Pharmacology of the Plantationocene: Drone Forestry and Drone Activism in Indonesia
ADAM FISH
University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA
For the official version of record, see here:
Fish, A. (2022). Pharmacology of the Plantationocene. Media Theory, 6(2), 185-202. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/189
Abstract
Drones or unpersonned aerial vehicles are deployed towards the task of forestry, agriculture, and forest monitoring. Proponents claim that drone-assisted forest management increases forest yield. Detractors say that drone forestry is an instrument for biopolitical control and the transformation of mature forests into plantations. This article brings together the concept of the Plantationocene, an era marked by the iniquitous movement of people and seeds, with scholarship on the pharmakon, or the poisonous as well as therapeutic potentials of technologies, to interpret ethnographic field research with drone activists and drone engineers in Indonesia. The result is an argument for an ambivalent approach to emergent technologies–while drones are tools for control, they also enable operations for multispecies futures.
Keywords
pharmakon, drone, forest, activism, Indonesia
Introduction
A consortium of over 11,000 scientists agree that reforestation is necessary “at enormous scales,” in order to sink carbon and stay the “catastrophic threat” of global heating (Ripple et al., 2020: 8, 11). A rise in two degrees centigrade is unavoidable unless, amongst other interventions, 300 million hectares of forests are protected and degraded land reforested (Houghton et al., 2015). In 2004, the Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize for planting a billion trees. Today only trillions of trees will suffice to cool the Earth through capturing and rooting carbon in their soils, stalks, and branches. Individuals unlikely to be concerned with tree planting include former US President Donald J. Trump, who signed an executive order to plant a trillion trees (Neumayr, 2020) and the 20th ranked YouTuber MrBeast (2019), whose support for the planting of 20 million trees received 50 million views. Many argue that the Earth simply does not offer enough dryland for the scale of tree planting needed to meaningfully sequester the amount of carbon to mitigate the climate crisis (Irwin, 2019).
Still others think that this passion for tree planting will turn the Earth into a “green desert,” a monoculture plantation. While tree planting may invite thoughts of lush old growth forests it could also bring to mind visions of tree farms–robotically-tended rote plantations for growing biomass. Instead of bringing forth Charles Darwin’s tangle of plants, animals, and fungi from fecund hummus, the planting of a trillion trees could manifest in a mechanistic and uniform farm lacking biodiversity. The planting of tree farms to hit the trillion tree mark would result in a reduction in wildlife habitat, disruptions to the hydrological cycle, and make necessary an intense utilization of fertilizer and pesticide (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2006: 65). Furthermore, attempts to incentivize carbon capture through the invention of carbon tax credits is considered by some to perpetuate planetary governance–a mode of top-down and northern-to-southern hemispherical control through markets, media, and eco-management, a “contemporary carbon colonization and a neoliberal land grab,” skeptics argue (Lyons and Westoby, 2014: 13). This would result in exaggerations of land tenure inequality, resource ownership, and manifest in “carbon colonialism”–a privatization of forests and their resources under the aegis of saving the planet (Lyons and Westoby, 2014). The worry is summarized by journalist Bibi van der Zee, who in investigating massive tree planting operations, commented that: “We wipe out whatever is complex and other and difficult to manage, and replace it with nice, easy farms and plantations full of monocultures of pigs and corn and wheat and palm oil. We like things nice and simple and symmetrical and easy to control, that’s the problem” (van der Zee, 2019: 3).
Planting trillions of trees would be impossible without the help of advanced aeronautics technologies. In the late 1990s, the United States offered a plan to repurpose military aircrafts designed to drop landmines to seed forests (Brown, 1999). With 250 C-130 transport aircrafts working 182 days a year it would take 25 years to reach 1 trillion trees. Since 2004, China has been using planes and helicopters for aerial seeding (Wenhua, 2004). These aircraft efforts are expensive, labor-intensive, and dangerous, putting it out of reach for many reforesters, particularly in mountainous regions. An alternative is the drone. Proponents argue that drones are a more cost effective and safe approach and leverage computer vision and artificial intelligence to monitor and plant forests. Detractors argue that drones are a way of digitizing the landscape prior to planting, and of automating seeding, while shrouding the Earth in the mantle of technological sophistication, efficiency, and safety.
