Postgraduate_July24

The above examples offer vignettes of human and non-human animal interaction in the Corbières region of France in an era of climate change and environmental degradation. As I investigate further, I will use photography as both a research method and as a means of expressing concepts that may be problematic when expressed in words. Examples here might be when stories touch on illegal activities as in the case of growers shooting boar raiding their crops, or where villagers ignore regulations regarding water restrictions to continue irrigating their vegetable plots. 

I will employ several assets to assist the development of my narrative. In the first instance, I can draw from my own diaries, correspondence, photographs and recollections. Then, as I progress the research, I will seek to have conversations with neighbours and friends with whom I have shared many experiences. I will inevitably draw upon their own observations, family photographs and personal reminiscences (Tullis, 2022, p103).   

The archives of local newspapers are a rich source of stories, names, and witness testimonies of events relevant to my enquiry, with much of this data available online. I am a subscriber to the departmental archives in Carcassonne where most local records are held and via whom I can request material from other sources should that be necessary. 

Departmental archives and local newspaper records include extensive photography, film and video collections. As well as being useful for aiding memories, archives can also assist where I might wish to rephotograph^[1] sites pertinent to my project. Examples here could include to show how drought has changed landscapes over time, or how human activities such as road- and housebuilding have altered habitats (see Martinez, 2024).

The trail camera videos I have been making since 2021, have already given me insights into the activities of non-humans when they feel secure and humans are not nearby (see Gill, 2017).  For example, via these videos, I have watched foxes hunting, pine martens climbing trees to pick fruit, badgers foraging and female boar shepherding litters of piglets. But I have also watched boar interact with one another, seen how foxes methodically trace their way around a terrain and observed badgers tracking creatures under the ground. 

In the context of the new materialist theoretical framework in which I position this work, I aim to devise a way of assembling information from these video sequences, using them as a proxy for ‘interviewing’ the non-humans. The link at Figure 13, is to the working draft of a short video I began making in April 2024. As well as additional photography, the video contains a commentary where I describe the circumstances in which I have been making trail camera photography. 

---

Figure 13: draft video regarding my trail camera work

Lionel Ormières, again in L’Independant, wrote in August 2022 about how the heat and drought were raising the risk of damage caused by wild boar (Ormières, 2022a). In his piece, Ormières points to the lack of water and food caused by the high temperatures that is pushing large numbers of boar to enter cultivated areas, especially vineyards. Hunters, who have a legal obligation to compensate farmers for damage caused by boar, fear that they will soon no longer be able to keep up their side of the contract. The article continues with stories from hunters and growers discussing how the boar population has proliferated and how boar eat large quantities of even unripe grapes in their search to quench their thirst. 

In a separate article, Ormières (Ormières, 2022b) writes about how, while the population of boar has been growing for several years, the populations of rabbits, hare and partridge are diminishing. Boar are responsible for some of this decline, says Ormières, but the high temperatures of recent years have also played a part. In the same article, Serge Gaubert, a representative of the local federation of hunters, is reported as saying ‘Everything is ‘grilled’ and animals such as the hare, which is highly prized locally by hunters, find it more difficult to (find things to) eat’ (Ormières, 2022b)

These examples reflect my own observations of boar and other animals in my orchard and garden. While there are great expanses of ‘garrigue’ (wild areas referred to as ‘scrubland’ in English) and forest all around the village, boar, foxes, and badgers enter village gardens at night to forage for food. While they come all the year round, the boar are particularly present during the Summer when windfall fruit is lying on the ground from the end of June to mid-September. However, every year, in early August, the boar suddenly disappear for several weeks, apart from an odd, unexpected visit. My wine-growing neighbours tell me that this is when the boar begin to go into the vineyards to eat the ripening grapes that are now filling with juice. The boar return to the orchard as the grape harvest begins, nowadays a noisy affair owing to the use of mechanised harvesters (see figure 10 below), which frightens away the boar. 

