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This is a book review of Hemispheric Indigeneities, a study that sets a series of transnational dialogues on issues pertaining commonalities of Indigenous societies in the Americas (Canada, the U.S. and Latin America).

Proposes and illustrates the concept of 're/membering' as an ontological re-composition of the socionature of the indigenous political body as it relates to the Andean cultures. Defending indigenous territories necessarily implies reviving the hylozoism discarded by eurocentric rationalists and dualistic philosphers.

Water's role in shaping human societies, economies, and cultures extends beyond its status as a natural resource. This water quality, the entanglement of the social and natural, constructs the waterscape. This paper discusses how a community fountain and its replica, in a rural community of Greece, constructed by different agents with divergent motivations and objective, form a waterscape, expressing the socionature of water. Perceptions, imaginaries, values, and connotations are considered in the making and (dis)continuity of the waterscape. Community practices, social and cultural meanings, economy, commodification, collective work, privatisation, memory, and nostalgia are schemes that flow within the waterscape, over time. Flows and uses, livability, and emotions display diverse patterns of sense of rootedness on the community space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a book review of Hemispheric Indigeneities, a study that sets a series of transnational dialogues on issues pertaining commonalities of Indigenous societies in the Americas (Canada, the U.S. and Latin America).

Proposes and illustrates the concept of 're/membering' as an ontological re-composition of the socionature of the indigenous political body as it relates to the Andean cultures. Defending indigenous territories necessarily implies reviving the hylozoism discarded by eurocentric rationalists and dualistic philosphers.

Rights of Nature (RoN) approaches as a tool to protect ecosystems and nature is gaining growing attention in academic and societal debates. Despite this new momentum, theoretical work is increasingly pointing out major problems and uncertainties related to such approaches. Inspired by this critical work, the paper considers RoN as a type of intervention that competes with those of other actors for the control of, and decision-making power over, natural resources. To understand the implications of such interventions, it is necessary to investigate how they shape, and are shaped by, local context. To that end, we look at Rights of Rivers (RoR) cases in New Zealand, Colombia and India. Investigating these well-researched cases, we aim to tease out the material and discursive contestations that emerge from the establishment and implementation of RoR interventions. We then propose an analytical approach that has emerged from our fieldwork and which can be useful in identifying the conflicts and contestations underpinning RoR.

