Imagining multispecies mobility justice

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Asia-Pacific, migratory shorebirds are being threatened by human encroachments into their coastal habitats. In this short visual essay, we unravel the entanglements that bind the Far Eastern Curlew with a range of mobilities in one of its key landing sites, Meanjin – Brisbane. These entanglements raise critical questions about how we humans conceptualise and pursue mobility justice. We suggest that paying attention to how mobilities intersect in more-than-human ways demands that our Western, anthropocentric narratives and framings of watery places, multispecies mobilities, and the rights to movement more broadly, must change. These considerations of mobility justice need to account for, and take heed of, the persisting existences with which ‘we’ cohabitate.

KEYWORDS:

• More-than-human
• mobilities
• migratory shorebirds
• wetlands
• ports
• justice

1.  

You have to look hard, squint almost, to spot a slight form out at the distance on the mudflats. This is the Far Eastern Curlew. It is a migratory shorebird, a ‘wader’, that feeds, roosts, and thrives on these muddy, mangrove, and mosquito-filled wetlands. Standing at the mouth of Brisbane River, Maiwar as it is known in Turrbal language, the river is intersected by Brisbane’s air and sea ports, along the shores of Moreton Bay, Quandamooka Country. The Far Eastern Curlew (Figure 1) is motley brown, with a long, shapely curved beak. It is smaller and sleeker than a domestic chicken, and is extremely nervous and timid around other species, vessels, and especially humans.

Figure 1. A Far Eastern Curlew in the distance of muddy shorelines.

Far Eastern Curlews are critically endangered, on the brink of extinction (BirdLife International 2022). Yet, they are also known as the ‘moon bird’, due to the fact that, across the 20+ years of its life, an Eastern Curlew will fly roughly the distance to the moon and back (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A Far Eastern Curlew in the foreground, towered by port infrastructure in the distance.

Far Eastern Curlews reside here in Brisbane – Meanjin, and around Australia, seasonally. They make an annual journey to the Arctic and back, visiting sites anywhere between the Australian coasts, through Asia, and right up to the Siberian tundra (EAAFP 2018). However, these ‘frequent flyers’ are in sharp decline. Populations of the Far Eastern Curlew have reduced by 80% in the past 30 years (BirdLife International 2022), alongside similar devastating declines across most other migratory species. Yet, their long-haul journeys persist, and they return to our shorelines each year.

It would be easy to think that this small creature is an unlikely contender to be one of the marathon commuters of the nonhuman world. When you glimpse shorebirds out on the mudflats, with their scrawny stance, their skittish nature, it is hard to imagine something so small – so vulnerable and endangered – being so vitally connected to the lands, sea, and elemental conditions that it navigates across an annual trans-hemispheric journey. Yet it is one of the many hundreds, thousands, of unlikely resisters to human mobilities along the coastal waterways and major mobility hubs across the world (Barry & Suliman 2021; 2023).

In this short visual essay, we unravel the entanglements that bind the Far Eastern Curlew with a range of mobilities in one of its key landing sites, Meanjin (otherwise known as Brisbane). These entanglements raise critical questions about how we humans conceptualise and pursue mobility justice. We suggest that paying attention to how mobilities intersect in more-than-human ways demands that our Western, anthropocentric narratives and framings of watery places, multispecies mobilities, and the rights to movement more broadly, must change. These considerations of mobility justice, as we sketch out in this visual essay, need to account for, and take heed of, the persisting existences with which ‘we’ cohabitate.

2.  

Here, on the mouth of Maiwar, we see not only vital spaces of migration used by the Far Eastern Curlew, but the mobilities of aircraft and sea vessels that follow similar trajectories to the major migration routes of nonhumans: the curlew and fellow shorebirds, but also fish, whales, krill, and more. These port geographies are often built upon optimal routes of flight and freight – for sea and land – that were established by pre-existing elemental mobilities: sea currents, wind corridors, tidal flats, and so on (Barry 2020; Barry & Suliman 2023). As such, these trajectories of humans and nonhumans intersect in those places where human mobility infrastructures are built over the ecological and biodiverse hotspots that are essential sites for these species survival (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3. The Port of Brisbane at the mouth of the river.

Figure 4. Fences and information signs along the riverbanks.

