Disasters as Meshworks: Migratory Birds and the Enlivening of Doñana's Toxic Spill

Abstract

The aim of this article is to revisit disasters as materially enlivened events. The sociology of disasters has usually rested upon two assumptions. First, that disasters are phenomena circumscribed in time and space. They are geographically situated and time-specific, thus their effects can be controlled and compared. And second, that the main actors involved in disasters are humans and institutions, the basic units of sociological research and theory. These principles, taken together, help in converting disaster into objects for cultural inquiry, but at the expense of diluting their material surplus. Based on the work of Tim Ingold, and drawing on the case of the Aznalcóllar ecological disaster in Doñana, one of the most damaging environmental disasters in the history of Spain, we propose to define disasters as meshworks in order to fully grasp the vibrant ontology of disasters. More specifically, by focusing on the role played by migratory birds in the enacting of the disaster, we argue that disasters are dynamic realities, difficult to localize and always distributed along disparate scales and actors. Moreover, disasters have a dual reality, unfolding actually and virtually at once -and therefore comprising a form of cosmopolitics rather than conforming to classical political imaginations. Finally, our larger point is to take disasters as opportunities to rethink our ways of living together.

It’s all about the birds! Non-human actors’ situational power in creating conditions for human engagement

“…Other elements could be added to this analysis, like the ecological corridors of the area, swamp frogs or urban gardening. The birds serve here as a way to illustrate the understanding of a situational ecology of practice, the set of relationships between different actors and their multiple qualities and composition among different scales of activities (Rodriguez-Giralt et al, 2014: 53) that bring into question the human-created institutions such as planning.…”

“…This perspective pays attention to the dynamic realities in urban environment. These dynamics cannot be reduced to negotiated or socially constructed reality, or relationships between humans considered or the roles of institutions, but on the immanent and inherent activity that constitutes dynamics and change (Rodriguez-Giralt et al, 2014: 53–55).…”

“…This paralleled the period, which started in the 1960s, when nature enthusiasm and social mobilisation for nature conservation increased among lay people all over the Western world and still continues to do so (cf. Rodriguez-Giralt et al, 2014; Sekericioglu, 2002). The Finnish bird-watchers have gathered bird records and evidence of the ecological change that has happened, and the current status of the pond as an ecologically valuable site is a result of this process.…”

Loudly sing cuckoo: More-than-human seasonalities in Britain

“…Krause, conversely, argues that Kemi River dwellers draw on seasonal categories to point towards the ongoing interplay they encounter through their practical involvement with the world rather than to conceptually order detached material phenomena into discrete periods. Just as Rodríguez-Giralt, Tirado, and Tironi (2014) argue for disasters, seasons for Krause are not discretely bounded events in space and time but relational unfoldings of humans, nonhumans, institutions and physical processes.…”

“…Making seasons is about a whole complex of doings that are responded to and rendered meaningful to others in the meshwork (Ingold, 2011; Rodríguez-Giralt et al, 2014; Whitehouse, 2015). The sprouting of leaves heralds the spring to the farmer, who then acts to plant his own crops.…”