Abstract
Rural areas of the temperate European countries are affected by climate changes that are not always perceived by local communities. We focus on how local discourses on biodiversity, in our case wild flora, provide insight into what people see as changing in their environment. We conducted ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation, on perceptions of biodiversity change in Bas-Comminges, a rural area of France where agriculture consists primarily of extensive mixed farming. Wild flora management there is shaped by traditional agricultural practices, rural and agricultural policies, and warmer temperatures and other climatic changes. We will show that (1) wild flora is seen as growing and expanding due to changes in local institutions in charge of green spaces, changes in agriculture, and warmer temperatures; (2) discourses on those impacts reveal different types of knowledge and uses of local flora; and (3) social conflicts are emerging around local flora management, and these conflicts reveal tensions between different objectives for the land within a changing community. We will demonstrate that warmer temperatures are not always linked to global climate changes by local residents and that environmental and social changes cannot be apprehended separately from climatic ones. More broadly, we want to understand how rural populations are facing and adapting to the major transformations of their land and society, and we show that conflicts can be used by different types of local residents to take back control of their land and maintain their communities. This research is part of a larger interdisciplinary and comparative program on local perceptions of environmental change funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR).
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Notes
- 1.
We make a distinction between “indicator” and “revealer.” We consider that an indicator helps people make sense of an unknown change, whereas a revealer helps people understand already known mutations of land or society. In this paper, we focus mainly on revealers.
- 2.
But see the innovative paper by Gaüzere et al. whose research endeavors to link the impacts of climate and land-use changes to dynamics not of flora but avifauna (Gaüzère et al. 2019).
- 3.
PIAF (Programme interdisciplinaire sur les Indicateurs Autochtones de la Flore et de la faune) is a project funded by the ANR Young Researcher Program #ANR-13-JSH1–0005-01 from 2014 to 2018: http://www.anr-piaf.org. PIAF brings together a research team from six research institutes and ten research laboratories and is coordinated by Anne Sourdril (CNRS, UMR7533 Ladyss). The team is composed of (by laboratory and alphabetical order) A. Sourdril, Émilie Andrieu, Cécile Barnaud, Marc Deconchat, Wilfried Heinz, and Sylvie Ladet (Inra UMR1201 Dynafor); Nadia Bélaïdi (MNHN UMR7206 Éco-anthropologie et Ethnobiologie); Éric Garine, Émilie Guitard, and Jean Wencélius (Université Paris Nanterre, UMR7206 LESC); Christine Raimond (CNRS, UMR8586 Prodig); Michel de Garine-Wichatitsky (Cirad); Sylvain Aoudou Doua (Université de N’Gaoundéré, Cameroon); Brian J. Burke (Appalachian State University, USA); Ted Gragson, Meredith L. Welch-Devine (University of Georgia, USA); and Hervé Fritz and Chloé Guerbois (CNRS, UMR5558 LBBE).
- 4.
The Zone Ateliers are CNRS platforms for long-term research on environmental issues. There are 14 official ZAs. The ZA Pygar was officially recognized in 2017, but long-term and interdisciplinary research has been conducted in the area since the 1980s; the ZA Pygar is specialized in the study of spatial and temporal dynamics of socioecological systems. See: http://www.za-inee.org/.
- 5.
“House” is defined as a “moral person, keeper of a domain composed altogether of material and immaterial property, which perpetuates itself by the transmission of its name, of its fortune and of its titles in a real or fictive line held as legitimate on the sole condition that this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of alliance, and most often, of both together” (Lévi-Strauss 1979, translated by Gillespie 2007: 33). House-centered approaches are used by anthropologists in kinship studies throughout the world, e.g., France, Algeria, Indonesia, and South America, to look at the reproduction of social organizations as domestic groups or local societies (Augustins 1989; Cunningham 1964; Bourdieu 1973; Rogers 1991). Researchers are trying to renew house-centered approaches by looking at the house in its material and spatial dimensions (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Gillespie 2000; Hamberger 2010).
- 6.
A Communauté des Communes is a federation of communes sharing a framework within which local tasks are carried out together. It is “a public institution of intercommunal cooperation bringing together several municipalities in one piece and without enclaves. Its purpose is to associate municipalities within a solidarity area, with a view to developing a common project for development and spatial planning” (Article L 5214–1 of the General Code of Territorial Communities).
- 7.
Loi pour la Nouvelle Organisation Territoriale de la République, adopted in 2015, in order to reduce the number of intercommunal institutions and to make them more efficient and economical.
- 8.
Newcomers are also gathering fruit from wild fruit trees in hedges or on woodlots, such as nuts, apples, or quinces, when those trees were no longer used by the local residents. Native residents were gathering and using fruit in the hedges until the 1970s–1980s, but with the intensification of the agricultural work and the lifting of the hedges, those uses have been abandoned during the last decades. Native residents remain really interested in mushroom gathering (Sourdril et al. 2012; Blanco et al. 2018).
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This material is based upon work supported by the ANR Young Researcher Program #ANR-13-JSH1-0005-01.
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Sourdril, A., Andrieu, E., Barnaud, C., Clochey, L., Deconchat, M. (2020). Observing “Weeds” to Understand Local Perceptions of Environmental Change in a Temperate Rural Area of Southwestern France. In: Welch-Devine, M., Sourdril, A., Burke, B. (eds) Changing Climate, Changing Worlds. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37312-2_5
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