Ecological livelihoods of farmers and pollinators in the Himalayas: Doing critical physical geography using citizen science.

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator‐dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio‐environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer‐pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year‐round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed). Key Messages: An ecological livelihoods framework can be productively deployed in an investigation of interdependent farmer‐pollinator relationships.Citizen science tools can help operationalize the triadic conceptual approach of autopoiesis, allopoiesis, and alterpoiesis in an ecological livelihoods framework.The use of citizen science in this context allows us to bridge the epistemological divide between posthumanist and ecological scientific approaches in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]