Saving Turtles; rehabilitating practices and enactments: the entangled lives of sea turtles and people in a turtle conservation organisation in Far Northern Queensland, Australia.

Abstract

Abstract This thesis explores encounters between humans and sea turtles. Based on six months fieldwork in Cairns, Far Northern Queensland, Australia, my ethnography revolves around Saving Turtles1, an environmental organisation that works to rehabilitate sick and injured sea turtles in two turtle rehab-centres; improvised, yet sturdy and well functioning hospitals built for sea turtles. I discuss how sea turtles emerge differentially through the nexus of practices that connects to this organisation, where turtles and people meet and entangle in different ways. I show how sea turtles are enacted as a threatened group of animals through pictures and texts deployed in the environmental movement, and argue that this creates conditions for the work carried out by Saving Turtles. I then focus on practices within this organisation's rehab-centres and show how different sea turtle ontologies are produced out of the caring-practices in which they take part. Furthermore, I argue that when turtles are successfully rehabilitated and released into the sea, this enacts wilderness-nature as a particular ontology that hinges on a clear separation between nature and culture. By focusing on the nexus of practices that go into rehabilitating turtles, my aim is to use empirical descriptions as a kind of onto-political interference, against seeing the natural world as given and inert or ontologies as fixed. Lastly, I briefly discuss how aboriginal hunting of sea turtles challenges the enactment of wilderness-nature and opens up for seeing how realities can always be done differently.