The downstream reaches of Maiwar are sandwiched in between fences covered with plastic debris and seaweed, along old bricked military sites and dilapidated roads, and newly-installed stormwater drainage systems with automatic sensing to prevent these low-lying areas from flooding. Nearby, early-morning risers walk dogs along the mudflats as the tide stretches out towards the horizon. Signage cautions against biosecurity threats from incoming vessels, possible contamination of the waterways due to runoff, undersea cables, and protected marine non-fishing zones. In the distance, feeding shorebirds can be seen, trying to fatten up for their northward journeys, shadowed by shipping containers on the horizon (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. Shipping containers.

Figure 6. A human and dogs walking at sunrise along mudflats at low tide.

While human and companion species’ recreation punctuates the beauty and vastness of these tidal mudflats, more signage warns visitors against disturbing nesting shorebirds. These signs boast the emblem of the not-for-profit wildlife charity that funded these permanent fixtures along the coastal recreation stretch, like a frantic call for attention to local residents that bustle past in everyday work and play. These landscapes are neither liminal nor devoid, awaiting industrial mobilities infrastructures to populate them. Tidal wetlands situate one ‘in the midst of a landscape, and a habitat, fully imbued with its own richness, and ecology and biodiversity’ (Darby 2020, 18).

Following Maiwar upstream, buoyed along by the currents trailing the criss-crossing CityCat commuter vessels, looking closely down into the water, more evidence can be seen of the banal encroachments of the greater city of Brisbane upon the river. Discarded e-scooters lay partially submerged in the muddy banks, energy drink cans drift along the surface, plastic bags, more plastic bags, witches hats thrown in, junk food wrappers, dogs being walked along the gritty shores, riverside walkways that sit atop the muddy waters, sea gulls begging for hot chips from picnicking groups, and then, close to the city centre, the dazzling coloured lights of the Story Bridge (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Maiwar at the city centre, with a CityCat commuter service in the foreground.

Major mobility routes converge on the river of this ‘New World City’ (Brisbane City Council 2019). The International terminals at both the air and sea ports have recently been expanded, and the impending Olympics in just over a decade have ‘necessitated’ new infrastructure to host this global spectacle. Further along the coastline, the desire for building up and out over tidal flats on the outskirts of the city has sparked fierce debate over the future of these muddy shores. The area known as Toondah Harbour has been the subject of a lengthy and passionate campaign against a multi-million dollar development proposal to build luxury apartments, private swimming pools, a new ferry hub, docks, and more (Cannane 2018). Significant stretches along this coastline are already protected under the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (EAAFP 2018). The recent history of wetland conservation has enrolled the public imaginary around ‘wetlands’ into ‘precious places that needed to be set aside’ (O’Gorman 2021, 15), furthering nature-culture divisions in public debate. As O’Gorman outlines, ‘“Wetlands” belongs to a new globalizing terminology … which includes “the environment”’ by using multiscalar politics to create this new ‘category and object of conservation’ (2021, 142–143). Despite the Ramsar protection on this coastline, the proposal from development has received little pushback from governments, and no apparent regard for these international protective frameworks (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Toondah Harbour, the site on which 40 hectares of Ramsar protected wetlands are facing imminent development.

3.  

Taking up the fight for the plight of the Far Eastern Curlew and its travelling companions of other migratory species, are local residents along Maiwar and the Moreton Bay coastline. Large public events, protests, and creative activities have been held in recent years to raise attention and awareness for the encroaching developments on local wetlands. These public-facing activities lean heavily on creative expression to garner attention and reiterate the scale of nonhuman mobilities. For instance, a towering, oversized curlew puppet, fondly named ‘Beako’, who is made from paper, textiles, and impressive articulated structure, ‘flies’ over and around crowds at local events. Each year on World Wetlands Day, hundreds of local residents and conservationists have come together at Toondah Harbour for an event named ‘Draw a line in the mud’. Raising torches, candles, and lights at dusk, a human crowd, stretched along the shoreline, creates ‘landing lights’, a kind of double metaphor to both guide the birds in, but to also enforce the message that they are ‘drawing a line’ against any further development along the coast (Redlands2030 2021). There are also participatory activities at many of these events, trying to encourage more people to take part in these protests, but also to enhance the general understanding of the marathon commutes of migratory shorebirds (Figures 9 and 10).

Figure 9. The oversized Far Eastern Curlew puppet at a community protest event, May 2021.

