Séminaire “Extraire, échanger, empêcher. La mise en ressource des milieux” | Living with a Dying Lake: Rural Precarity and the Politics of Climate Change Discourse in Bolivia

Paris : 3 mai 2024 10h00-12h00.

Ci-dessous l’annonce de la prochaine séance du séminaire “Extraire, échanger, empêcher. La mise en ressource des milieux“, organisée en partenariat avec l’Atelier Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur l’Environnement (SciencesPo).

L’invité sera Tom Perreault, DellPlain Professor à Syracuse University, pour son intervention Living with a Dying Lake: Rural Precarity and the Politics of Climate Change Discourse in Bolivia.

La séance aura lieu le vendredi 3 mai, de 10h à 12h, au CERI, 28 rue des Saints-Pères 75007 Paris, salle S1.

Résumé de l’intervention :This paper examines the recent drying of Lake Poopó, in the central Bolivian Altiplano. While numerous fishing cooperatives and indigenous campesino communities were negatively affected by the lake’s drying, arguably the greatest impact was experienced by the three communities of Urus indigenous peoples, located on the lake’s eastern shore. As a consequence of their historical marginalization – which began in the pre-Hispanic era, intensified during the Colonial period, and has continued into the present – Urus have virtually no land of their own and have historically depended on fishing, hunting and gathering in the lake and surrounding wetlands. With the drying of the lake, Urus communities have experienced high levels of out-migration and deepening immiseration. This paper examines the causes and consequences of the lake’s drying and considers the broader political economic context of regional socio-environmental transformation. While climate change undoubtedly plays a role in the lake’s drying, it has been exacerbated by large-scale water withdrawals for mining, agriculture, and urban uses. Thus, the power relations involved in contemporary patterns of resource use, in combination with regional environmental change, have combined to magnify the vulnerability of fragile ecosystems and already marginalized populations.

Le séminaire est ouvert, mais une inscription est nécessaire depuis la page de l’événement : https://www.sciencespo.fr/agenda/ceri/fr?event=5392