Occurrences in the Midst
I have been driving this road many times over the past weeks, but still I become awkwardly shocked by all sensations washing over me as the green blanket of lush olive plants devolves into a landscape of bared branches, cut-down canopies, and uprooted trunks. It is a view hard to get used to, one even more difficult to experientially cope with. Heartfelt and sinister, the shifting scenery experienced driving from Ostuni down to Lecce, one realized in terms of destruction and devastation, intellectually and emotionally, appears truly troublesome to take in. Vigorous and ghostlike, paradox as it occurs, changes in the setting emerge immensely difficult to conceive of and, frankly, it appears wildly unimaginable to think that the landscape around Ostuni could ever become like this. Equally difficult to imagine, that this landscape once appeared like the one around Ostuni. Yet it did. Yet it most likely will. Surreal as it all occurs, it unfortunately emerges just a matter of time, for it appears to be no remedy for the spreading of the plant bacterium Xylella fastidiosa that causes desiccation of the olive plants; thus, the collapse of the green blanket covering the landscape.
The above deeply felt, I sense sorrow occupying my being driving through the landscape. I do so momentarily for witnessing the vast and withering effects of Xylella fastidiosa, this vector-transmitted multispecies occurrence which since its first detection in Gallipoli in 2013 has caused roughly 21 of the 60 million olive plants rooted in Apulia to dehydrate; equally momentarily, for in such a direct and embodied manner experiencing precarities inherent to a monocultural industrialized landscape such as the one my research concerns. I feel a sort of despair for being aware of the hardships and affects correlated this assemblaged presence. Experiencing the setting, trying to grasp the conditions by which it has come to be alongside those it consequently mobilizes, regarding for instance ecological and economic vulnerabilities and endurances, I think about the many people who lost their livelihood. Contemplating how a great many of the olive oil mills in the region has closed and how many orchards now grow void of human cultivation, I also consider the struggles undertaken to nevertheless try to make a living in the wake of this particular disturbance, such as by making and selling woodfire out of dried-out trees, such as done by the producer that I am currently on my way to spend the day with. From a more critical point of view, I also think about emergences of ecological and economic ruins, of the precarities and troubles correlated the current day and future becoming of Apulian olive cultivation and olive oil production, and how such can be analytically approached with reference to multiple anthropological works that in one way or another deals with similar or related issues (e.g. Galvin 2018; Gordillo 2014; Haraway 2016; Omura 2019; Peluso and Watts 2001; Strathern 2018; Tsing et al 2017; Tsing 2015). The combined wording defunct liveabilities marks my reflections. Defunct liveabilities.
Driving through acres and acres of desiccated orchards in the splendor of an emerging day occurs quite dramatic, bewildering almost. It appears strange experiencing the vibrant beauty of the sunrise contrasting the bleak olive plants such as I in this moment do. The perplexed sentiment is added to by the fact that I usually feel excitement over the gorgeously shifting patterns created by the movement of bare branches against the sky; also by the fact that I am used to experience this phenomena in the cold climate of Swedish winter, not in 23 degrees heat, for which reason the partly blossoming grounds accompanying the warmth of the scenery here appears fairly odd to my being, too. Presently driving in this place, I remember how I during my second reconnaissance trip last December found the presence of bare canopies in the midst of blooming surroundings an utmost peculiar encounter: to my being, it occurred quite remarkable sensing the smell of spring to the look of summer and winter at once. I am slowly getting habituated to both the warmth and the spring-summer-winter feel of the scenery, what I cannot seem to get used to though, is the sharp contrast in finding myself in the barren, cut-down and uprooted olive groves covering – used to cover (!) – the southern part of the Apulian landscape while seeing the intensely green dotted surface on Google Maps. The immense discrepancy experienced encountering the scenery from within juxtaposed to that from the satellite imagery of above come across almost as difficult to wrap my head around as the reality that the lush landscape of northern Apulia within a few years could become the concurrent desiccated reality of the southern part. Defunct, yet livable. Surreal, yet tangible.
As the bacterium occurs at once experientially challenging to cope with and vigorously important to explore, from human and beyond-human perspective, for the people I work with and for me, I will over the year to come engage it further in thinking with, for instance, the assemblaged and multispecies character of its becoming, the glocal trajectories of its entry and presence, the disturbances and vulnerabilities it correlates, the effects and mitigating measures mobilized by it and more. Thinking with spatiotemporal dynamics of its existence, I aim to explore the defunct liveabilities of its occurrence.
REFERENCES
Galvin, Shaila S. 2018. Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 233-249. Doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050232.
Gordillo, Gastón R. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Omura, Keiichi, Otsuki, Grant J., Satsuka, Shiho, and Morita, Atsuro (eds.). 2019. World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds. New York: Routledge.
Peluso, Nancy L., and Watts, Michael (ed.). 2001. Violent Environments. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2018. Opening Up Relations. In Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (eds.). A World of Many Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 23-52
Tsing, Anna L., Swanson, Heather, Gan, Elaine, and Bubandt, Nils (eds.). 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
