Future Pasts in an Apocalyptic Moment: A Hybrid Analysis of 'Green' Performativities and Ecocultural Ethics in a Globalised African Landscape

This project investigates how different ideas of the past, in particular imagined past relationships between people and nature, are conditioning the futures being urgently created now in pursuit of 'sustainability' and the avoidance of 'environmental crisis'. It explores tensions between traditional, indigenous and local conceptions of human/nature relationships, on the one hand, and new conceptions underlying modern market-based methods for creating 'green' futures, on the other. We will do this through in-depth field research in western Namibia - where three of our team members have long-term research experience - and in collaboration with our local institutional partner, the National Museum of Namibia.

Problems such as 'environmental change' and 'sustainability' are complex and require analysis that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Our research, therefore, applies methods and theory from Cultural Geography, Ethnomusicology, Environmental History, Philosophy and Social Anthropology. Our field location encapsulates tensions present in many contemporary circumstances. Here, old and new conceptions of human/nature relationships are colliding spectacularly as resources such as uranium are extracted from land which is home to some of the oldest cultures on earth, as well as to highly valued (and endangered) animal and plant species.

Through engaging with diverse actors in corporate, state, NGO and local contexts, we will explore the environmental change understandings informing a range of new 'green' entities that are being created, marketed and exchanged so as to generate sustainability. We will juxtapose these 'sustainability objects' with ways that landscape and other species are conceived and remembered in local indigenous culture, as encoded in stories, song, dance and healing rituals. Our selected, interconnected and commodified 'green things' are, i) 'green uranium' (so-called because of its alleged contribution to low-carbon generation but also because the impacts of its extraction are to be 'offset'), ii) biodiversity offsets (in which environmental harm arising from development in one location is offset by conservation activity elsewhere), iii) natural products derived from indigenous plant knowledge, iv) animal hunting trophies, and v) KhoeSan rock art heritage.

This research will enhance humanities understandings of how new 'green' objects act, and are perceived to act, to 'perform sustainability', and thereby to transfer past social and environmental health forwards into the future. We will complement this by in-depth analysis of perceptions regarding environmental change, assisted by the collation and exhibiting of repeat landscape photographs. In these, contemporary photographs reveal how landscapes have changed (or not) since early archival images, dating back to the late 1800s, were made.

A key and iterative component of our project is the exhibiting of images, audio and video material from our research, both at the Museum in Windhoek and as mobile exhibitions in varied field contexts within Namibia. We intend this to stimulate open discussion regarding ideas of environmental change and sustainable futures, and thereby generate further research data. We will also foster public engagement through a project website with the URL www.futurepasts.net.

Results from these interconnected research strands will be synthesised and theorised in a further strand. This will examine the philosophical and ethical issues arising at the interfaces between different culturally-bound understandings of human/nature relations. Our work here will flesh-out a new cross-disciplinary domain of 'ecocultural ethics' that considers sustainability imaginaries as entwined with the cultural production of particular pasts, presents and futures. This juxtaposition of competing ethical principles underlying different sustainability perspectives will draw together the empirical material analysed in the rest of the project.

Our project engages with diverse peoples with a range of interests in environmental change and sustainability in the geographical landscape of our research (western Namibia). They include local people (primarily Damara and Herero), NGOs (in environmental conservation and tourism), business leaders (in natural products industries, tourism lodge management, trophy hunting enterprises, and uranium mining), and Namibian representatives on national and international environmental policy bodies (such as the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme). We already have connections with a range of these actors, locations and organisations, which we will foster through this research.

As such, our research will be relevant for a range of potential beneficiaries with interests in projections of environmental change, perceptions regarding culture/nature relationships, and the ways these inform environmental understanding and sustainability policy solutions.

The project is designed to facilitate and emphasise public engagement activities in Namibia at specific moments during the research (see Work Package 5). These will enhance possibilities for both the sharing of our research material and the co-production of knowledge with diverse actors, as delineated above. Our public engagement activities and events will take place in a range of contexts. They will combine exhibitions both housed by the National Museum of Namibia in Windhoek, with travelling presentations that can take place in the specific sites of our research, including in local communities and at business operations such as mines and tourism sites.

We will also create a public project website, incorporating popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These online media are used in Namibia as elsewhere, and will enable interested parties, including non-academic users, to learn of and engage with our research. This will facilitate the creation of an online social network with interests in our research foci. Material published and made available online will be subject to ethical consideration, in accordance with our ethical policy.

Through these activities we intend to generate and reach a broad and expanding range of users of, and beneficiaries from, our research (see Pathways to Impact statement). We envisage that non-academic users of the research will derive benefits in the following ways:

- Exposure to a diversity of views and perspectives regarding environmental change and sustainability possibilities will foster greater understanding regarding the contemporary environmental moment and the concerns and desires of different groups of people.

- Public exhibitions and events in varied Namibian contexts that are designed to foster creative sharing and community memory regarding environmental change and sustainability trajectories, will enhance community and public knowledge regarding diverse perspectives on environmental issues.

- The creative and cultural industries in Namibia, via our collaborations with the National Museum of Namibia and with Mamokobo Film and Production, will benefit from the generation of content for public exhibitions and presentation events.

- Environmental policy-makers in all sectors will benefit from enhanced engagement and information regarding public understanding of environmental change and sustainability trajectories. All members of the research team already contribute to public policy development and debate (see CVs) and we will extend such activities through the proposed research.

Our public engagement activities will be accompanied by regular possibilities for feedback and evaluation by participants so as to facilitate the assessment and reporting of impacts. This will also permit us make improvements to our public engagement activities as the project progresses.