In the context of industrial tree planting, the drone also enables concerned citizens and villagers to document their forests and its threats. Thus, considered alongside its hegemonic application in agricultural extractivism, this drone-based counter-mapping of Indigenous forest resources (Fish, 2021b; Radjawali et al., 2017) invites an ambivalence about the drone. The co-existence of similar drones working for both industry and against it challenges our binary notion of the drone as exclusively either a tool for domination or resistance.
This article moves into this ambiguous terrain about the ontology of the drone through brief ethnographic vignettes of two applications of drones in the forests of West Papua, Indonesia. In one instance, the drone assists palm oil plantations to increase yield. In the other, the drone helps activists report on the ecological consequences of those plantations. In the discussion that follows, I read these multiple possibilities of drone practice through the optic of the pharmakon, a substance with both curative and corrosive capacities. In a speculative move, I consider how therapeutic drones might contribute to the reversal of the plantation epoch, an era marked by elite, exploitative, extractive, and racial characteristics.
Pharmacies in the Plantationocene
Despite the International Commission on Stratigraphy approving in July 2020 the Anthropocene as a subdivision of geologic time, its original marker remains debated. Does it begin with the Pleistocene extinctions 60-15,000 before present (BP), Watt’s coal-fired steam pump in the 1770s, or nuclear testing at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945? In the context of forests, two earlier markers of global human geological impact are important to consider. The first is the Neolithic revolution of 12,000 BP and the second is the Orbis Spike, a sudden decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to forests self-propagating out from fallow farms and abandoned gardens–a result of 50 million Indigenous people of the Americas perishing under European disease and colonialism circa 1610 AD (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). Both the invention of agriculture and the dawn of Amerindian colonialism required the clearing and reseeding of land as well as the elimination, enslavement, and replacement of human populations. It is large-scale farming and colonialism that sets the context for drone forestry and drone forest activism.
As many as 80 titles have been offered for the present epoch (Chwałczyk, 2020). The Anthropocene has faced competition from such entries as the Capitalocene and the Kinocene, which emphasize, in addition to the human, either the market economy or the migration of goods and people. Another offering, the Plantationocene, has arisen to identify different origins and anthropogenic factors (Davis et al., 2019; Haraway, 2015; Haraway et al., 2016; Latour et al., 2018). Key to the concept of the Plantationocene is the movement and replacement of people and plants in a context of human and nonhuman inequality. Anthropocentric as the problem is, I am content with the significance of the “Anthropocene” as the fundamental term for the present epoch while the “Plantationocene” in the context of this research is useful to draw attention to the industrial agriculture which the drone reveals and assists in its pharmacological potential.
Tsing identifies the Plantationocene with the “long-distance simplification of landscapes” (Haraway et al., 2016). Haraway links it with the “transportation of genomes, the transportation of breeding plants and animals, including people” (Haraway et al., 2016). For Tsing, this movement across space creates “alienation” for all organisms involved wherein “plants and animals are abstracted in order to become resources that can be used for investment” (Haraway et al., 2016). Continuing, Haraway defines the Plantationocene as the “historical relocations of the substances of living and dying around the Earth as a necessary prerequisite to their extraction.” Emphasizing displacement, Latour describes the Plantationocene as a “historical ‘de-soilization’ of the Earth” (Latour et al., 2018: 592). In the Plantationocene, humans are enslaved and transported, plants are uprooted and their seeds planted in foreign soils, and generations of both classes of species are broken and displaced.
The Plantationocene continues today in large-scale, industrial monoculture farming resulting in impressive yield and sustenance for billions of humans. In the process, forested lands have been cleared, wetlands drained, savannah “reclaimed,” and other landscapes transformed to make space for industrial agriculture. Science and technology have contributed to this increase in yield, through fertilizer and harvesting advancements. Today, innovations in sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics seek to extract additional caloric gains from farms. Drones have emerged as a promising addition to high-tech farming, assisting industrial food producers in planning, planting, and fertilizing crops. In this manner, agricultural drones contribute to the Plantationocene, the replacement of Indigenous lands with extractive zones, endogamous with exotic plants, and human labor with automation. The agricultural drone is becoming a technology integrated at an early stage in this production chain that is resulting in the generation and global movement of market goods. Agricultural drones are easy to read as ominous weapons of war brought to the field, unable to differentiate “an aphid on a soybean or a terrorist suspect carrying an assault weapon” (Bolman, 2016: 130, 143). It is all “‘targeting’ and acting prosthetically to resolve a pest,” we are led to believe (Bolman, 2016: 130, 143). Indeed, the plantation is a form of colonial exploitation organised by a racialized work force that is sustained by an elite and perpetuated by core–periphery relationships (Davis et al., 2019; Wolford, 2021). And while it does so without the same level of transparent and sanctioned brutality as the slave plantation of the past, forced and child labor and other forms of exploitation exist in palm oil plantations in Indonesia as they do in other plantation contexts (Mason and McDowell, 2020).
