Entanglements between biodiversity and rural traditions in Italy: nourishing more than humans relationships

This paper aims to untangle how biodiversity and traditional agropastoral contexts are intertwined, to learn how biodiversity preservation is embedded in situated farming practices and to uncover opportunities to support specific relationships among farmers and other species by means of a participatory design process. Focusing on Italian traditional farming traditions, the project situates in Central Italy, in the protected mountain areas of the Abruzzo region, whose agropastoral practices are historically rooted in local communities’ culture. Although in the past decades, many villages of those territories have been experiencing depopulation, with the consequent abandonment of agriculture and livestock activities, the project fieldwork has shown an initial change of direction which is outlined by the re-activation of former grandparents farms or by the rise of new enterprises which are grounded into sustainable farming methods. Ethnographic accounts foreground an embodied eco-commoning approach to farming which has been inherited from the ancestors and has contributed to shape, enrich and preserve the current environmental landscape. On the other hand, the re-activation of traditional agropastoral activities in the actual context may present novel challenges and hidden risks to unintentionally fail in reciprocal care among farmers and the more than humans, due to the modified environmental and anthropic conditions, the different current approach to environmental conservation, the knowledge gap between the growing scientific knowledge and the inactive indigenous local knowledge. The core of the paper revolves around a specific story collected during the fieldwork about the cleaning of a drinking trough for sheep grazing by an unaware shepherd, which could have potentially hurt newts reproduction. Therefore, I suggest a participatory process based on co-creation and prototyping to shape the eco-common of the drinking trough through which the commoners could be made visible and the co-existence of species could go beyond the anthropocentric dualism of human- not humans.