Territories of life on the edge. Mediterranean mountain pastoral commons (II): Diversity is life    

These communities retain strong inter-generational bonds with their territories. They permanently negotiate and take collective decisions on the use of their natural resources to assure their sustained use and a relatively equal access to all its members, while expressing their gratitude to the land through constant rituals and festivities that renew their pastoral identity and sense of existence. Their ways of living imply innumerable benefits, both socio-culturally and environmentally. Such is the case that community conserved territories have been recognized by institutions such as the United Nations, the Convention for Biological Diversity or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Therefore, it is particularly ironic that these communities most often continue to be alienated, displaced or dispossessed from the very land and ecosystems they contribute so fundamentally to co-create and that would not exist without their presence.  

This Temporal exhibition hosted on the Virtual Museum of Human Ecology is the outcome of long-term and ongoing works conducted by over 20 scientists, photographers, video makers, local community members and activists passionate about mountain lifestyles, landscapes and pastoral commons in four different Mediterranean countries, Morocco, Spain, Montenegro and Turkey, where different cultures live and conserve their territories of life. Cradled in beautifully diverse ecosystems, they all share the power to live a life in equilibrium ~ in connection with nature and oneself. They carry within them the possibilities to reflect, introspect and transform human aspirations and the global trajectories that we are lost in today. 

The objective of this exhibition is not to lend a description of pastoral systems as a whole, but to evoke the unique values and virtues that they embody. To many urban or rurban peoples, these systems are dated, irrelevant, retrograde, and ‘unsustainable’. This exhibition seeks to shift this stigmatized gaze and draw attention to the many sustainable richness that is embedded in the lives of these Mediterranean mobile pastoralists. So while recognizing the many imperfections that also persist within these systems (e.g. numerous gender and intergenerational inequalities, disequilibrated power dynamics within the different communities of livestock breeders, etc.), the exhibition would like to speak about how resilient they have been for centuries and even millennia, and how these ways of life have developed some of the most outstanding landscapes, cosmogonies and knowledge systems. 

In fact, the creation of this exhibition has been provoked by the reality that these people, their livelihoods and ecologies are particularly fragile as they get engulfed by globalized forces and State control. Factors that endanger their existence grow only stronger every year, and there are many! Lack of governmental and social incentives, ageism of the population, climate change, mass tourism, intensive agriculture, vulture multinationals promoting land grabbing, and aggressive political choices as particularly featured in the Montenegrin case here, but also in others. All of these issues need to be addressed bravely and courageously, in order to save and protect these unique places, people, products, natures, cultures and ways of life, as much for the benefit of the communities themselves as for humanity and the world ecosystem in its entirety.