In addition to contributing to these inequities, the forestry drone is a pharmakon that also has therapeutic possibilities. Pharmakon came to media studies from Plato, via Derrida and Stiegler. Plato’s concern was that with writing true memory, or anamnesis, will be lost and replaced by hypomnesis, or simplistic repetition. Derrida reads Plato’s dialogues on pharmakon as an analogy for writing; a process of inscription that has both poisonous as well as therapeutic potentials, it stifles memory while memorialising with grave consequences. Derrida refers to the pharmakon as a “medium” (1981: 443) and an existential technology that can carry messages beyond the grave: the “pharmakon and writing are thus always involved in questions of life and death” (Derrida, 1981: 438). The pharmakon has power “over death but [it] is also in cahoots with it” (Derrida, 1981: 438). Stiegler takes Derrida’s pharmakon as a definition of technology, and by combining this interpretation with the work of Leroi-Gourhan, develops his pharmacology, a theory that posits technological pharmaka as exo-somatizations of human memory, coding our present and future predicament.
In his last English book Neganthropocene, Stiegler (2018) addresses the present as an opportunity to reverse the entropy of the Anthropocene with pharmacological therapies which include the use of networked communication technologies. From this pharmacological perspective, it is possible to observe the drone as an impactful actant in both the Plantationocene and its reversal, the Neganthropocene, or what we might call the Negplantationocene–an inversion of the Plantationocene’s simplification, substitution, enslavement, and reordering of generations (Fish, 2022). If the plantation defines poisonous planting, drone activism driven by Indigenous knowledge is its non-toxic vitalization (Casimir, 2020; McKittrick, 2013). The Negplantationocene beckons an era of activist witnessing, reseeding, rewilding, reforestation, revitalization, regeneration, and re-emplacement – locally reversing the entropic process of surveillance, colonialism, clear-cutting, climate-induced forest fires, and monocultural agroforestry. It may begin with the work of drone activism: observing the destruction of the plantation from the sky.
Thus, from a pharmacological perspective, drone forestry is complex and not exclusively an example of colonial control from above. Therapeutic applications of drones include the mapping of industrial-scale tree farming, recording forested areas before they are cut and replanted with tree crops, and monitoring destructive activities with a mobility, vertical vision, speed, and stealth that terrestrial forms of counter-surveillance do not (Fish and Richardson, 2022; Tuck, 2018). These activist forest drones offer a zoēpolitical mode of biopower–an ontopolitics of zoē or “the non-human, vital force of life” (Braidotti, 2019: 42)–enacted through counter-surveillance, making the initial steps towards a resistance to the plantation that complicates media theories of technologies and biopower as predominantly hegemonic. In this manner, the Plantationocene and its technologies, partially because of their involvement in agricultural relocation, alienation, and enclosure have the potential to draw “attention to the liberatory potential of Black ecologies” (Davis et al., 2019: 4). Awareness of this “can provide guidance for cultivating worlds that support multispecies well-being” (Davis et al., 2019: 5). It is with that affirmative spirit that I began my fieldwork with drone activists in the plantations of West Papua and the drone start-up offices of Java, Indonesia.
Pharmacological Drones
A day’s drive from Manokwari, West Papua, Indonesia, after miles and hours of navigating through palm oil plantations and crossing siltified streams, we arrive at a hillside village at the end of a road. A man with a steel-tipped spear and a baby boy in a sling smiles as we pass him and an under-appreciated church with a well-used volleyball court in its yard. I am here with a group of Indonesians–Javanese, Papuan, and Balinese drone experts and environmentalists–to use drones to document a peat swamp forest, and hopefully quantify its carbon through photogrammetry and 3D modelling, techniques drones excel at (Fig. 1). Wind gusts, the contingencies of battery power, and the welcomed annoyance of children clamouring to see as the drone sees and moves are acceptable inconveniences for flying gracefully with optical cameras above this impenetrable swamp[1].
