Chaired Brita Brenna
Hugo Reinert, "My Friend, the Nodule: Some notes on the deep time(s) of seabed mining"
Taking as its focus and point of departure a small, deep-sea polymetallic nodule retrieved from the “abyssal plains” of the Cook Islands Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), at a depth of five kilometers, the paper explores some of the strange, intersecting temporalities of deep seabed mining: a mode of resource extraction, as yet mostly prospective, premised on industrial-scale “harvesting” of mineral nodules from the deep ocean environment.
The practice is controversial, both locally and internationally. After decades of regulatory uncertainty and delay, matters have recently come to a head and over the course of July 2023, in the weeks leading up to the Lifetimes conference, global talks will be held that finally settle its status. In the blink of a geological eye, mineral deposits that have formed in the light-less deep over millions of years may (or may not) suddenly become available for capitalist extraction and transformation into goods and commodities such as batteries, solar panels, or paint.
Stood at this temporal juncture, holding a small nodule in its hand, the paper asks: what tools, methods and imaginational resources may exist to help us make sense of this moment—to attune to the depths that are in play, and respond adequately?
Bio: Hugo Reinert is Associate Professor in the Cultural History of Nature at the University of Oslo. He dabbles in time studies, critical heritage studies and environmental humanities.
Małgorzata Zofia Kowalska "Stonewort stories for the polyrhythmic world"
Stoneworts are engineer species in the Natura 2000 site where I conduct my research. They form communities of benthic meadows that indicate but also induce high clarity of water. They play a vital role in oligotrophic, calcareous ecosystems and attract growing interest in hydrobiology and limnology. Ancient and evidenced as close precursors of all land plants (and therefore enjoying an honorary status of macrophytes), Charophytes are complex-structured algae. Vulnerable and endangered by anthropogenic pressure, they might simultaneously be destined to outlive humans.
Fascinating as they are, stoneworts are virtually unknown beyond the expert circles. Although some are red-listed, they remain elusive and unrecognised by the local community. My research focuses on drawing attention and experimenting with different forms of attuning to underwater engineers while challenging the dominant understanding of nature conservation as environmental management. Stoneworts here are understood as cocreators of the common world and "generative and agentive co-constituent(s) of relationships and meaning in the society" (Krause and Strang 2016: 633). I am interested in ways we can represent different times and different "world-making projects" (Tsing 2022) in more-than-human ecologies – and how these representations can serve to create a more polyrhythmic, relational, and regenerative social reality.
Anna-Katharina Laboissière: "Fallow soils and exhausted attunements"
The practice of intentional fallowing, edged out by the advent of synthetic fertilisers in the 19th century, nevertheless continues existing as an object interest in agricultural policy and microbiology in recent years; it responds to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy. Fallowing variously functions as a technique for agricultural productivity through improved soil fertility, an additional arrow in conservation biology’s quiver of potential restoration tools, and as a promising resource of micro-organisms that could be used to engineer novel plant holobionts. In the process, fallowed soils emerge as sites where a variety of interests and projects converge and where these take up, replay, and extend questions of productivity and idleness, growth, and alternatives to economic expansion.
This paper takes a poetic detour through fallowed ground, asking what kinds of attunements or mis-attunements to exhausted and extracted temporalities are forged at the confluence of technocratic soil management and microbiological attention.
Laura McLauchlan: "Intergenerational attunements: embodied remnants of relations-past in openings and closings between kinds"
What does it mean to open to other beings, or to close oneself off from them? Returning to snippets of a decade of ethnographic moments with humans variously in love with and disdain for a range of other organisms, this presentation will trace strands of attunement that variously render human and other beings strange or idealised, including those labelled and labelling others as ‘crazy cat people’; hedgehog ladies variously loved and suspected; children weeping over their hand-raised steer sold for slaughter; rodeo men weeping for a stampede of Broncos; and a love of chickens that may or may not make human loves and rhythms easier. With a particular interest the ancestral or intergenerational as well as contemporary embodied forces in these pulls and repulsions, this presentation will consider the implication of other-than-human attachments for our ways of moving through the world, as well as for what it might mean to meet with generosity.
Bio: McLauchlan is visiting fellow at the University of North South Wales. Her area of speciality is transformative change, particularly with respect to environmental and interspecies care and connection. She is trained in multispecies anthropology, informed by material feminisms, environmental humanities scholarship, medical anthropology and trauma studies. Her work, which ranges from studying hedgehog-human relations, to tree-planting and pedagogical practice, pays ethnographic attention to emergent and marginal ontologies and practices that might allow for greater responsiveness to the interconnection of life.