8.18. Transmitting Biomemories

How did social memory of the weather in the past foster debates on the consequences of deforestation and urbanization, prompting intellectual elites and public opinion to question the model of nature exploitation and environmental change in Brazil? The paper analyzes a compilation of literary and journalistic sources comprising stories, opinion pieces, scientific reports, daily chronicles, and personal memoirs. These sources have in common the perception of the past as an original paradise, with climate change being an expression of loss in authenticity and degradation of the environment due to the advancement of modernization. The social memory built by perceptions of climate change gave origin to simultaneously nostalgic and frightening tales, rooted in shared experiences. First, the estrangement towards the urban environment conveyed feelings of unfamiliarity and disruption. Second, the growing perception that “once it was much colder” connected itself to the awareness of the environmental damage caused by the predatory model of exploitation of nature in Brazil. It increasingly shared space with the development projects, which were also on the rise during this period. From this moment on, the discourse in favor of economic growth at any cost suffered pressure from different social agents, albeit initially in a marginal way. In a whole set of perceived damages to the environment, climate change was virtually cumulative and catastrophic. The work of collective memory turned itself, therefore, into creating narratives capable of building and sharing the experiences of the cold and the present perception of a forever-changed weather.

What does it mean to teach for the future using materialized memories, also referred to as archives, from the past and present? Given today’s unpredictable Climate Change realities, how can formal or informal education prepare today’s young students to respond to all the challenges and opportunities they face as a result of these extreme environmental changes? To better assist young people to tackle this crisis, the dissertation study titled “Climate Ready, Set, Go! Investigating the Role of Archival Instruction in K 12 Disaster Education” proposes a different approach to learning about the extreme ecological changes undergone by our environment through the use of archives in K 12 instruction. In the United States, archives when used as a teaching tool tend to function mostly as visual aids in textbooks or simply as graphical garnishment against a text. More recently archives have been employed as a tool to teach historical literacy, information seeking, critical evaluation, digital platform navigation, visual conceptualization, and civic participation (Garcia et al, 2019). But research has not yet questioned the use of archives for socio-emotional learning as it relates to human nature relationships and how differing relationships impact attitudes or actions against the Climate Crisis. In response, this paper looks at the results from the curriculum design analysis that placed archives as instructional tools in a K 12 summer course using document sampling and self study teaching inquiry. Findings pinpointed areas of opportunity and improvement for instruction design. This pivot from primarily “historical thinking” to one that considers the relational and affective dimensions of memories embedded into physical things is noted as a powerful shift for teaching across age, discipline and personal investigations. Archives as vessels for memories can perhaps close the divide between the history of land and the non human and those of humans.

This paper explores the intersections between memory and environmental justice, and posthuman perspectives in two Latin American novels separated by a century: José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1924) and Itamar Vieira Júnior’s Tortuoso arado (2019). Both texts portray environments—the Amazon rainforest and the semi-arid Brazilian sertão—not merely as settings but as agents that preserve, transform, and transmit memory across human and non-human temporalities. Drawing on frameworks from environmental humanities, I argue that these novels reconsider anthropocentric notions of historical narrative by foregrounding ecological and collective forms of remembrance. In La vorágine, the rainforest functions as an archive of capitalist and extractive violence, where the memory of exploitation exceeds human testimony. In Tortuoso arado, the land embodies Afro-Brazilian colonial, ancestral and spiritual memory, revealing the ever-present enslaving past and seeks to redefine the land and its cultural meanings, reconstructing identity and collective memory as acts of political resistance against silence and erasure. By reading these narratives through the lens of environmental justice, this paper suggests that Latin American literature articulates alternative modes of eco-memory to illuminate how remembering environmental violence can open paths toward reparation and ecological responsibility.

This paper starts with a critical interrogation of the concept of “biocultural memory”, coined by Toledo and Barrera-Bassols (2008) to refer to the way in which long-standing knowledge of the environment, preserved by Indigenous and peasant cultures across the globe, serves to sustain agrarian production systems. Biocultural memory, as these scholars note, has historically been under threat for various reasons: the long history of colonialism, the imposition of industrialised agriculture since the 1950s (i.e. the Green Revolution) and, in recent decades, globalisation. However, a reflection that remains largely absent from Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ work is how the evolution of biocultural memory is shaped by forms of political and economic conflict. Therefore, this paper proposes that what I will call “agroecological memory” is not a pre-existing repertoire of biocultural knowledge that is readily available, and unilaterally transmitted from the past to the present across familial and communitarian lineages; but rather an ever-evolving relationship with agrarian knowledge that is constantly recreated from multiple presents and subject to complex processes of recovery, transmission and adaptation. Drawing on fieldwork on agroecological practices in the province of Granada, Spain, and in the soy-producing territories in northern Argentina, as well as on associated cultural texts, I will show how memories of traditional agricultural practices in both regions are also shaped by memories of political and economic repression and displacement —specifically, the urbanisation process initiated during the second half of Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime in Spain; and the implementation of a monoculture regime in Argentinean agriculture since the 1990s. Such factors urge us to rethink memories of traditional agrarian knowledge as complex repertoires of memory practices, associated with histories of economic and political violence on both sides of the Atlantic.