Carbon emissions trading, a way of incentivizing forest protection through market forces and global “green” agreements, has put a price on keeping carbon in trees and out of the atmosphere. Indonesia has 36% of the world’s tropical peatland which, in addition to being home to orangutans and Sumatran tigers, are important carbon sinks, storing 20% more carbon than non-peatlands (Seymour and Samadhi, 2018). The maps of peatland are notoriously poor, resulting in inaccurate assessments of carbon stocks which encourage the development of a different economy, the conversion of peatland into palm oil plantations. If we could quantify the carbon with the drone’s atmospheric agility and advanced seeing, this forest might not transform into a monoculture for oil to be made into candies, cosmetics, and other commercial consumables.
The day before, we stopped to drone videograph a palm oil plantation (Fig. 2). This crop grew its greasy bundles of red palm seeds into and beyond the banks of a nearby river. From our elevated position, we saw numerous fallen palm trees, water logged and rotting, clogging the river. Eroded but still visible from above, the rectilinear outline of the plantation was now gutted by the serpentine flow. The matriarch of a local family that was collecting river sand to sell for cement production claimed that before the palm oil plantation the river never breached its banks. She was worried about the growing population of snakes attracted to the rats that live on the palm kernels. The poisonous snakes endanger her partner and son who work for poverty wages cutting the oily seed bundles. About this phenomenon, The Economist (2019) writes: “monkeys struggle to swing on palm branches; birds have few places to nest. But for snakes, the plantations are an earthly paradise.” This agro-forestry weakens the soil, causes erosion, and reduces the otherwise complex ecology into a competition between rats and snakes. Chao’s (2018) ethnographic research into oil palm focuses on how the plant fails to form and indeed severs relationships the human Marind have with other plants and animals in their region[2].
From the air we produced sweeping, large scale videos of the unforeseen if ignored consequences palm oil plantations have on the local environment. Today we hoped to use the drone to quantify peat carbon, providing a different valuation of this land, before it was converted into palm plantations.
In Indonesia, participatory mapping began in 1992, borne out of an emphasis placed on community-based forest management and efforts to reclaim customary rights to lands (Peluso, 1995). Countermapping took root in this context and in light of the Indonesian government’s usurping of customary land rights for industrial timber exploitation. Drone-based counter-mapping began as an action-research project with seven “Participatory Hydro-Political Appraisals” (PHPAs), between 2013 and 2014, which includes a series of participatory drone workshops with communities in the Kapuas River area of Kalimantan, Indonesia. The PHPAs consisted of citizen research groups who collected data on place stories, as well as river and customary forest locations. In these endeavors, drones were not only tools for the collective production of high-resolution spatial information, they also gave villagers visual access to areas otherwise restricted by timber industry police and security forces. The participatory labor with drones instigated a collaboration with NGOs with the aim of developing a more transparent mapping process. The most substantial impact of drone-based participatory mapping occurred in the Tayan area of Kalimantan, Indonesia, in the sub-district of Tayan Hilir. As a result of immense concessions given by the Indonesian government to a mining corporation, bauxite was being extracted for shipment to China where it was to be refined into aluminum. In this context, they used drones to document the activities of the bauxite mining company, map customary fruit trees, and produce maps that disputed the state’s designation of village lands and farms as “forest” for the taking (Radjawali et al., 2017: 823).
But our attempts at drone countermapping the peatland were failing. Liberating eyes into the skies is rarely easy. In the first attempt, the winds were too severe at high elevation. As the drone precipitously dropped elevation, we had to conduct a tense emergency landing. The local Papuan pilot felt unskilled for this operation and handed the controller to the more seasoned Javanese pilot at the last minute. We held a large net to catch the drone as it skipped across the grasses of the overgrown football field. We flew again, but the drone operators did not properly attach the propeller. The drone crashed into a nearby acacia tree soon after take-off. Here a crash resulted in a broken drone, gravity grounding it to the earth. Entropy taking its toll as the complexity of the drone was simplified into broken parts. Our drone crashes and the crash of this ecosystem seem intertwined at this point. A “crash theory” came to mind: the intertwining fates of falling drones meant to protect failing ecosystems (Fish, 2021a).