Rights of Nature (RoN) approaches as a tool to protect ecosystems and nature is gaining growing attention in academic and societal debates. Despite this new momentum, theoretical work is increasingly pointing out major problems and uncertainties related to such approaches. Inspired by this critical work, the paper considers RoN as a type of intervention that competes with those of other actors for the control of, and decision-making power over, natural resources. To understand the implications of such interventions, it is necessary to investigate how they shape, and are shaped by, local context. To that end, we look at Rights of Rivers (RoR) cases in New Zealand, Colombia and India. Investigating these well-researched cases, we aim to tease out the material and discursive contestations that emerge from the establishment and implementation of RoR interventions. We then propose an analytical approach that has emerged from our fieldwork and which can be useful in identifying the conflicts and contestations underpinning RoR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maputo, Mozambique's capital city, is marked by clear socio-spatial divisions in access to sanitation services and distributions of environmental risks. Current development plans tend to reproduce these inequalities and suggest that some residents' sanitary needs are more important than others. We contest this logic of differentiation underpinning current interventions in Maputo, revealing how the assumption of different sanitary needs has become normalized and naturalized in the urban environment. We use a genealogy of sanitation in Maputo and the former colonial city of Lourenço Marques to trace how colonial power relations worked to normatively distinguish urban spaces and the people who live in them, making some residents and places more deserving of public protection and investments than others. Drawing on Foucauldian theorizations of governmentality, we analyse colonial authorities' sanitary plans and interventions to show how differences and separations between spaces and bodies were and are produced. Projects of drainage and land reclamation created clean, dry and sanitary habitats for the privileged white few, the existence of which simultaneously created the wet, unhealthy and muddy spaces deemed good enough for the non-white majority. Such manufactured spatial distinctions, in turn, worked to strengthen the perception of differences in cleanliness between people. These differences were consequently mobilized by the Lourenço Marques health service to further mark and legitimize racial segregation. This is how social and spatial inequalities became naturalized in the urban environment over time, culminating in the stark sanitary divides that continue to mark the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience provides a forward-looking framework to understand human–environment relations. Yet, adopted through a system-modelling approach in coupled social-ecological systems, it often reinforces a functionalist vision of the world as an interconnected whole, unable to engage with the multiplicity of people's practices navigating change. I argue for sustained engagement with resilience and propose a socionatural approach to overcome its system-modelling limitations, thinking through the world's entities as inherently social and natural. I discuss how socionatural resilience can be pluralized through assemblage ideas and reflect on the implications that an ontological politics of resilience poses for our conceptual framing and methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue composed of essays that brainstorm the triadic relationship between Covid-19, Race and the Markets, addresses the fundamentals of a world economic system that embeds market values within social and cultural lifeways. It penetrates deep into the insecurities and inequalities that have endured for several centuries, through liberalism for sure, and compounded ineluctably into these contemporary times. Market fundamentalism is thoroughly complicit with biopolitical sovereignty-its racializing socioeconomic projects, cheapens life given its obsessive focus on high growth, by any means necessary. If such precarity seemed normal even opaque to those privileged enough to reap the largess of capitalism and its political correlates, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic with its infliction of sickness and death has exposed the social and economic dehiscence undergirding wealth in the U.S. especially, and the world at large. The essays remind us of these fissures, offering ways to unthink this devastating spiral of growth, and embrace an unadulterated care centered system; one that offers a more open and relational approach to life with the planet. Care, then becomes the pursuit of a re-existence without domination, and the general toxicity that has accompanied a regimen of high growth. The contributors to this volume, join the growing global appeal to turn back from this disaster, and rethink how we relate to ourselves, to our neighbors here and abroad, and to the non-humans in order to dwell harmoniously within socionature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Milk donation in Brazil is shaped by racialized and gendered norms of care labour. • Milk flow is a socionature influenced by colonial-capitalist development. • Donor milk banking devalues milk expression due to concerns over exploitation. • Donor networks are multi-scalar, shaped by processes from the globe to the body. • Feelings of altruism and breast fullness motivate donation. Brazil is currently home to the most extensive, publicly funded donor human milk banking network in the world. While this formalized donor network is only a few decades old, it is haunted by long histories of exploitative wet-nursing in the country. In this paper I examine how Brazil's human milk banking network is a metabolism – founded on social reproductive, breastfeeding labour – that is based in, but also transforms, racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions of milk and motherhood. Drawing on interviews, policy analysis, and participant observation, I argue that this social reproductive metabolism is constituted through: biomedical understandings of milk and lactation; gendered and racialized norms of altruism in the public sphere; legal infrastructures to curb exploitative wet-nursing; public health policies to decrease infant mortality; and embodied sensations of breast fullness. I pay particular attention to how human milk sharing in this context is a multi-scalar metabolism, drawing together global and national health policy with intimate dynamics and affects of breast engorgement and care. Overall, examining this human milk flow demonstrates how metabolisms are embodied, racialized, multi-scalar, and social reproductive in ways that are geographically situated and that relate to, but exceed, commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The supply of clean, soft water was of great importance to towns and cities in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, helping to maintain a healthy population and the resources for industries. Leeds, West Yorkshire, was no exception to this, with the Leeds Corporation in the 1860s looking north of the town to the Washburn Valley for a new supply of water to replace the polluted waters of the Rivers Aire and Wharfe. The construction of four reservoirs in the valley, three between 1869 and 1879 and a further one between 1961 and 1966, irrevocably altered the natural environment. In order to highlight how the actions of a municipal body impacted on the natural environment and the lives of those residing there, this article will examine two case studies: the village of Fewston, which was severely damaged by land subsidence a year after the completion of the original three reservoirs in 1880; and the construction of Thruscross Reservoir and the flooding of West End village in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the U.S National Park Service instituted tours accompanied by armed guards to areas of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which abuts the U.S.- Mexico boundary in southern Arizona. These areas, like the majority of the park's lands, had been closed to the public since August 2002, following the shooting death of National Park Ranger Kris Eggle-allegedly by drug smugglers from Mexico. The re-opening reflected the U.S. Border Patrol's and National Park Service's "retaking" of parts of the park that had been "lost" to unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers. This article explicates the tours' origins, illustrating how they connect present and past in relation to the making of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument as a territory of "nature." In doing so, the article shows that the militarized tours (which ended in September 2014, with the entire park's re-opening) are the understandable extension of the park's doubly colonial logic-as imperialized/settler-colonized space and as the embodiment of a stark division between humans and nature. Overcoming such violence and facilitating the thriving of humans and other-than-humans in the space of OPCNM requires a reworking of "nature" and territory-as well as of the associated human identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphical abstract Highlights • Sociocarbon cycles highlight the relations that comprise forest carbon governance. • REDD+ is creating new relations between C atoms, technology and institutions. • More just carbon governance is possible through sociocarbon analysis. Abstract As Indonesia's REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program unfolds, it is transforming people and places in unexpected ways, and reconfiguring human and non-human processes. In this paper we recognize that forest carbon governance is about much more than carbon. Reflecting on observations from research in Indonesia, we develop the concept of sociocarbon cycles in an effort to move beyond the human-nature dualisms that characterize much work on REDD+. We see carbon governance as emergent sets of arrangements that are continually tested and challenged through the agency of diverse human and non-human actors. Drawing on insights from the literature on socionatures, and in particular on work on hydrosocial cycles, we approach carbon as a socionatural achievement, constituted through relations among institutions, carbon technologies, and C atoms. Our approach recasts REDD+ as an inherently political program, rather than a techno-scientific response to climate change. This, we contend, opens up new ways of conceptualizing and approaching carbon. A sociocarbon lens highlights the importance of social research in reconceptualising biophysical carbon cycles; brings questions of justice and power to the fore (who wins and who loses from carbon initiatives); and aids in understanding what carbon is, how it is made known, and how competing carbon claims are sustained. We suggest that a sociocarbon lens provides multiple points of entry to pursue more just geometries of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological interpretations on the concept of socionature, that is an ontologized nature as represented in the symbolic theurgic meaning of stones, shrines, and sentient nature.