In March 2023, a local winegrower told me that on one night in August of 2022, a group of boar had entered his vineyards and devoured about 350 kgs of grapes, which I estimate to have been worth about 

3, 500€ worth of wine. Grape-growing and winemaking are already felt to be precarious due to declining consumption in France, inflation affecting material costs, and climate change affecting production. Boar raiding plantations to eat grapes is galling for growers, but I suspect many of them may feel that boar invasions are the only one of the various factors negatively affecting them that they can personally do something about. They can shoot the boar or have them shot. 

Recognising the relative decline of viticulture, during the 1990s the Aude departmental council began a push to develop tourism as an alternative player in the local economy. This coincided with the EEC^[1]’s Set-aside policy which was an incentive scheme to help reduce the large and costly surpluses produced in Europe under the guaranteed price system of the CAP^[2]. Set aside was designed to deliver environmental benefits in the wake of extensive damage to agricultural ecosystems and wildlife (sic) resulting from the intensification of agriculture. It sought to achieve this by requiring that farmers leave a proportion of their land out of intensive production. Such land was said to have been ‘set aside’. 

As viticulture is the principal agricultural activity in the Corbières, the set-aside scheme was most often used to return vineyards to nature. According to reports from television channel France 3^[3], wine production in the Occitanie region (in which the Corbières are situated) fell by a third between 1993 and 2023. This is an indication of the amount of land taken out of wine production and returned to nature and some used for other purposes such as house-building or commercial activities. 

Inevitably social and political challenges have an impact on land use which in turn impacts the lives of non-humans that live on the land. This type of anthropogenic environmental impact ranges from set-aside making new lands available to non-humans; to land that non-humans have been using now being taken from them for human use such as roadbuilding, or development of tourist sites. My research will aim to illuminate key examples of these types of anthropogenic environmental impact with reference to ‘sharing out’ of land between human and non-human animals. 

The climate emergency is a second, arguably more impactful, environmental consequence of human activity and its presence has been keenly felt in the Corbières for some years. The two most noticeable manifestations of the climate emergency in the region are hotter summers with long periods of much higher-than-average temperatures; and lack of rain leading to severe drought. As a result, the forests are exhausted and trees are dying (Vitasse, Wohlgemuth and Rigling, 2023). Non-humans are affected in numerous ways, frequently leading to human-non-human animal conflict. 

In its current resumé showing that ‘the effects of climate change are multiplying’, the Aude Chamber of Agriculture^[4] (CAA, 2024) states^[5] : ‘All farms in the department are exposed to climatic risks. Some areas, such as the Corbières, have a great number of risks’.  Less than 10% of the departmental agricultural area is irrigated, 41% of the Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA^[6]) is completely devoid of possibilities of access to secure water resources, and almost all the cantons of the department have soils with an organic material content of low to very low. 

The map at Figure 7 (below) illustrates these risk factors as they were in 2020 with the areas in red being those where climate change is being most felt. The Corbieres is completely contained within this red area. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that since 2020 summer temperatures have increased further and, despite occasional rain, drought has been endemic.

A different public service information website, Info Secheresse (2024), states that the water tables across the Aude, including the Corbières, and in the next department to the south, the Pyrenées Orientales, are at the lowest levels of all departments in France. The drought situation is so severe that in the village where I am focusing my research, the government drought information website (Vigieau, 2024) instructs residents that: Drinking water is on heightened alert at your address’. It goes on to say that there is a:

“Reduction of all water withdrawals and ban on activities impacting aquatic environments. Reinforced restrictions on watering, filling and emptying swimming pools, washing vehicles and irrigating crops”.

Figure 8a (below) shows the usual level of water in the ‘lavoir’ (washing) area of the Ruisseau^[7]  just below my garden and orchard. Figure 8b shows the water level on 24^th May 2024. 

In Figure 8a the entire lavoir is full and the water is running quickly as the stream is constantly replenished by water from springs higher up in the hills, which in turn are replenished by rainwater.  In figure 8b, only the dammed area of the lavoir contains water and that water is barely moving as there has been little rain, so springs have dried up. 

