Sanar: Post-mining landscape recovery in the Amazon

My current research continues to explore the limits of State legibility and its interaction with Indigenous territorial projects through the lens of public policy. I identify a crucial paradox in the Amazon: while mercury contamination from informal mining is proven, the resultant environmental damage remains invisible in official censuses of unreclaimed mining sites.

I conceptualize the network of abandoned mining pits in the Amazon as a landscape of abandoned commons that Indigenous communities actively seek to reappropriate. Through a collaborative action-research partnership with the Shipibo-Conibo Nation in Madre de Dios, we are centering Indigenous governance and knowledge in landscape recovery initiatives. These projects aim to "heal" the territory (sanar) and consolidate the vision of the Amazonian Nation—a novel scale of governance designed to overcome territorial fragmentation and state inaction.

This work combines approaches from global environmental policy, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and feminist political ecology within a reparative ecology framework. This underscores the necessity of moving environmental policy beyond simple compensatory mechanisms or clean-ups to envision processes of fair, productive recovery anchored in the territorial projects of Indigenous peoples.

This initiative, supported by the competitive postdoctoral program of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, directly contributes to updating environmental policies in the Anthropocene, where frontline communities are faced with learning to deal with what is left behind after furious extraction.

Aguaje palm trees are associated with aquatic environments and envisioned as allies in post-mining landscape recovery