The Nature-Culture-Climate Continuum: Intercultural collaboration to mitigate anthropogenic ecocide in a time of climate crisis.
Through an intercultural, eco-acoustic collaboration with Wampís people in the Peruvian Amazon, this project aims to understand and mitigate the acts of ecocide which threaten the welfare of the Wampís peoples’ culture, sustainable livelihoods and the globally important and biodiverse environment in which they live (Rodríguez & Vega 2022). The project’s engagement will be underpinned by a theoretical engagement with human-environmental relations and conceptions of ‘nature’.
Centred on the co-production of an eco-musical performance with Wampís people, this project will co-create and evaluate the potential for novel soundscape methods to support entangled issues of ecological conservation and cultural resilience locally, within the frame of wider climate crises.
This approach will involve co-collection of rainforest soundscape recordings, that will be explored creatively as well as scientifically, as a means to monitor biodiversity health, geo-locate illegal deforestation to support the development of just, resilient and sustainable territorial conservation strategies. The sound recordings will also form the foundation for the co-production of musical performances that explore the dialogical interactions between the local socioecology and wider global ecological health, termed as The Nature-Culture-Climate Continuum methodology, thus supporting the resilience and preservation of Wampís eco-cultural heritage while also allowing for an academic exploration of their ontological perspectives of nature and ‘inter-species sociality’ (Haraway 2003: 4-5). The underlying goal of these interconnected activities is to use academic, methodological and engaged innovations further to support Wampís peoples’ desire to live sustainably and protect their environment in the wider context of the contemporary global environmental, biodiversity and climate crisis.