In Vienna, community gardens have multiplied rapidly since 2010, when the city government declared its support for these initiatives. Although of marginal importance in terms of surface and total size of membership, they are highly visible in policy and media discourse. On the contrary, allotment gardens, which cover large surfaces and have a very large membership, barely appear in policy and media discourse. Both types of gardens are managed collectively, but allotment gardens, which are more often located at the periphery, have larger and fenced plots with houses, in contrast to community gardens. Furthermore, community gardens are often associated with ascriptions of diversity, place attachment, communication, creativity, self-responsibility and ecology, which are prominent in the policy and media discourse on Viennese city development as well, while allotment gardens are not. By using photo elicitation and ethnographic methods, our study explains this paradox by interpreting the construction of community gardens as class- based socionatures that express social distinction against allotment gardeners. The results from six representative community gardens with a random sampling of gardeners and comparative interviews in allotment gardens indicate that community gardens are post-Fordist spaces, which are primarily shaped by and attractive to parts of a “creative class”. Allotment gardens are remnants of Fordist spaces that undergo privatization. Our findings can be best put into the context of garden- historical studies by conceptualizing gardens and parks as paradigmatic spaces of the symbolization of socionatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Polis (07176554) is the property of Polis - Revista Academica Universidad Bolivariana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Socjologiczne is the property of Studia Socjologiczne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With a few notable exceptions, urban garden scholarship tends to be either celebratory or critical of the role urban gardens play in wider political, social, cultural, economic and ecological dynamics. Drawing on urban political ecology scholarship, this article explores the question of nature within scholarship on urban gardens. I argue that failing to adequately scrutinize the co-constitutive character of nature and society has led some scholars to overlook the potential for urban gardens to achieve broader socio-political goals, and led others to overstate the potential. Employing a political ecology approach to urban garden analysis clarifies the material and discursive role of nature in urban garden practice, and ultimately contributes to untangling the potential and limits of urban gardens as sites of socio-political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study investigates why low-income Mexican-American residents living in rural and periurban subdivisions (colonias) in South Texas, one of the poorest regions in the United States, are increasingly dependent upon water vending machines as the main source of drinking water despite continued water infrastructure development. We outline a relational framework that builds on current debates within nature-society scholarship to address this paradox. We demonstrate how institutional enclosure--the creation or repurposing of institutions that curtails public participation in water governance--paired with water quality discourses and daily practices, operate over time to enroll residents as neoliberal subjects. We focus our attention on the emergence of the 'water consumer', or the individual who purchases drinking water from the vending machine. This approach addresses the coproduction of political subjectivities in relation to institutional change and how subjectivity reconstitutes a new hydrosocial relationship mediated by the water vending machine. We argue for a relational approach that attends to the production of political subjectivities as central to, not as a result of, the neoliberalization of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the socio-natural relations inherent in the commodification of carbon reductions as they are generated in energy-based carbon offset project activities, and abstracted to wider market systems. The ability to commodify carbon reductions takes place through a socionatural-technical complex that is defined by the material nature of technology's interaction with the atmosphere, local social processes and the evolving governing systems of carbon markets. Carbon is not unproblematically commodified: some projects and technologies allow a more cooperative commodification than others. The examples of a hydroelectricity plant and an improved cookstove project in Honduras are used as empirical case studies to illustrate the difficulties and opportunities associated with the relational aspects of carbon commodification. Drawing upon select literatures from post-structural thought to complement the principal lens of a more structural, materiality of nature analysis, the paper also outlines the reasons why carbon offset reform is needed if offsets are to more progressively engage debates about climate mitigation and North-South development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przeglad Socjologiczny is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the construction of political ecology theory as a key framework in studying the relationship of man and the environment. It notes that a potential theoretical advancement is possible since there exists a tension between the field and its home discipline considering the fact that political ecology is disciplined based. Analyses on human-environment relations from political ecologists are related to key theoretical concepts in human geography including place, region and scale. The author states that human geographers have been debating and retheorizing key concepts as political ecology developed and expanded. He cites that the advancement of political-ecological research and scale theorization can be possible through clear and concise political ecology of scale.