Bright red betel spit glistened on the new road we were standing on, purchased for the community by the palm oil industry, as we gathered up our broken drone and quickly returned home through the monotony of endless palm trees, our 4X4 tires rolling over the occasional flattened snake. As we departed, we witnessed the launch of a different drone. Instead of monitoring the ecologically erosive impacts of palm oil, this drone was being flown by the palm oil workers. We quickly drove by so as not to be recognized for our clandestine though inconclusive activism.
Drones are used by the palm oil industry to monitor the health of their plantations. In this monitorial capacity drones are able to “do the work of 500 farmers,” according to Bloomberg (Raghu, 2019). Several of our team members could identify the make and model of the palm oil drone; they worked for a company that made and sold drones to the plantations. These drones were fitted with traditional image-making systems as well as thermal cameras that survey the land, collecting images for orthomosaic maps and gathering heat signatures of healthy and ill plots. This information is used to ascertain the presence of water and shade. The drone also identifies soil types, elevation, and pitch–important information to maximize growing success. After this, the drone may spray pesticide followed by planting seeds in spots optimally selected based on complex artificial intelligence. Drones may fly again over the trees, monitoring the seeds from sapling to maturity, and measuring their growth. Sensors will alert forest managers about the presence of blight, drought, pests, and when to harvest–as well as when the trees have passed their optimal stage of oil productivity. But today in West Papau my colleagues in the Indonesian drone business were helping the activists while back at work in Java they would help the palm oil plantations. Across these collapsing contexts, the drone was an extension of human evolution, entangled with the elements and other species, and contributing to both protecting life and the entropic simplification of landscapes.
This vignette illustrates this article’s contributions towards a convergence of media and environmental studies. Here a drone enacts an insufficient defense of multispecies existence in the peat swamps and palm oil plantations of West Papua, in the process contributing to the documentation of an unstable, simplified novel ecosystem–that of rats, snakes, oil palms, and men–before a crash drops the drone to terra firma.
After our action in West Papua, I traveled to Bandung, Java, where I met with drone manufacturer Aeroterrascan—a company whose practices embody pharmacological flexibility. In an office with walls of half-assembled drones, top-of-the-line and out-of-date remote controllers, and sundry soldering tools and antennas, I discussed the mixed motivations in the drone business with the bespeckled and smoking Feri Ametia Pratama, Director at Aeroterrascan, who wore the company’s logo on his gray shirt. Aerroterrascan is one of the leading drone manufacturers in Indonesia and several of their employees assisted us in our operation in West Papua. He informed me that one of their major clients is the palm oil industry. I pressed him on the apparent contradiction of the activism I had witnessed in West Papua and their collaboration with the palm oil industry. Feri explained to me that it was not the problem I thought I uncovered. He began by referencing Borneo, an Indonesian island that has lost 50% of its forests, much to palm oil plantations (United Nations Environment Programme, 2019). He said increased palm oil yields aided by drones might slow palm oil expansion. He did not want to see West Papua be deforested like Borneo. Drones help palm oil plantations become “smart” farms. Drones help the plantation “better organize, optimize, and manage their land so that they can increase yield. That is our dream, we don’t want them to open the new forest,” he tells me (personal communication, 2018). He then spoke to how forests impact climate change, referencing how regenerative geoengineering sinks carbon into tree trunks, branches, and roots, as a way of slowing climate change. At the same time they were assisting palm oil plantations increase yield, Aeroterrascan was also looking for a “balanced” approach. To do this they provide drones to NGOs like Sawit Watch and Aidenvironment that monitor deforestation associated with palm oil production. They do this to make sure “the technology is on both sides.” Later, Aidenvironment flew drones over palm plantations in Borneo owned by Malaysian company FELDA and documented vast deforestation (Ruiz, 2017). It is not known that the drones used were from Aeroterrascan.
Conclusion
A legitimate concern is that technological approaches to trees result in forests being conceptualized as standing reserves to be managed; this instrumentalization pervading both those exploiting as well as those defending the forest. With the sensorial quantification of industrial tree farms as well as within customary forest activism, forests “become visible as stores of timber or carbon sinks” (Gabrys, 2020: 5). With this code-based grammatization of the forest and its carbon potential, trees and forests become resources but not “sites that sustain cultural narratives or indigenous cosmologies” (Gabrys, 2020: 5). Drones in this context are particularly concerning because as semi-autonomous tools for precise quantification, their use may occlude the “democratic engagements with environments” which terrestrial approaches necessitate (Gabrys, 2020: 7). With its elevated viewpoint, alien atmospheric mobility, and reductive datafication, the drone strips the forest of its cultural resonances.
