history – Centre for Environmental Humanities

Investigating non-human histories of Lake Titicaca

Posted on September 4, 2024 by paul.merchant

Dr. Olivia Arigho Stiles, Research Associate – Rethinking Values of the Anthropocene

Figure 1. Donkey in Sampaya on Easter Sunday, April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

Over March and April I spent four weeks in Bolivia as part of the British Academy-supported Rethinking Values of the Anthropocene project, overseen by Dr Paul Merchant at the University of Bristol and colleagues further afield.

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined in 2000 by scientists to refer to a new epoch in which human activity has irrevocably changed the earth’s make-up. It has since entered the ‘eco-humanities’ as a way of thinking about climate change, resource extraction and ecological destruction in the past, present and future. How does the Anthropocene intersect with histories of colonisation, for example? What power relations – racial, spatial, gendered – does it call into question? Is the ‘Anthropocene’ even a meaningful concept?

Scientists now don’t think so, at least officially. In March, a committee of geology experts voted down a proposal to declare that the Anthropocene started in the 1950s.

But beyond the scientific establishment, the Anthropocene continues to open pathways to reimagine human relationships with the non-human in the climate crisis. In this vein, I am exploring the Anthropocene from the perspective of a lake in the high Andes, and investigating how Lake Titicaca’s other-than-human histories might enrich or disrupt conceptions of the Anthropocene.

To do this, in April I set about interviewing community activists, government officials and scientists to understand their perspectives on climate change, as well as the change over time in socio-ecological relations at the Lake.

I began in Copacabana, a small town and sacred place on the Bolivian edge of Lake Titicaca: the highest navigable lake on earth, seemingly as vast as an ocean and so close to the sky that the clouds merge with the Andean cordillera in the distance. It is the birthplace of the Inca creator Viracocha and now a site of pilgrimage for the Virgin of Copacabana.

Figure 2. Lake Titicaca. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

When I arrive it is Holy Week. Choripan (hotdog) stalls line the lakeside, which is barely visible for beer stalls and tents housing the revellers who have come from far and wide. A miniature pony dressed in a Mexican sombrero stands patiently next to a churros stall. Outside the basilica, a line of large minibuses and cars snakes through the crowds. People are lining up to ch’allar (to bless) their new vehicles which are festooned with flowers.

On Easter Sunday I visit a small village nearby called Sampaya, marked by abandoned dwellings. It is harvest time, and people are busy in the fields on the heavily terraced hillsides.

Later, in the warm, softer glow of the late afternoon sun I walk up the calvario in Copacabana. The steep path is deserted apart from an elderly man, Pedro*[1], who suddenly begins talking to me. He is from Copacabana but like many Bolivians, worked for several years in Argentina. I ask him about how the lake has changed in his lifetime, whether it is more polluted these days. He pauses before telling me that the pollution is more on the Peruvian side. In Bolivia there is less mining so the waters are purer, he says. Pedro tells me that agriculture is disappearing from the fertile shores of the lake, as more and more young people leave to work in the cities where they can earn more money. The lake is drying up. Where before it used to stretch up to the hills, now the water is receding.

Figure 3. Llama on Isla del Sol. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

In Copacabana I also meet Rosa Jalja, a journalist and leader of Mujeres Unidas en Defensa del Agua, a group of 40 women from Aymara and Quechua-speaking communities in Bolivia and Peru who for the past decade have mobilised against pollution. Rosa and the other women have spearheaded anti-pollution and anti-litter campaigns, lobby political authorities and conduct community workshops on climate change in the area. We meet inside the headquarters of Radio Copacabana, the local radio station which broadcasts in Spanish and Aymara where Rosa has a show. I leave feeling very in awe of Rosa Jalja’s energy and commitment.

Figure 4. Rosa highlights an advert for pesticides in an edition of El Campo newspaper, Yr. 3, No.29. Dec. 1968-Jan.1969.