This article addresses the potential of eco-Marxism to enhance understanding of people/nature, or socionatural, relations by focusing on the effect of the so-called natural world on human perceptions of nature and society. Empirical data on hurricane frequency in Honduras suggest that so-called natural phenomena can contribute significantly to human perceptions of their environment. Interview data on an inhabited protected area in Honduras reveal how peasants have been negatively affected by Western-style development. Interview responses suggest that the difficult socionatural conditions in which they are embedded influence both the decisions made by inhabitants and their relation to the environment. The data also reveal that humans are not a homogeneous group but, rather, are affected disparately by socionatural phenomena based on different class and natural/ecological conditions. What emerges from the data are socionaturally determined classes, one of them in a highly precarious socionatural condition that likewise holds the kernel of the desire for social change. The data support a conjunction of political economy's concern with power, social differentiation, and class analysis with concerns about how "nature" inextricably shapes human relations. This article illustrates how efforts made by groups like World Neighbors, a development organization working to make nature a less capricious actor, would be bolstered by an understanding of socionatural class conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent overhaul of the relationship between nature, society and the economy in Southeast False Creek began in the Fall of 1990 when the Vancouver Task Force on Atmospheric Change presented a report entitled Clouds of Change to City Council. The report laid out a set of 35 recommendations designed to set a new course for socionatural transformation in the city by implementing a more comprehensive approach to environmental planning and policy. Among the initiatives outlined in Clouds of Change was a call for the development of a planning and design process aimed at creating a sustainable community on the shore of Southeast False Creek. The subsequent and on-going evolution of the plans to create this “sustainable community” will be used to examine how the vision of Clouds of Change has been forced to interact and react with other concomitant visions of the Vancouver of Tomorrow to produce a new space and a new nature on the city’s waterfront. I will show how various phases of the now decade-old debate over the meaning of “sustainability” in the context of SEFC have exposed the often obscured connections between transformations in the socionatural function of urban space and the process of maintaining and renegotiating the relationship between nature and urban-centered regimes of accumulation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article reconsiders vulnerability to contemporary hazards within the context of a globalizing world, characterized by the hegemony of technocratic and social modernity. It presents findings of a field study conducted on flood hazard in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation in Pakistan. Insights from three intellectual traditions within resource geography—pragmatism, political ecology, and “socionature”—are coupled with the landscape idea within cultural geography to develop the integrative concept of a “hazardscape.” This concept is defined as both an analytical way of seeing that asserts power and as a social-environmental space where the gaze of power is contested and struggled against to produce the lived reality of hazardous places. Analyses of the Lai Nullah hazardscape in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation reveal that flood victims perceive a much greater range of choice in dealing with the flood hazard than do policy makers. On the other hand, flood managers, typically state agents, see a very limited range of choice because of their modernist technocratic engagement with the Lai hazardscape. The hazardscape concept engages the social structural basis of vulnerability as well as the power/knowledge dynamic governing policy and popular discourses on flood hazard in the Lai. Analysis through the lens of the hazardscape helps expand the range of choice and suggests pragmatic solutions to hazardous situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]