Plants, pathogens, and feral landscapes: ethnoecology and indigenous innovation for the more-than-human Anthropocene

In the history of humanity, plant pathogens have shown capable of erasing entire ecosystems, disrupting economies, redesigning landscapes, and restructuring the political and socio-cultural matrix of entire geographies. Although the phenomenon is not new, the last decades have seen an increase in emerging plant diseases and insect pests, and more invasive species are expected to be on the move as an effect of the cumulative impact of climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. How communities respond - or should respond - to such threats (to their livelihoods, their culture, their knowledge) is therefore a key but nevertheless highly contested issue. Is intensification of agriculture and a higher degree of control over plants, pathogens, and - ultimately - space, under the lead of agricultural experts and advanced technologies, the way forward? Or is a more “relational” agriculture grounded on traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous expertise and bottom-up innovation practices the way to coexist with other living beings that are not necessarily pathogenic but rather become pathogenic under specific socio-environmental conditions? Or, rather, some middle ground position where agricultural sciences and local expertise engage in a productive dialogue for sustainability? This research aims at addressing these questions. By looking at case studies from Italy, Spain and Mexico, and bridging debates from environmental humanities to ethnoecology to innovation studies, the attempt is to provide a historically informed, politically sensitive and ethnographically grounded exploration of some of the unexpected and uncontrolled side-effects of human-made infrastructures in the Anthropocene, together with local (and global) responses by different human communities.