Seminar (TURBA) "Drones in the forest: Surveillance technologies in biodiversity conservation"

Program

Abstract

Unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly used to monitor conservation environments: in forests drones map changes in canopy cover; count wildlife; capture footage to convey to wider publics, and track illegal activities. Such practices raise important political issues. Critically, the potential to surveil or document human activities can translate into new kinds of discipline and control in areas already articulated through conflict and/or racialised spatial ordering. Further, scholars of political ecology and (feminist) Science and Technology Studies (STS) have long sought to unsettle ‘the view from above’ and 'the view from nowhere' enabled by technologies like drones, linked with militaristic uses of aerial technologies. Drones were, after all, developed in contexts of war, and can intensify atmospheres of fear through their very presence, as well as providing a means to collect incriminating evidence of those (purportedly) violating rules. Drones may also participate in establishing racial stereotypes in relation to illegal activities like poaching or illegal timber-cutting, legitimising further rounds of military intervention. My ethnographic work in the Maya Forest, Andean Forest, and Amazon provide evidence of these dynamics, while also opening out onto important alternative perspectives. Drones are also being used by rural and Indigenous communities to constitute authority and expertise, and to defend territorial rights. Some Indigenous communities articulate drones in these contexts in relation to bird and insect companions, linking their surveillance capacities with situated ways of more-than-human knowing and being. Further, dialogues with Indigenous practitioners of ‘non-modern’ aerial technologies (e.g. shamanistic use of plant-guides; constructing earthworks for a ‘gods’ eye view’) propose modes of knowing forest worlds from above (and from the side, from all sides) that are grounded in invitations for care, not military domination. Through ethnographic vignettes, I explore the politics and ethics of the aerial view, posing the question: is it possible to decolonise a drone?

Dr Naomi Millner

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, UK. Naomi is a political geographer and political ecologist who explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global ‘environments’ in the context of changing global agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict. Her work explores how conservation has become a vehicle for the militarisation of conflicted areas – but also how rural communities are using conservation technologies (e.g. drones) to defend tenure rights and to articulate other visions of environmental futures. Naomi is currently involved in interdisciplinary projects in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru exploring the use of drones by communities and other actors. Naomi has a new co-authored book with Patrick Bresnihan due out in spring 2023: All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour, and Movements beyond Environmentalism.