Paolo Gruppuso is an anthropologist researching water landscapes, nature conservation, and more-than-human socialities at the intersection of social anthropology and the environmental humanities. He holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen (2016). His research explores wetland practices and imaginaries, as well as urban ecologies and Anthropocene landscapes across Europe. He currently holds a DFG Eigene Stelle research grant for the project “Rethinking Wetlands (ReWet): An Environmental Anthropology,” based at the RCC.
Erika Garozzo is a geographer based in Catania. Her PhD project focused on the dismantling of social health-care infrastructure in an urban setting and how feminist responses are emerging in the form of protests and self-organized infrastructures of care. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the BIOTraCes project, funded by Horizon Europe. In her research she explores the socioecological relationships of the Simeto River and new ways of inhabiting this landscape that break away from agroindustry and monoculture.
This piece reflects on the ongoing processes of environmental transformation that, beginning in the early twentieth century, have turned the Simeto River, the largest in Sicily, into a water conduit serving hydropower plants and industrial agriculture. Developments in water control, along with the emergence of “green” energy infrastructures and intensive agriculture, have left enduring marks along the river landscape, from altered environmental flow to habitat degradation. By emphasizing the affective dimension of environmental change, this piece provides a firsthand description of a disrupted landscape, while unveiling the potential of walking as a way of knowing, feeling, and engaging with the current socioecological crisis.
