towards the lived experience of planetarity, rethinking and challenging the theory of the world that undergirds neoliberalism and the logics of objectification and commodification. Yet where knowledge of the planetary crisis and its potential remediations translates earthly processes, for their own protection, into data objects to be audited by accountants, objectification and commodification take centre-stage, advanced by their compatibility with the enumerative logics propounded by neoliberalism and technofeudalism. In sum: where climate development and sustainability advocates require knowledge producers to become translators of lived experience into the world of the spreadsheet, environmental humanists and activists address the devastations that not infrequently arise from the implementation of those policies. This may lead to a number of problems between researchers who, while they share the common sense of urgency to address planetary crisis, may find themselves in competition over project concepts, and at loggerheads in respect of critique, methods, and oversights. How can the natural sciences and environmental social sciences and humanities build the alliance that is crucial in addressing our shared planetary crisis? In this talk I aim to open these issues generatively by identifying the problem as the modernist theory of the human-in-the-world dating back to the 1600s, and, taking a leaf from Latour’s proposal to “recall modernity for a product improvement”, propose an African climate-response scholarship that takes as its point of departure an African philosophy of the human—that is, uBuntu.
Sustainability as Pedagogy? Towards Tertiary Curricula in and of Africa
What is "the Africa we want"? How could a critical transdisciplinary study of the Sustainable Dev... more What is "the Africa we want"? How could a critical transdisciplinary study of the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union's Agenda 2063, prepare African university students to bring that Africa into being?
This site, produced by Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, addresses approaches and pedagogies, and curates the contributions of African thought leaders, civil society, activists and academics into an experimental curriculum.
Environmental Humanities, 2019
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the... more This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasiz- ing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critical engagement with some of the key challenges and opportunities that are emerging in EH teaching, centering on how the field is being defined, shared concepts and ideas, interdis- ciplinary pedagogies, and the centrality of experimental and public-facing approaches to teaching. The final part of the article offers six brief summaries of experimental pedagogies from our authorship team that aim to give a concrete sense of EH teaching in practice.
E-Flux, 2021
Whose knowledge? What is knowledge? What is a university? These questions will be at the core of ... more Whose knowledge? What is knowledge? What is a university? These questions will be at the core of your work. Great swathes of history have instantiated the ontology, epistemologies, and assemblages of modernity. Ontology: what counts. Epistemology: how to count it. Assemblage: the world according to the spreadsheet, or the map, or the taxonomy, sans time; sans perspective; sans empathy. The Universe, as known by the University. The One-World World. Knowledge-keepers in the one-world world will bitterly resent the challenges you will bring to their paradigm: to them your thinking will be a personal affront. To challenge the protectors of the oneworld world is to challenge those who have made themselves Masters. Many are white, and male. They will expect you to obey. Masters accept into their disciplinary houses only knowledge that is translated into their terms: their epistemology; their ontology; their assemblages. This you will not accept, for you know that to accept that rationality, and its subjectivity, will betray all that you have struggled to put into the words that you know can make new worlds.
Decoloniality, Environmentality, Anthropocene by Lesley J F Green
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2023
Muizenberg East, in Cape Town, South Africa, is a peri-urban landscape that encompasses sewage wo... more Muizenberg East, in Cape Town, South Africa, is a peri-urban landscape that encompasses sewage works, tourist beaches, a nature reserve, a waste dump, a Ramsar site for the protection of migrating birds, shack settlements, and a corporate office park. The complex and contradictory uses of this land demonstrate the limitations of social-ecological analysis and ecosystem service approaches to environmental governance. Mapping contemporary struggles over food, housing, aquifer contamination, air pollution, conservation space, safety, and farmland, the study proposes that a new materialist approach combining emerging transdisciplinary fields that focus on material flows and metabolism offers a bigpicture science for landscape diagnostics and repair. It is argued that the Earth processes such as metabolism, thermodynamics, and flow offer an integrative basis for environmental governance based on partnerships with Earth processes. Such a constitutional shift in approaches to local governance offers the possibility of amplifying habitability without inserting new modes of profit-taking into the web of life.
