Forthcoming Publications
Drafts of the below papers have been completed and are awaiting publication. Please get in touch if you’d like to see any of them.
Military Snails: Multispecies Solidarities in Hawai‘i
For Roman Bartosch, Ursula K. Heise, and Kate Rigby (eds) Unsettling Extinction: Biodiversity Loss and the Environmental Humanities.
Mākua Valley on the island of O‘ahu is a place in which snail conservation, the US Army, and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) claims to access land and cultural sites, are all brought into dynamic tension. Over roughly the past 100 years, the Army have used this valley for live-fire and other exercises, excluding people while also blowing up and burning the habitat of critically endangered land snails and other species. Snails and some local people are drawn together here into a powerful multispecies solidarity centered on efforts to conserve the biological and cultural heritage of this place in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of both colonization and militarization. In telling this story, this chapter aims to draw out how the history of struggles over this valley was shaped by a particular snail species, Achatinella mustelina: by its specific evolution, life history, and ecology. In so doing, it aims to highlight the importance of multispecies solidarities, of the particular possibilities that different, other-than-human, beings open up and foreclose as allies in struggles for more livable worlds. The chapter aims to unsettle extinction through both its focus on the agency of non-humans in their own conservation, and through its consideration of possibilities for mobilising conservation in ways that empower, rather than undermining, forms of Indigenous sovereignty.
Eucalyptus Histories and Futures: Living and Dying with Hydrological Infrastructures
Co-authored with Emily O’Gorman and Grace Karskens. Forthcoming in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. For a special issue on “Multispecies Landscapes” co-edited by Pierre du Plessis, Zachary Caple, Thom van Dooren, Ursula Münster, Sophie Chao, and Sara Asu-Schroer.
The Camden White Gum (Eucalyptus benthamii) is a threatened species of Eucalypt found in the Sydney region, Australia, on the ancestral lands of the Gundungurra and Dharawal peoples. While the species faces a range of threats, in recent years its future has become even more uncertain with a proposal by the state government to raise the wall of the Warragamba Dam, and in so doing drown the largest remaining population found in the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. A few scattered stands of these trees can also be found elsewhere, growing along the Nepean River in what is now a predominantly rural and suburban area in Western Sydney. But they too are threatened in a range of ways, including by the changing hydrology of this landscape which has impacted on the reproduction of these flood-reliant trees. This article attends to the biology of this tree: its life history and ecological relationships with the wider landscape, in particular with the flows of water that are at the heart of both the life and death of this species. Drawing on environmental humanities and STS research on infrastructures and the layered more-than-human histories that produce landscapes, this article explores how past and contemporary settler Australian relationships with water, and its control and regulation, are unravelling possibilities for ongoing life for the species in a way that is likely to only increase in an era of escalating climatic uncertainty.