BEAVERS, SETTLERS, AND SCIENTISTS: ENTANGLEMENTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND (IN)JUSTICE IN AUSTRAL PATAGONIA, 1940s-2020s

My historic-ethnographic dissertation, "Beavers, Settlers, and Scientists: Entanglements of Environmental Science and (In)justice in Austral Patagonia, 1940s-2020s," follows the history of beavers in Tierra del Fuego (TDF) to study the racial and colonial politics that have shaped environmental sciences in the region, as well as the ecological and social consequences of such racializing visions. During the 1940s, the state introduced settlers and animals into TDF, including beavers from Canada, to modernize and whiten a land that was deemed empty and uncivilized. Today, global actors are trying to eradicate the beavers for harming the native ecosystems of TDF. During my two-year fieldwork, I analyzed environmental concepts, films, maps, and textbooks in various scientific disciplines to show how the racialization of nature helped to naturalize injustices in TDF. I found that environmental visions not only transform how people know and intervene in nature, but also in society: while national sciences in the 1940s argued that introducing foreign species and white settlers would end up "dissolving" any trace of non-whiteness, today's global visions on nature and indigeneity are displacing local articulations of nature, subjectivity, and politics. This research advances decolonial, feminist, and interspecies justices that link social and environmental reparation. In TDF, I found that concerns over environmental harm were intertwined with intergenerational and interspecies histories of violence. For instance, some biologists started to interrogate their role in a settler-society when trapping, shooting, and boiling beavers for being invasive; others refused to ally with local indigenous activists because their support to beavers' eradication was not for conservation but for land decolonization. The way in which nature has become a proxy for politics in TDF challenges the idea that naturalizing something is a way to obscure its politics. In TDF nature politics demand intersectional justices that account for the right of plural subjectivities, natures, futures, and forms of earth care to exist.