WEBVTT Kind: captions; language: en-us NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 86% (HØY) 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.600 This video is about a somewhat depressing thought namely the idea that even our most positive and 00:00:06.600 --> 00:00:14.100 virtuous actions like environmental conservation or restoration can be implied in and contribute to 00:00:14.100 --> 00:00:17.250 degradation and destruction somewhere else. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:00:17.250 --> 00:00:25.100 I talked about long-distance ecological relations in the previous video and this kind of ambivalence 00:00:25.100 --> 00:00:32.299 that I like to touch on here is you might say a symptom of a world that is interconnected through a 00:00:32.299 --> 00:00:35.599 lot of these long-distance relations NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:00:35.599 --> 00:00:43.600 so the idea for this one is the concept of shadow ecologies and we have an article this week by 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:51.200 Heather Swanson in which this concept is developed but the classic shadow ecologists argument comes 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:57.500 from a political scientists called Peter Davern he wrote a book called shadows in the forest about 00:00:57.500 --> 00:01:04.900 the relations between Japan and Southeast Asia through timber production he describes their arising 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:05.450 demand NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:01:05.450 --> 00:01:12.900 for timber products in Japan, Japan needed a lot of stuff made of wood like paper for instance and 00:01:12.900 --> 00:01:20.000 that demand for timber led to a massive rise in timber production in the Philippines where a lot 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:26.700 of the tropical forests were turned into plantations for timber production. So his argument 00:01:26.700 --> 00:01:34.400 is about the shadows that consumption in one place can cast on landscapes somewhere else it's about 00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:35.150 how NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 73% (MEDIUM) 00:01:35.150 --> 00:01:43.400 Consumption in one place places environmental burdens upon others and I think that we're all fairly 00:01:43.400 --> 00:01:49.900 familiar with this kind of idea right so it's the idea that our consumption patterns are often 00:01:49.900 --> 00:01:57.600 placing burdens on others that landscapes far away are being degraded for our clothes and food and 00:01:57.600 --> 00:01:59.750 electronics and so on NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:01:59.750 --> 00:02:07.400 but the Swanson article takes this argument in a sense one step further, what if it's not just 00:02:07.400 --> 00:02:12.600 consumption that can bring harm to other people and other landscapes what if even the good things we 00:02:12.600 --> 00:02:21.700 are doing are enabled by landscapes being degraded somewhere else in the world. Swanson goes along 00:02:21.700 --> 00:02:28.000 with the Davern but goes one step further in the first instance as in Davern example demand and 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:29.850 consumption in Japan NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:02:29.850 --> 00:02:39.000 drives degradation somewhere else but the next step is to see that the fact that Japan's needs are 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:47.300 now met by producers somewhere else is itself productive of Japanese landscapes Southeast Asian 00:02:47.300 --> 00:02:50.950 forestry or a Chilean salmon production NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:02:50.950 --> 00:02:58.900 as in Swanson's example may be part of what produces Japanese landscapes in other words it is not 00:02:58.900 --> 00:03:07.800 just the shadows of Japan's consumption but also how those Shadow places in turn shape Japan so 00:03:07.800 --> 00:03:13.700 Swanson takes us through the histories of salmon production in Japan and Chile and how those two are 00:03:13.700 --> 00:03:21.200 linked so after they initially failed to establish establish salmon production in Hokkaido NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:03:21.200 --> 00:03:28.100 Japan then sought out places abroad that could serve as their source of salmon and they found Chile to 00:03:28.100 --> 00:03:37.800 be a promising site. Japan than openly cultivated Chile as a resource Colony as the production site 00:03:37.800 --> 00:03:46.800 for Japan's salmon needs, Chile then became a sacrifice zone or an extraction zone for Japan and the 00:03:46.800 --> 00:03:51.250 Salmon pens damaged the environment there in several ways. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 59% (MEDIUM) 00:03:51.250 --> 00:03:52.149 NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 81% (HØY) 00:03:52.149 --> 00:03:59.100 That's like the first step right and that's the same thing as Davern did in his book and 00:03:59.100 --> 00:04:05.800 the first step is to say that the Chilean landscapes bear the environmental burden of salmon consumption 00:04:05.800 --> 00:04:12.750 and salmon demand in Japan and what followed then was a period when both Hokkaido and Chile 00:04:12.750 --> 00:04:19.200 were producing salmon and this created a surplus which drove down prices and this made it difficult 00:04:19.200 --> 00:04:22.250 to be a salmon producer in Hokkaido but it also NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:04:22.250 --> 00:04:29.100 Opened up to new possibilities and opportunities