This article’s brief examination of the use of drones in forest activism and tree farming provides a more nuanced depiction of how drones contribute to community engagement with the remaining forest and the palm oil that replaced it. The plantation is unequivocally a site for colonial ecological and racial subjugation. However, it is also a place where re-engagements are made possible by the very depletion of the plantation. Towards the aim of an affirmative, participatory interaction with forests, forests to come, and the forests that once were, technologies like drones provide to communities a platform for the convergence of political and multispecies involvements.
This article has articulated the drone as a salubrious pharmakon applied to monitoring forests on Indigenous lands. The complexity is that drones also assist agroforestry, a practice that requires replacing the biological diversity of old-growth forests with but one species. This is the bedeviling potential of emergent technologies. If pharmacology remains abstract it is convenient to dismiss as Manachean, a reduction to good or evil, life or not-life, zoēpolitical or necropolitical. This brief study empirically exposes the drone as a still-emergent pharmakon, offering a slippery governance of the possibility between vitality and senescence. Today the drone remains a novel technology; on the temporal and spatial extremity of exosommatics; at the edge of computational networks, ecologies, and ethical environments.
Few oxygen breathing organisms would disagree that forests are key biomes for survival. We experientially appreciate this multispecies entanglement with every breath. Forests not only produce oxygen through photosynthesis but they also protect freshwater and essential habitat. Thus, forests have an intrinsic value and are vitally important for the life-sustaining autopoietic systems that make up their tangled ecologies. For the many non-human beings, the value of the world’s forests needs not be quantified. Forests are infrastructures for life. But in order to render the intrinsic non-monetary value of forests qualitatively legible to most humans, technologies must sense forests and render them into numbers. This serves a purpose, enabling a comparative valuation against but in the metrics of economic fundamentalism. The ability of forests to collect and hold carbon in the many living and dead trees, is one such valuable function. Forestry drones can be a factor in re-building the carbon sequestering capacity of forests; they can also contribute to the simplification of ecologies associated with cash crop tree farms. In the process, they not only contribute to forest vitality and the incremental rewilding of its former simplified landscapes, but also to the informationalization and computationalization of natural systems. The struggle to plant the Negplantationocene continues.
As a probing and exploratory prosthesis, the drone’s ultimate pharmacological moment has yet to gain totalising momentum in any one direction. A curative drone is emerging out of activist and Indigenous practice, from the use of drones to monitor police forces during the #nodapl anti-pipeline protests at Standing Rock (Kaplan, 2020), identify illegal logging in Peru (Kane, 2018) and record forest health and counter-surveil police in Guatemala (Millner, 2020). These affirmative applications, provide an avenue towards less necropolitics and more zoēpolitics–the open-ended management of multispecies life. The zoēpolitical possibility remains thus far speculative.
The tide is against zoēpolitics, but pharmacologies towards either the erosive Plantationocene or a life-supporting Negplantationocene remain two possibilities. Likewise, though plantations have persuasive economic and social capital to sway it towards their necropolitical needs, the pharmacological momentum of drones has yet to be set (Hughes, 1983). After ethnographically investigating the use of drones to resist the enclosure of Indigenous forests, Millner writes, “drones inhabit a zone of technological capacity whose political function is not yet fully decided” (2020: 2). Drone forest activism can be one small therapeutic digitization–literally, extension of human digits or fingers–towards life. In this way, drone forest activism is an attempt to forge a minor bifurcation to negentropy, a local flourishing of life’s complexity.
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Notes
[1]Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Scientia Fellowship at the University of New South Wales, this fieldwork in West Papua was a phase of a global ethnographic, interview-based, and participatory investigation into the use of drones in conservation and activism (Fish, 2022; 2021a; 2021b; Fish and Richardson, 2022).
[2] Chao and her Marind collaborators used drones in a similar way as my Indonesian project participants to document environmental destruction attendant with oil palm.
Adam Fish is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts.
Email: a.fish@unsw.edu.au
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