Coltivare cibo baladii in Palestina. Le politiche della natura, tra terra e aria

Abstract

In the Occupied Territories, environment is not the main concern facing daily insecurity of military occupation and life uncertainty in one of the most high-tech experiments of land and communities colonization and bordering, of “risk” society and fenced materiality. The common weather has been disconnected as much as water resources on the ground have been bordered. Icon of global patterns of territorial management and idolatries of land, here the aerial dimension has become a detached locus of risk (military visual control, pollution).

Politics of nature stand at the heart of nationalist perspectives (politics of planting, rooting and de-rooting the self and the others, technofix utopias) with their incapacity to meet environmental changes and their challenge for a new shared patterns of knowledge and resource use: notwithstanding border development “on the ground”, Palestinian population and Israeli colons and military forces are sharing the same overheating atmosphere.

The farming fields of habba’il in Battir (Bethlehem), where food grows up, well show the local, national and regional politics of nature at the heart of historical political settings; besides they highlight the interdependence between patterns of denial of the human Other and of denial of environmental agents; further, they reveal how local knowledge patterns of food making have reproduced in this familial places, reproducing patterns of ecological relationality and attempts of maintaining autonomy in maintaining their own food and knowledge.