A plant that doesn't belong there. Environmental justice and autochthony in southern Sardinia Greek

Abstract

On the edge of a protected Natural Park in southern Sardinia, in an area recently affected by fires and floods, intense eucalyptus logging for the use of the local biomass-fuelled  power plant results in the loss of a substantial part of the forest heritage.  While for beekeepers these cuts mean the disappearance of their nectareous basin, others see it as an opportunity to get rid of “a plant that doesn't belong there.” Thanks to ethnographic research on beekeeping carried out in a multimodal approach, the article debates how conceptions of “nature” (e.g., the opposition between native and allochthonous species) occasionally produce positive evaluations of local forestry practices that with other plants would be read as environmental disasters. The debate, set in a multispecies perspective, seem to bring out the limitations and aporias of some conceptions of “environmental justice” in the Capitalocene era.

Keywords: Beekeeping, autochthony, Sardinia, eucalyptus, biomass