Dicenta, Mara (2020) BEAVERS, SETTLERS, AND SCIENTISTS: ENTANGLEMENTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND (IN)JUSTICE IN AUSTRAL PATAGONIA, 1940s-2020s. Doctoral thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Abstract
My historic-ethnographic dissertation, "Beavers, Settlers, and Scientists: Entanglements of Environmental Science and (In)justice in Austral Patagonia, 1940s-2020s," follows the history of beavers in Tierra del Fuego (TDF) to study the racial and colonial politics that have shaped environmental sciences in the region, as well as the ecological and social consequences of such racializing visions. During the 1940s, the state introduced settlers and animals into TDF, including beavers from Canada, to modernize and whiten a land that was deemed empty and uncivilized. Today, global actors are trying to eradicate the beavers for harming the native ecosystems of TDF. During my two-year fieldwork, I analyzed environmental concepts, films, maps, and textbooks in various scientific disciplines to show how the racialization of nature helped to naturalize injustices in TDF. I found that environmental visions not only transform how people know and intervene in nature, but also in society: while national sciences in the 1940s argued that introducing foreign species and white settlers would end up "dissolving" any trace of non-whiteness, today's global visions on nature and indigeneity are displacing local articulations of nature, subjectivity, and politics. This research advances decolonial, feminist, and interspecies justices that link social and environmental reparation. In TDF, I found that concerns over environmental harm were intertwined with intergenerational and interspecies histories of violence. For instance, some biologists started to interrogate their role in a settler-society when trapping, shooting, and boiling beavers for being invasive; others refused to ally with local indigenous activists because their support to beavers' eradication was not for conservation but for land decolonization. The way in which nature has become a proxy for politics in TDF challenges the idea that naturalizing something is a way to obscure its politics. In TDF nature politics demand intersectional justices that account for the right of plural subjectivities, natures, futures, and forms of earth care to exist.
Metadata
Item Type: | Thesis |
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Subjects: |
Science > Environmental sciences and engineering > Animal rights Social and human sciences > Social sciences > Anthropologists Countries and country groupings > Americas and the Caribbean > Argentina Politics, law and economics > Politics and government > Colonization Science > Environmental sciences and engineering > Ecology Science > Environmental sciences and engineering > Environment Science > Scientific approach > Ethics of science Science > Scientific approach > History of science Social and human sciences > Ethnic questions > Indigenous peoples Science > Environmental sciences and engineering > Nature conservation Science > Geography and oceanography > Regional geography Science > Science and research management > Science and development Science > Scientific approach > Science and society |
Depositing User: | Dra. Mara Dicenta |
Date Deposited: | 17 Mar 2021 15:47 |
Last Modified: | 17 Mar 2021 15:47 |
URI: | https://repositorio.esocite.la/id/eprint/485 |
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Filename: Dicenta_Beavers, Settlers, and Scientists_(2020).pdf - Published Version Download (7MB)
Description: Tesis Doctoral
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0