Figure 10. Draw a line in the mud event, Toondah Harbour, May 2021.

Attending these events for the past few years, we (the authors) keep returning in our thinking to the contradictions in scales and imagery that motivate and mobilise such public resistances (Figure 11). Cartographic uses in signage and scale, often mixing metaphors of avian and aviatic movements, rely on very human framings and articulations of what ‘mobility’ means. These nonhuman migrations are beyond the scale of what any human voyage could achieve by land or sea alone, without the aid of vessels, fuel, and technologies. These are extraordinary mobile lifeworlds, and we come to understand such lengthy journeys and plights through our own knowledge and experiences of long-haul mobility. For instance, we understand the poetics instilled in the language of the ‘long-haul’ journey or ‘frequent flyer’, but this rests on our own grasp of what this kind of mobility is to experience in the first place.

Figure 11. Painted wooden shorebirds, staked in the gritty shoreline at a community event.

4.  

We return to the anthropocentric discourse of who has the right to be mobile, and where such mobility takes place. These hypermobilities are now assumed to be integral to global society, and the hyperextensive movements of goods, people, and resources are deeply ingrained within social and cultural understandings and geographies of mobility, despite the impending climate crisis (Cohen and Gössling 2015). Nonhumans, such as the curlew and other migratory species, are largely left out of these discussions, because of their inherently mobile existences. As much as we might seek to understand their mobility, we need to cautiously approach an ‘informed anthropomorphism’ (Johnson 2008, 643), which allows us to ask questions about how our mobilities and coexistences might converge with or differ from nonhumans. Might they just ‘move elsewhere?’ As much as ‘we’ humans would like them to, Harry Sadler eloquently explains that:

Shorebird lives are inextricably linked to the sea; so, too, are human lives, for we all live connected lives now. We ship goods around the world – we access and accept the world via ports and harbours. That shorebirds, sitting near the top of a food chain that begins with the nutrients disgorged by rivers into tidal mudflats, so often depend upon these exact same areas, puts them into a more direct conflict than most birds with not just humanity but the with the very foundations of our modern civilisation (Sadler 2018, Loc 2162).

The fight for Toondah Harbour brings these divisions to light, as we begin to question how the ‘kinetic elites’ and ‘supercommuters’ (Adey 2006; Bissell, Vannini, and Jensen 2016) of the human world are relatively unquestioned around mobility privileges and the emissions and destruction such frequent flying produces. And, although the ports in Brisbane enable a significant connectivity and prosperity for local human communities, we need to be reminded that our mundane mobilities are deeply neglective of any kinds of justice for other species. This case, therefore, highlights the urgent injunction to critically reframe conceptions of multispecies justice that moves from an entirely conservation framing – which, as O’Gorman reminds us, declares these as ‘precious places’ separate from the human (2021, 15) – towards an ethical relationality. In this way, it ‘requires acknowledging the presence of being endowed with … ecological situatedness that may be radically different from those of humans’ (Chao and Celemajer 2023, 2) that neither radically separates humans from nonhumans, nor sustains the hierarchies through which more-than-human mobile lives are always subsumed under mobility. Shorebirds draw our attention to this ‘messy coming together’, in the words of Thom Van Dooren, where there is ‘much at stake’ for migratory species ‘and for the broader community of co-evolved life to which we both belong’ (2014, 22) (Figure 12).

Figure 12. Fence with shorebird information sign nearby the birdwatching platform at the Port of Brisbane.

Of course, we recognise that conceiving of the immensity of multispecies mobility, such as in the migrations of the Far Eastern Curlew, needs to lean on our all-too-human understandings of movement, space, and scale. But the violence that human mobility produces needs to be foregrounded (Fishel 2019) and must not be palmed off as entirely the product of the wealthy or powerful. As we eagerly open our next-day-delivery that’s been flown in from afar, or as we sip our flat white in a riverside café, or delight in slightly less gridlocked traffic in the peak hour commute along the newly completed over-water expansion to (the aptly named) Kingsford Smith Drive, we might take these moments to consider the limits of mobilities justice, of whether we are actually attending to the intersecting mobilities of humans and nonhumans. If we are trying to speak and act for nonhumans, can we pause to wonder if anyone has left the landing lights on?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Dr Kaya Barry is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award [project number: DE220100394] funded by the Australian Government.