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Environmental entanglements and health: what era are we living in?

Dr Andrea Mastrangelo
What does industrial agroforestry in the Santo Tomé region, in Brazil’s bond with Argentina, have to do with the spread of Covid-19, fires and social inequalities in the region? Combining a feminist anthropological perspective and concerned with showing how the emerging agribusiness-driven technique creates environments and offers other forms of social exclusion, Andrea Mastrangelo analyses the environmental catastrophes, such as the fires, that have ravaged this region of Argentina, showing how the modification of the local biome and the introduction of biotechnologies in favour of agribusiness has resulted in fires, but also in syndemics, droughts, river floods and a decline in the supply of food and water. The era of the Anthropocene reveals how industry based on exploitation appropriates biological processes in favour of capital accumulation, as if nature were doing unpaid work, just like women.
With an MA and PhD in Social Anthropology from the National University of Misiones, Argentina, Andrea Mastrangelo has researched the social consequences of large investments in rural areas (impacts on labour, health and agrarian social structure). She has published on socio-environmental issues in metalliferous mining for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), forestry industry for cellulose and derivatives and production of transgenic maize seeds. In Argentina he carried out fieldwork in provinces in the northwest (Catamarca, Salta, Santiago del Estero, San Juan), northeast (Misiones, Chaco and Formosa), Patagonia (Chubut) and the center of the country (La Pampa, Buenos Aires and Córdoba). She completed her post-doctoral fieldwork in Pernambuco, Brazil and in Andhra Pradesh – Kothagudem coal mine – India. In 2023 she had a postdoc stay at UNAM, Mexico. In Argentina she is a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas -CONICET- and lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín where she directs the Centro de Estudios en Antropología (CEA-UNSAM).

Learning points

  • Why does agribusiness change patterns of accumulation?
  • In describing the connections between the artificial pine forest in Santo Tomé and the increase in social inequalities, Mastrangelo proposes the notion of Forestocatastrophe. What are the constituent events of this notion based on his study?
  • The Anthropocene epoch is marked by a Convergent Ecocrisis in which apparently isolated events contribute to the impoverishment of some and the enrichment of a few. What do you understand about this term from Mastrangelo’s lecture?

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