South African Journal of Science, 2022
Reflecting on a recent three-decade review of the social-ecological sciences of False Bay in Cape... more Reflecting on a recent three-decade review of the social-ecological sciences of False Bay in Cape Town that was co-authored by 32 South African based scientists, this essay draws on current Anthropocene scholarship in the environmental humanities and social sciences to suggest four approaches to strengthening transdisciplinarity engagement between social and natural sciences. First, the material flows between the fields categorised as 'nature' and 'society' is suggested as an alternative empirical base for integrative transdisciplinary research, building on emergent transdisciplinary fields including industrial ecology, biogeochemical sciences, circular economics and critical zone scholarship. Second, a humanities-informed conversation in South African scholarship invites discussion as to whether and how the conceptual categories of nature and society remain empirically useful, given the evidence in Anthropocene stratigraphy that human living is terra-forming. Third, humanities scholarship is vital for the scholarly assessment of historical and contemporary data sets and scientific publications. Fourth, the theorisation of 'social systems', 'the human', 'society', and 'ecosystem services' in the social-ecological approaches represented in the review, create a barrier for social scientists to take up invitations to transdisciplinary research partnerships. The above concerns, taken together, frame an alternative approach to transdisciplinary research that is tentatively suggested as an 'anthropocenography': a research paradigm based on material flows in the Anthropocene.
Building on the conceptualisation of “terrans” by Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro... more Building on the conceptualisation of “terrans” by Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014), and drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics (2010), this essay composes a field that I tentatively call “Terranology”: a field that, I suggest, encompasses not only the study of “the facts of earthly relations” but the study of “relations” themselves (De la Cadena 2016; Strathern 2020).
Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and humanities for a decolonial South Africa, 2020
Environmental Humanities, 2020
Audre Lorde cautioned that the master's house will never be taken down with the master's tools. ... more Audre Lorde cautioned that the master's house will never be taken down with the master's tools. Her insight has new poignancy in the Anthropocene where the tools of mastery-over people, plants, microbes, and molecules-have devastated agricultural soils. What conceptual tools can take down the logics and rationales of the Anthropocene's mastery over nature-in respect of agricultural soils? The papers in this special section edited by Anna Krzywoszynska and Greta Marchesi speak powerfully to the emergence of a new chapter in Environmental Humanities: a weaving together of sciences, social sciences, relationality, materiality, and multispecies relations in a manner that surfaces partnership-based processes rather than object-based mastery. The struggle they exemplify is what Isabelle Stengers would call a cosmopolitical struggle-a struggle over what is rational, reasonable, normal, everyday common sense. For reclaiming terra-soil and earthly relations requires struggles over forms of science that have been captured by economic, political, and legal practices that have situated in the web of soil life, the logics of private property, ownership, and control.
South African Journal of Science, 2017
This paper presents our collection methods, laboratory protocols and findings in respect of sewag... more This paper presents our collection methods, laboratory protocols and findings in respect of sewage pollution affecting seawater and marine organisms in Table Bay, Cape Town, South Africa, then moves to consider their implications for the governance of urban water as well as sewage treatment and desalination. A series of seawater samples, collected from approximately 500 m to 1500 m offshore, in rock pools at low tide near Granger Bay, and at a depth under beach sand of 300–400 mm, were investigated for the presence of bacteriological load indicator organisms including Escherichia coli and Enterococcus bacteria. A second series of samples comprised limpets (Patella vulgata), mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis), sea urchins (Tripneustes ventricosus), starfish (Fromia monilis), sea snails (Tegula funebralis) and seaweed (Ulva lactuca), collected in rock pools at low tide near Granger Bay, and sediment from wet beach sand and where the organisms were found, close to the sites of a proposed desalination plant and a number of recreational beaches. Intermittently high levels of microbial pollution were noted, and 15 pharmaceutical and common household chemicals were identified and quantified in the background seawater and bioaccumulated in marine organisms. These indicator microbes and chemicals point to the probable presence of pathogens, and literally thousands of chemicals of emerging concern in the seawater. Their bioaccumulation potential is demonstrated. In respect of proposed desalination, the findings indicate that desalinated seawater must be subjected to treatment protocols capable of removing both bacterial loads and organic chemical compounds. The terms of reference for desalination plants must specify adequate testing and monitoring of chemical compounds as well as microorganisms in the intake and recovered water. Drinking water supplied by the proposed seawater desalination plants should be carefully tested for its toxicity. In respect of water management, our findings suggest the need for the City of Cape Town to move to an integrated water and sewage management plan that treats urban water, including seawater, as a circulating system that is integral to the health of the City, and which excludes marine outfalls.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017
A selection of contributions curated and introduced by Kristina Lyons with Juno Salazar Parreñas... more A selection of contributions curated and introduced by Kristina Lyons with Juno Salazar Parreñas and Noah Tamarin, providing critical perspectives on decolonization, decoloniality and science studies.
“Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS” includes contributions by the following scholars.
Lesley Green on “Thinking Decoloniality with Perlemoen”
Kristina Marie Lyons on “On the Situated Politics of Analytic Symmetry”
Tania Pérez-Bustos on “A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STS”
Juno Salazar Parreñas on “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of Decolonization”
Banu Subramaniam on “Recolonizing India: Troubling the Anticolonial, Decolonial, Postcolonial”
Noah Tamarin on “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities”
The ongoing political drama of ecological regime shift as enacted by J. lalandii (also known as W... more The ongoing political drama of ecological regime shift as enacted by J. lalandii (also known as West Coast Rock Lobster, or reef) offers a way in to thinking about how creatures are going to negotiate the conditions of their survival in altered environs.
Extensive environmental damage has been documented in relation to hydraulic fracturing in states ... more Extensive environmental damage has been documented in relation to hydraulic fracturing in states that have adopted the technology for shale gas extraction in the USA. Multiple forms of evidence that seek to testify to that damage have been presented in the public record in: courts by plaintiffs; social science journals by ethnographers and qualitative researchers; in-depth reports by journalists and documentary filmmakers, and scientific journals. The 'gold standard' of proof of harm in US public debates and courts of law, however, has been based on the provision of scientific data that demonstrates incontrovertible causality, based on the assumption that hydraulic fracturing itself does not cause harm. Given that the US evidentiary regarding shale gas extraction is relied upon heavily in South African public debates, including in Parliament and the courts, an assessment of the terms and conditions affecting the production and evaluation of evidence is relevant and important for South African democratic debate. This paper offers such a reflection. Finally, the chapter argues that where science and other forms of scholarly production proceed in the belief that they are not affected by or separate from prevailing knowledge practices and concepts defined in the neoliberal knowledge economy, they risk losing the ability to respond to fundamental challenges to their independence.
Develops an ethnographic approach to fracking, arguing that creating wasteland zones establishes ... more Develops an ethnographic approach to fracking, arguing that creating wasteland zones establishes a necropolitical ecology in the Karoo, which is an extension of the ideas of modernity that rendered South Africa's humanity and landscape as a resource for coloniality. Thinking through how to do an ethnography appropriate to the anthropocene, the paper argues that current engineering discourses on "how to frack better" constitute a cosmology of cement, on the erroneous belief that cement serves to control all states of matter. Matters of state, it is argued, are not appropriate to controlling states of matter where they are to be affected in perpetuity, as in the permanently toxified water that is a byproduct of fracking processes. As such, the idea that legal regulatory frameworks are adequate to the task of managing fracking, comes into question. The paper concludes with an exploration of alternative energy production in the Karoo: the idea of "mining today's sky" rather than mining the solar energy that was deposited in the pre-Jurassic era in the karoo.