In the nearby village of Sahuiña, I visit Ana Aguilar, who once masterminded a ‘frog observatory’, an eco-tourism project dedicated to the enigmatic giant frog native to Lake Titicaca, known in Aymara as k’aira. It has since closed down, but Ana took me in a rowing boat to see a trout farm, one of many which are scattered across the lake. Trout were introduced from the US around 1940, and to a large extent, have had a destructive impact on the lives of the frogs and native fish species. In this project, I draw together the entangled and conflictive lives of frogs, fish and humans, all imperilled in different ways by changes we might call the Anthropocene.

Figure 5. Ana Aguilar leads the way. In Sahuina, April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

Figure 6. Ana prepares the rowing boat, Sahuina. Photo, author’s own.

Back in La Paz, I conduct a series of interviews with NGO workers, political authorities and scientists based at the main public university, UMSA. At the Cota Cota campus in the south of the city, I visit the lab of Erick Loayza, a doctoral researcher studying the decline of native fish in the lake.

Figure 7. Fish specimens in Erick Loayza’s lab, UMSA. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

Figure 8. Bag of fish specimens in Erick Loayza’s lab, UMSA. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

I return to Copacabana to attend a two day meeting hosted by the Lake Titicaca Authority (ALT), an organisation jointly run by Peru and Bolivia which oversees the management of the lake and its resources, combining an interest in anti-pollution, tourism and heritage.

The meeting brings together local people from villages around the lake, political representatives and technical experts. We hear from representative of the village of Tiwanaku that tourism figures are vastly down on pre-pandemic times, and they’re hoping Instagram influencers might help. In Humamarca, a local guide tells us they hoping their bird viewing platform, the only one in the lake, will bring more visitors.

Figure 9. Meeting hosted by ALT, 16 April 2024, Copacabana.Photo, author’s own.

Figure 10. Rosa Jalja (Mujeres Unidas) addresses the ALT meeting. Photo, author’s own.

At lunch, I am sat next to a man from a village near Copacabana opposite Isla Koati (also known as Isla de la Luna). We discuss fishing, and he tells me sadly, like many other people I speak to, that there are less fish now in the lake. It is difficult to make a living from fishing or from agriculture.

Representatives of the tourism board in Yunguyo on the Peruvian side join us, and the discussion turns to linguistic and cultural differences between Aymara-speaking communities on the Peruvian and Bolivian sides of the lake. The lake is an ‘espacio transfronterizo’ (transboundary space), a place that both divides and connects across countries, languages and local cultures. In the age of the Anthropocene, the lake might also be said to connect across deeper cleavages of time. From the residues of mining contamination in the colonial period to sewage pollution from the twentieth century rise of urban centres such as El Alto, the lake resists easy periodisation. By centring its human and non-human entanglements, we might reflect on what, and who, is valued in the Anthropocene.

Figure 11. Author with Bolivian flag, Sahuina, April 2024

[1] pseudonym

New book: Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages by Lucy Donkin

Posted on March 16, 2022October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

Dr Lucy Donkin (History of Art, University of Bristol) has published a new book on holy ground in the middle ages.

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces.

The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.

Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people’s identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

Cornell University Press are offering a discount of 30% using the code CSVS2022 at combinedacademic.co.uk.

Three history lessons to help reduce damage from earthquakes

Posted on June 5, 2020October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

Daniel Haines shares his blog post, first posted on the Cabot Institute blog.

Earthquakes don’t kill people,’ the saying goes. ‘Buildings do.’ There is truth in the adage: the majority of deaths during and just after earthquakes are due to the collapse of buildings. But the violence of great catastrophes is not confined to collapsed walls and falling roofs. Earthquakes also have broader effects on people, and the environments we live in.

Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.

Can history help?

Building against disaster

Buildings are a good, practical place to start.

Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.

NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.

This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.

Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.

In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.

But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.

Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.

Long-term health impacts

Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.

History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.

For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.

Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.

From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.

This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.

Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate.
Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.

Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.

History in action

In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.

These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.

The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.