Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Impacts of Glacier Recession and Declining Meltwater on Mountain Societies

Glacierized mountains are often referred to as our worlds water towers because glaciers both store water over time and regulate seasonal stream flow, releasing runoff during dry seasons when societies most need water. Ice loss thus has the potential to affect human societies in diverse ways, including irrigation, agriculture, hydropower, potable water, livelihoods, recreation, spirituality, and demography. Unfortunately, research focusing on the human impacts of glacier runoff variability in mountain regions remains limited, and studies often rely on assumptions rather than concrete evidence about the effects of shrinking glaciers on mountain hydrology and societies. This article provides a systematic review of international research on human impacts of glacier meltwater variability in mountain ranges worldwide, including the Andes, Alps, greater Himalayan region, Cascades, and Alaska. It identifies four main areas of existing research: (1) socioeconomic impacts; (2) hydropower; (3) agriculture, irrigation, and food security; and (4) cultural impacts. The article also suggests paths forward for social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences research that could more accurately detect and attribute glacier runoff and human impacts, grapple with complex and intersecting spatial and temporal scales, and implement transdisciplinary research approaches to study glacier runoff. The objective is ultimately to redefine and reorient the glacier-water problem around human societies rather than simply around ice and climate. By systematically evaluating human impacts in different mountain regions, the article strives to stimulate cross-regional thinking and inspire new studies on glaciers, hydrology, risk, adaptation, and human–environment interactions in mountain regions.

Greening the Economy: Articulation and the Problem of Governance in the Andes

Abstract The “green economy” is increasingly being promoted as a way of creating socially and environmentally viable forms of development. Using the specific case of an attempted nongovernmental organization (NGO) intervention in a minor peasant community in the Recuay region of the Peruvian Andes, this article raises the question of how to get from green economy as a theory of development to green economy as a tool of governance. The article is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the region. Peru has experienced a decade of rapid growth, but this impressive progress hides the fact that large numbers of rural poor have been left untouched by the national economic boom. An examination of the household economy through the idea of “ecologies of production” underscores the social, economic, and environmental embeddedness of Andean household economies and explores pathways to the market. Articulation and governance are the main concerns when it comes to understanding the ways in which the peasant economies are maintained through environmentally embedded social relations, which in turn govern how natural resources and ecosystems are managed. The article concludes by pointing to three issues of importance with regard to a green economy: (1) In conditions of poverty, economically risky investments are rarely sought; (2) matters of governance inform production; and (3) articulation to the market is crucial in terms of production input and output.

Tactics of the governed: figures of abandonment in Andean Peru

Abandonment has become a performative idiom in Andean Peru, where it retains its purchase despite the investments of the state. Local development is tied to the desire to be governed. In spite of prolonged state presence, the villages’ relationship to authorities is continuously and persistently figured as one of abandonment: villages are abandoned because someone is deliberately holding them in such unfortunate conditions. To figure abandonment in village politics is to draw on this idiom as an effective means of both communicating the historical experience of governance and putting forward morally grounded claims to local authorities. The idiom of abandonment is therefore both effective and affective as a critique of governance and a claim to citizenship.

Environmental history and the understanding of causal relations

Environmental history and the understanding of causal relations Frank Sejersen a b , Kirsten Hastrup c , Nick Brooks d , Mats Widgren e , Laura Vang Rasmussen f & Mattias Borg Rasmussen g a Department of Anthropology, Waterworlds Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Strandgade 102, DK-1401 Copenhagen K, Denmark b Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Waterworlds Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Strandgade 102, DK-1401 Copenhagen K, Denmark c Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Oster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen, Denmark d School of World Art Studies and Museology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK e Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden f Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Oster Voldgade 10, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark g Department of Anthropology, Waterworlds Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Oster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark Version of record first published: 14 Jan 2013.

Rewriting conservation landscapes: protected areas and glacial retreat in the high Andes

Glacial retreat reveals the unsettling effects of anthropogenic climate change, and challenges deeply seated cultural ideas about static landscapes. Glaciers have thus emerged as key signifiers of environmental loss. Because they are the outcomes of Westernized visions of the relationship between nature and culture, protected areas are important sites for understanding how notions of the Anthropocene come to reshape ideas about the future of glaciated landscapes. This article explores one particular conservation initiative, that of the establishment of the tourist and educational facility known as the Route of Climate Change in Peru’s Huascarán National Park. It asks how we can understand the production of conservation landscapes in a context where the framing of glaciers as an endangered species denies their fluctuating dynamics and imparts to them a directionality toward irreversible change. Focusing on the contentious production of conservation landscapes through interaction between the park administration and a local community, the article is based on ethnographic fieldwork consisting of semi-structured interviews (48), informal conversations, and participant observation over multiple visits to the area between 2013 and 2015. The study finds that while the production of new conservation narratives certainly resituates the sites in time and place, it also produces uncertain environmental futures that may be molded to secure a rapprochement between park administrations and communities based on mutual alignment of conservation and community practices. It is thus argued that an underlying shift in orientation—from preserving what is to countering what might otherwise come to be—results in the production of new imaginaries about conservation landscapes that are both a condition and an outcome of protected area management in times of glacial retreat.