I have already obliquely referenced Government concerns for the climate emergency unfolding in southern France including the Corbières region, by citing examples of official information websites aimed at farmers and the public.  Lack of time and space prevent me from elaborating on the multifarious ramifications of the climate crisis on human and non-human animals in the Corbières, but these will be an important aspect of my research.   

The situation on the ground is changing so rapidly^[8], that peer reviewed material is not keeping pace with political discussions and decision-making as manifestations of anthropogenic climate change grow ever-more apparent, and an increasing number of people grasp the reality of what is happening. 

Local, departmental and regional politicians need up to the minute intelligence to be able to respond to changing conditions, and the local press see an important part of their role as being to both provide information to the community and to feed community views to politicians. Government information is also distributed to local politicians as well as to local news services. Local businesses, growers and residents rely on newspaper reports based on this information.   

This is in line with findings of Jenkins and Nielsen (2018) who found that in the digital era, local newspapers that are successful aim for local depth and breadth and seek to sustain themselves through premium content and subscription models^[9]. These newspapers are often highly tailored to the specific areas they serve (…) Over time, their emphasis on a more targeted geographic area and audience also make them more dependent on local support. Unquestionably, one must proceed with care here, for newspaper reports are not always intended to be unbiased^[10]. Nonetheless, I use them in this paper as a source of current information to help build a picture of the impact of climate change in the Corbières, as well as an illustration of the kinds of information that is directly informing the knowledge base and attitudes of much of the human population. 

As a result, to be as up to date as I can be, I will draw from the latest reporting by scientific advisers, science correspondents and local reports providing information to the politicians, professional organisations, and general population of the Aude (including the Corbières).

For example, in January 2023, agroclimatologist, and climate photographer Dr Serge Zaka, (La Dépêche, 2024), discussed some of the ways in which climate change is impacting on the Aude department. For Zaka, the situation is now so acute, that he suggests that very soon people in the Aude will have to choose between tourism or agriculture. He is clear that the environment will not be able to support both, for each of these activities requires considerable quantities of water in a region where: 

…at less than 200 mm of cumulative rainfall, we are in fact at the classification threshold for arid climates; between 200 and 400 mm, we are in semi-arid conditions. This shift, with a transition from a Mediterranean climate to an arid climate, has taken place practically without transition, in two years. Of course, to qualify as climate change, it must be observed over a longer period. (La Dépêche, Antoine Carrié in conversation with Serge Zaka, 2024)

Zaka’s reading of the latest scientific evidence at the beginning of this year was that in the last three years the climate of the Corbières has switched from Mediterranean to Arid. In his interpretation of the available data, Zaka felt confident to predict that between 2024 and 2050 this new climate will establish itself as the norm and that this change will have an important impact on the economic life of the region. 

Only four months later, Véronique Durand in L’Independant of 26^th May 2024, reported on the distress being caused to older winegrowers in the Corbières. In areas without direct access to water supplies for irrigation, growers are being compensated – not enough in their view – for destroying their vineyards and returning the land to nature. 

I shall investigate these interactive patterns of actions or ‘performances’ (Madeira, 2022), using a New Materialist theoretical framework. A key characteristic of this approach is that it will enable me to move beyond anthropocentricism and employ qualitative methods to help me probe a range of coexisting phenomena. In other words, I will consider each of the different players in my enquiry as having equal status. This perspective will be particularly important as I scrutinise the play between human and non-human animals, avoiding assumptions of human dominion over other creatures. 

New Materialism is also commensurate with my project being practice-led, employing photography, including post-human photography in the form of trail cameras, to make images of non-human animals in settings where a photographer is not present when the image is made (von Essen et al., 2023). 

I sense that a new materialist theoretical framework will inevitably and very quickly oblige me to face such issues as anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism. I am preparing for these challenges through my literature review, where I will draw on criticism of anthropocentrism by writers such as Donna Haraway (2007) and calls for political and social activism on behalf of non-humans by authors such as Eva Haifa Giraud (2019). 