to reimagine and reshape the production landscapes 00:04:29.100 --> 00:04:36.200 in Japan and so this is where we get to the second step of the argument what is this this Chilean 00:04:36.200 --> 00:04:43.600 sacrifice as Swanson puts it enabling or making possible for Hokkaido NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:50.900 Well it made it possible to imagine the salmon differently not just as a food product and a commodity 00:04:50.900 --> 00:04:57.250 but as an ecological being an animal with a life and with conservation value NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 77% (HØY) 00:04:57.250 --> 00:05:04.200 so for one thing the Chilean sacrifice allowed Hokkaido to situate themselves differently in the 00:05:04.200 --> 00:05:14.200 global network of salmon producers as a more eco-friendly alternative. Chilean farmed salmon allowed 00:05:14.200 --> 00:05:21.500 the fishermen in Hokkaido to reimagine their own salmon as wild and natural and their own practices 00:05:21.500 --> 00:05:27.100 as green and sustainable situating themselves in contrast to the Chilean farm raised NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 82% (HØY) 00:05:27.100 --> 00:05:35.050 salmon so they gradually became eco-friendly fisheries selling for a foreign market outside Japan 00:05:35.050 --> 00:05:42.300 a market that wanted sustainable seafood and this gives us the strange situation where Chile 00:05:42.300 --> 00:05:50.150 produces salmon for the Japanese market while Japan in turn produces salmon for the European market 00:05:50.150 --> 00:05:56.000 but it also involves Japanese fishermen who in order to meet guidelines for sustainability 00:05:56.000 --> 00:05:57.100 certification NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:05:57.100 --> 00:06:04.500 comes to actually transform their local practices in meaningful ways who begin to rework Hokkaido's 00:06:04.500 --> 00:06:11.900 rivers with a focus on restoration there's things like dam removal tree planting they're trying to 00:06:11.900 --> 00:06:19.600 use less fertilizer and they're focusing on returning to normal and natural I should say natural 00:06:19.600 --> 00:06:26.900 spawning salmon, they were in a sense de-industrializing their salmon practices. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 88% (HØY) 00:06:26.900 --> 00:06:35.600 But imagine yourself as the Europeans salmon consumer for a moment knowing now that your choice some 00:06:35.600 --> 00:06:44.000 sustainable salmon leads to a healthier landscape in Hokkaido but 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:45.299 possible NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 77% (HØY) 00:06:45.299 --> 00:06:51.900 That this is only possible because the Japanese market is saturated by cheap and far less sustainable 00:06:51.900 --> 00:06:57.000 Chilean salmon and because of shipping and packing the infrastructures that move salmon from Chile 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:03.200 to Japan and Japan to Europe This locally sustainable even ethical choice seems quite a lot more 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:10.700 complicated when you look at those wider connections so if the first step of the argument is to point to 00:07:10.700 --> 00:07:15.600 the shadows of consumption the second is to point to the Shadows of the NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:07:15.600 --> 00:07:22.900 Conservation efforts that were made possible by the shadows of consumption it's not 00:07:22.900 --> 00:07:27.850 just when you consume that your actions are implicated with an environment 00:07:27.850 --> 00:07:32.900 elsewhere but it can also be when you do something good NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 75% (MEDIUM) 00:07:33.100 --> 00:07:40.000 the concept of shadowy ecologies gets far more interesting and far more troubling once we get to this 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:46.900 point where what we thought were positive and may be innocent and probably good actions in one place 00:07:46.900 --> 00:07:56.300 can still place the burden or rely on the burden having been placed somewhere else in Swanson's case 00:07:56.300 --> 00:08:03.200 we see that salmon landscapes in Japan are less exploited and she describes stuff like eco-friendly 00:08:03.200 --> 00:08:03.799 Fisheries NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:08:03.799 --> 00:08:10.400 Management Zen based conservation and an indigenous rights these are good things right you know a 00:08:10.400 --> 00:08:17.700 great things but in a sense these things are also enabled by Landscapes being exploited in Chile 00:08:17.700 --> 00:08:24.800 Conservation can be reliant on an enabled bio-degradation somewhere else you're restoring a forest 00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:30.100 or a river but that restoration may have been considerably easier by a different forest or river 00:08:30.100 --> 00:08:33.849 being exploited somewhere else so this might all NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:08:33.849 --> 00:08:41.500 give restoration or conservation more of an ambivalence it might also you know disturb the notion 00:08:41.500 --> 00:08:49.700 that conservation is ever completely local it also shows as I think one kind of Cosmopolitan ecology 00:08:49.700 --> 00:08:56.200 a sort of neoliberal kind wher its ties across International lines are many and 00:08:56.200 --> 00:09:03.849 complex where they flow not just from Europe to the new worlds as in the previous NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 84% (HØY) 00:09:03.849 --> 00:09:10.300 video but from the nearly everywhere to nearly everywhere else it shows the co-constitution of 00:09:10.300 --> 00:09:18.200 Landscapes across long distances are implicated we just need each other, a landscape in Japan can be 00:09:18.200 --> 00:09:22.850 produced in part by something that happens in Chile. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 87% (HØY) 00:09:22.850 --> 00:09:29.300 One of the questions we should ask then when we study conservation sites and especially restoration 00:09:29.300 --> 00:09:35.900 sites so places that used to be production and have been restored or turned into consideration sites 00:09:35.900 --> 00:09:42.300 one of the questions we should ask is according to Swanson where has the degradation gone and 00:09:42.300 --> 00:09:48.600 I'm quoting Swanson here "where is the degradation that has made possible these restoration and 00:09:48.600 --> 00:09:51.350 conservation projects?" NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 82% (HØY) 00:09:51.350 --> 00:09:58.500 because production rarely goes away right more often as Swanson writes the sacrifice zone is simply 00:09:58.500 --> 00:10:05.300 moving somewhere else so if you look at an individual local place what you might see is a shift a 00:10:05.300 --> 00:10:11.500 transitioning from a production site to a conservation landscape from a sacrifice sites to a 00:10:11.500 --> 00:10:17.700 restoration side but if we zoom out and look at the world as sort of an interconnected system it 00:10:17.700 --> 00:10:21.400 might look more like a shifting around of extraction or NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 86% (HØY) 00:10:21.400 --> 00:10:28.900 Degradation like some sort of zero-sum game where degradation or extraction is the only constant or like 00:10:28.900 --> 00:10:34.200 a game of whack a mole you know the older arcade game where he punched down moles that stick their head 00:10:34.200 --> 00:10:40.000 up from little holes and when you punch down one there's always another one popping up 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:46.100 somewhere else so you'd punch down one sacrifice zone turning into turning it into a conservation 00:10:46.100 --> 00:10:51.000 side only to have another pop up and when you get rid of that one another one pops up right over 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:51.349 here NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 76% (HØY) 00:10:51.349 --> 00:10:57.400 and the efforts start to seem more futile, but it doesn't have to be such a 00:10:57.400 --> 00:11:03.800 one-to-one relation either as in Swanson's case where there's something like a direct companionship 00:11:03.800 --> 00:11:10.700 between the Chilean landscape and the Japanese one, for instance when when all old coal and 00:11:10.700 --> 00:11:16.200 Timber town like this Australian town named Kali where I spent some time doing field work when it 00:11:16.200 --> 00:11:21.350 shifts gradually from being a place of extraction to a place of conservation NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 77% (HØY) 00:11:21.350 --> 00:11:27.600 and tourism there isn't necessarily one other place that pops up sort of to take over Kali's coal 00:11:27.600 --> 00:11:34.300 mining and timber production but we should still ask where is the degradation site that enables the 00:11:34.300 --> 00:11:41.250 shift for this town and the answer might be that the degradation has been sort of dispersed 00:11:41.250 --> 00:11:47.000 and widely between several Industries in many different places some of the burden might have been 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:51.300 shifted onto Southeast Asian forests when NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 74% (MEDIUM) 00:11:51.300 --> 00:11:56.300 Kali's Forest became national parks but some might also have been shifted on the other kinds of 00:11:56.300 --> 00:12:02.500 building materials such as concrete and steel and the burden of coal is shifted on to other sources of 00:12:02.500 --> 00:12:13.500 power such as wind power or maybe maybe oil somewhere else and none of which are 00:12:13.500 --> 00:12:20.400 completely benign and innocent and so the burden of production enables 00:12:20.400 --> 00:12:21.349 the coal mining NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 81% (HØY) 00:12:21.349 --> 00:12:27.600 Town to become a site of consideration would be widely shared dispersed through a large 00:12:27.600 --> 00:12:35.100 International network of power production and yet you know this is not to say that we should should 00:12:35.100 --> 00:12:41.900 keep mining coal of course it is instead to say that this place like all places are shaped by 00:12:41.900 --> 00:12:48.600 long-distance ties and sometimes those ties are easy to locate like in Swanson's case between 00:12:48.600 --> 00:12:51.300 Chile and Japan and other times these NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 87% (HØY) 00:12:51.300 --> 00:12:57.700 are extremely widely dispersed and difficult to pin down NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:12:57.900 --> 00:13:06.000 and so this all sort of evokes a sense of interchangeability and we should be wary of moving too far 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:12.200 in that direction I think so places can become less like specific localities and more like just 00:13:12.200 --> 00:13:18.300 side so either extraction or consideration there's a tendency to regard places as production 00:13:18.300 --> 00:13:25.300 sites a tendency to see the world as composed not of unique local places but as a series of 00:13:25.300 --> 00:13:28.600 potential production