Patrick Robinson

Patrick is a second-year PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Arizona. His research concerns environmental monitoring as a means of resistance to large-scale mining in the Andean cloud forests of northwest Ecuador. Patrick is especially interested in how encounters between diverse conceptualizations of “natural” entities shape, complicate, and sometimes strengthen transnational environmental social movements.
 

Project: What is "Nature," now? Science, Alliance, and Informed Local Self-Determination in Intag, Ecuador

The megabiodiverse cloud forests of the Intag Valley are the site of a longstanding conflict over the prospect of large-scale mining. For years, a diverse coalition of anti-mining activists has sought to prevent this prospect via the systematic collection of water quality and other ecological data. While most agree that these data may prove useful in their struggle, some local activists also conceptualize “natural” entities as living subjects that cannot be known entirely by scientific means; in other words, there is limited internal agreement as to what “nature” is. The coexistence of diverse conceptualizations of “natural” entities has important implications for the efficacy of the anti-mining movement. In this research, I use a mixed-methods approach to investigate the nature and extent of mining-induced contamination; the role of science within the anti-mining movement; and the "political ontology" of alliances between local activists and outside environmentalists.