After consideration of different research methods, the qualitative research method that I have concluded is the most appropriate to my project is ‘autoethnography’. I am persuaded that autoethnographic methodology can accommodate the five different ‘threads’ I have outlined above. Furthermore, I believe that autoethnography is commensurate with maintaining different forms of photography within my work both as appropriate research tools and as project outputs.

The word ‘autoethnography’ is a portmanteau of two words, ‘autobiography’ and ‘ethnography’. Autobiography is where an author selectively and retrospectively writes about their own particular experiences. They use meaningful artifacts such as diaries, photographs, videos, objects and interviews with others to “reflect on, record and report experiences living through time, space and circumstance” (Moore, C, 2022).

The practice of ‘Ethnography’ is ‘the study of culture through participant observation, where the researcher makes observations, takes notes, and then analyses those observations and notes with reference to other material ‘(Moore, C, ibid). 

Thus autoethnography allows researchers to explore their own experiences and connect them to broader social contexts. By analysing personal experiences, emotions, and interactions, it is possible to uncover valuable insights into the chosen subject area. Autoethnography empowers individuals to share their stories and contribute to the collective knowledge in their field. (Adams et al, 2022 pp1 – 13).

So, in the present project, my aim is to combine autobiography with ethnography to provide an account of human and non-human animal interaction. As the source of qualitative research data, I will draw from my own experiences, observations, contact with residents and knowledge of the area gathered during years of living in the rural setting that is the locus of my investigation.  

Five threads from my previous experience led me to this project:

1. For my Final Major Project in the Photography MA at Falmouth^[1], I looked at historic deforestation and current reforestation in the Corbières. In that work, while my primary interest was the precarious state of the forest, it was impossible to avoid thought of what must be happening to non-human animals living within it. As I completed the MA, I felt compelled to transfer my focus from concern for the state of trees and plants to the condition of the non-humans the forest shelters, feeds and nurtures. 

In southern France, the climate emergency has delivered increasing insecurity. Over successive years we have had prolonged summer heatwaves with exceptionally high temperatures, and lack of rain leading to persistent drought and wildfires. Amid these phenomena are non-human doing their best to survive. How well are they managing?

• As I was commencing the MA Photography in 2021,  a boar’s presence on land next to my house prompted me to place trail cameras around the orchard to see if other boar might be visiting. From day one there were badgers and foxes, and beech martens, but no boar for several months. I have kept the cameras in place for three years and the many clips I now have, show these various non-humans engaging in a range of activities. I want to scrutinise this material in depth to better understand what they show of non-human lives in this era of anthropogenic environmental change. 

•  Over the years, I have witnessed many changes in the makeup of local non-human populations, including the disappearance of bats, butterflies, squirrels, scorpions and others.  There are numerous reasons for this disappearance, such as use of insecticides onvineyards affecting insect populations, increased car use leading to animals being killed on the roads, the forest now principally made up of pines rather than holm oaks, and now drought and high summer temperatures.  In this light, I surmise that there is a multi-layered story to explore regarding the interactions between the human and non-human animals in this region. 

•  I wish to draw upon my own experiences, acquired through long association with the village where I am conducting the study. Between being a part-time resident in the 1970s to today when I am a permanent resident, I have seen the presence of non-humans plunge from ‘abundant’ to all too often ‘completely absent’. I want to try to find out what is going on.  

In the Corbières, the impact of anthropogenic climate change has reached a critical stage. Its effect on the landscape and on the ability to thrive of animal and plant life within it is palpable. And the situation is exacerbated by a simultaneous increase in human activities and incursions into the wildlife habitats, changing land use, and bringing humans and non-human animals into closer, frequently conflictful, association. My research is an exploration of these interactions.

In the following entries, I will introduce several of the issues and themes that I will explore in more detail after approval of my ethics statement and risk assessment. 

This is a practice-led research project, where I will use creative tools of photography and the qualitative research method of autoethnography to investigate ways in which non-human animals are living out their lives in this uncertain environment and examine their uneasy interactions with humans. 

The primary locus of the research are the orchard and garden next to my house in a southern French village which has a human population of 120 and a varied population of non-human animal neighbours and night-time visitors.