sites we might think of NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 75% (MEDIUM) 00:13:28.600 --> 00:13:35.000 This as an assumption that makes shifts like the shifting salmon production from Japan to Chile 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.100 possible and even more stark examples of this way of thinking about places and how the world is 00:13:41.100 --> 00:13:48.900 interchangeable can be found in environmental accounting and so this is the extreme expression of a 00:13:48.900 --> 00:13:55.800 logical place you might say and you all know the notion of the carbon footprint idea that 00:13:55.800 --> 00:13:58.550 all of our actions constitute a burden we NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 82% (HØY) 00:13:58.550 --> 00:14:04.200 place on the world and the atmosphere so with carbon accounting we get them the idea that this 00:14:04.200 --> 00:14:10.600 burden can be made up for somewhere else and so that when you build a city you can make up for that 00:14:10.600 --> 00:14:16.700 by planting some trees somewhere else and this creates an equivalence between places everywhere is 00:14:16.700 --> 00:14:24.900 part of the same whack-a-mole game being either emitters or holders of carbon either sources or 00:14:24.900 --> 00:14:28.600 carbon sinks so nowhere is locality NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 86% (HØY) 00:14:28.600 --> 00:14:33.400 Nowhere is just a specific place distinct and unique and different from everywhere else instead 00:14:33.400 --> 00:14:41.300 everywhere is carbon either as a sink or source so these carbon accounting imaginaries are sort of 00:14:41.300 --> 00:14:49.700 like an abstractions that can render place and locality irrelevant with abstractions like carbon the 00:14:49.700 --> 00:14:58.550 forest is simply a carbon sink and you can swap one carbon sink for one in a different place without NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 75% (MEDIUM) 00:14:58.550 --> 00:15:02.400 anything being lost and in that imaginary NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 75% (MEDIUM) 00:15:02.400 --> 00:15:08.300 so what do we take from all this you know is there's nothing that's innocent anymore is 00:15:08.300 --> 00:15:14.600 there nothing that's unambiguously good and I think the tricky thing is that the world is set up in 00:15:14.600 --> 00:15:19.000 such a way that even when you move towards conservation this is something that is going to open up for 00:15:19.000 --> 00:15:25.600 degradation somewhere else or that move itself may only be an option because of degradations somewhere 00:15:25.600 --> 00:15:33.150 Else the move towards conservation in Japan is only an option in this situation because you have NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:15:33.150 --> 00:15:39.600 degraded landscapes in Chile or you have production sites that cause degradation in Chile. Things 00:15:39.600 --> 00:15:44.500 are set up in such a way that when you become a carbon sink this can open up for others to be a 00:15:44.500 --> 00:15:51.100 Emitters and but again what the concept shows us the concept of shadowy ecologies what it suggests is 00:15:51.100 --> 00:15:56.500 not just that conservation isn't a good thing or that we shouldn't do conservation that's not 00:15:56.500 --> 00:16:02.950 that's not right instead the point is that we live in a world whose pattern and connections NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 74% (MEDIUM) 00:16:02.950 --> 00:16:11.300 cause some deep and sort of unsettling ambivalences and we should recognize those tensions we 00:16:11.300 --> 00:16:16.300 have to sit with the fact that our conservation projects rests on the foundation of some other 00:16:16.300 --> 00:16:23.500 places being degraded we should make those connections visible and also another thing is 00:16:23.500 --> 00:16:30.200 that we live in a world that has a drive towards abstraction and placeslessness we should we should 00:16:30.200 --> 00:16:33.000 realize that and try to counter it NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:39.900 some ways I think Swanson would say and to add to that those two things together create a tension so 00:16:39.900 --> 00:16:45.700 on the one hand if you were to insist on Hokkaido being a completely local place a 00:16:45.700 --> 00:16:51.300 singular local landscape that we should value for its own sake then we would be blind to its 00:16:51.300 --> 00:16:58.200 implication to its complicity with the exploited landscape so Chile as a Swanson points out many 00:16:58.200 --> 00:17:02.750 conservation projects are our myopic or nearsighted NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:17:02.750 --> 00:17:11.000 in exactly that way and undercut them their desire for a more sustainable world but on 00:17:11.000 --> 00:17:17.500 the other hand if we were to see Hokkaido as simply the shadow of Chilean exploitation as simply a 00:17:17.500 --> 00:17:24.849 conservation site made possible by degradation somewhere else then NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:17:24.849 --> 00:17:31.800 if you were to see only its global interconnections and none of its local specificity you would be 00:17:31.800 --> 00:17:38.100 playing right along with the neoliberal tendency towards abstraction the same tendency that 00:17:38.100 --> 00:17:43.700 drives this whack-a-mole game shifting around of exploitation right, 00:17:43.700 --> 00:17:50.100 it's that we have to be able to see places as local and singular while also seeing their implication 00:17:50.100 --> 00:17:55.200 with places somewhere else and how they're tied into the world system.