Resilience 1.2, Jun 30, 2014
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Book Review by by Ebunoluwa Popoola, Dept of Public Law at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria
Contested Ecologies: Reimagining the Nature-culture Divide in the Global South offers an interven... more Contested Ecologies: Reimagining the Nature-culture Divide in the Global South offers an intervention in the conversations on ecology and on coloniality, and on the ways in which modernist thought, with its bifurcation of nature and culture, constitutes ‘ecology’ within a very particular politics of the cosmos. The chapters in this collection contest the framework of knowledge that has deadlocked nature and culture, tradition and modernity, scientific and indigenous and in doing so makes a case for the value of rethinking knowledge beyond the nature-culture divide.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Crain Soudien
Acknowledgements
1 Contested ecologies: Nature and knowledge
Lesley Green
a first intervention: Nature versus Culture
2 Notes towards a political ontology of ‘environmental’ conflicts
Mario Blaser
3 Economic development and cosmopolitical re-involvement: From necessity to sufficiency
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
4 On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections
Harry Garuba
a second intervention: space, time, life
5 About ‘Mariano’s Archive’: Ecologies of stories
Marisol de la Cadena
6 The day-world hawkri and its topologies: On Palikur alternatives to the idea of space
Lesley Green
7 Cultivating krag, refreshing gees: Ecologies of wellbeing in Namaqualand
Joshua B. Cohen
8 Are petitioners makers of rain? Rains, worlds and survival in conflict-torn Buhera, Zimbabwe
Artwell Nhemachena
9 Metaphors for climate adaptation from Zimbabwe: Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and the marriage of water and soil
Christopher Mabeza
a third intervention: sciences and publics
10 Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward doing difference generatively and in good faith
Helen Verran
11 The making of Sutherlandia as medicine
Diana Gibson and Sanjay Killian
12 Conservation conversations: Improving the dialogue between fishers and fisheries science along the Benguela Coast
Tarryn-Anne Anderson, Kelsey Draper, Greg Duggan, Lesley Green, Astrid Jarre, Jennifer Rogerson, Sven Ragaller and Marieke van Zyl
13 Cape Flats Nature: Rethinking urban ecologies
Tania Katzschner
14 Spotting the leopard: Fieldwork, science and leopard behaviour
Ian Glenn
15 Contesting ecological collapse: Rapa Nui, the island at the end of the world
David Turnbull
16 Closing remarks from the conclusion of the Contested Ecologies Writing Workshop, September 2011
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
About the contributors
Index
Uploads
Environmental Crisis and Higher Education by Lesley J F Green
This site, produced by Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, addresses approaches and pedagogies, and curates the contributions of African thought leaders, civil society, activists and academics into an experimental curriculum.
Decoloniality, Environmentality, Anthropocene by Lesley J F Green
“Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS” includes contributions by the following scholars.
Lesley Green on “Thinking Decoloniality with Perlemoen”
Kristina Marie Lyons on “On the Situated Politics of Analytic Symmetry”
Tania Pérez-Bustos on “A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STS”
Juno Salazar Parreñas on “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of Decolonization”
Banu Subramaniam on “Recolonizing India: Troubling the Anticolonial, Decolonial, Postcolonial”
Noah Tamarin on “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Crain Soudien
Acknowledgements
1 Contested ecologies: Nature and knowledge
Lesley Green
a first intervention: Nature versus Culture
2 Notes towards a political ontology of ‘environmental’ conflicts
Mario Blaser
3 Economic development and cosmopolitical re-involvement: From necessity to sufficiency
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
4 On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections
Harry Garuba
a second intervention: space, time, life
5 About ‘Mariano’s Archive’: Ecologies of stories
Marisol de la Cadena
6 The day-world hawkri and its topologies: On Palikur alternatives to the idea of space
Lesley Green
7 Cultivating krag, refreshing gees: Ecologies of wellbeing in Namaqualand
Joshua B. Cohen
8 Are petitioners makers of rain? Rains, worlds and survival in conflict-torn Buhera, Zimbabwe
Artwell Nhemachena
9 Metaphors for climate adaptation from Zimbabwe: Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and the marriage of water and soil
Christopher Mabeza
a third intervention: sciences and publics
10 Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward doing difference generatively and in good faith
Helen Verran
11 The making of Sutherlandia as medicine
Diana Gibson and Sanjay Killian
12 Conservation conversations: Improving the dialogue between fishers and fisheries science along the Benguela Coast
Tarryn-Anne Anderson, Kelsey Draper, Greg Duggan, Lesley Green, Astrid Jarre, Jennifer Rogerson, Sven Ragaller and Marieke van Zyl
13 Cape Flats Nature: Rethinking urban ecologies
Tania Katzschner
14 Spotting the leopard: Fieldwork, science and leopard behaviour
Ian Glenn
15 Contesting ecological collapse: Rapa Nui, the island at the end of the world
David Turnbull
16 Closing remarks from the conclusion of the Contested Ecologies Writing Workshop, September 2011
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
About the contributors
Index