Professor Flora Lu was a senior author of a paper entitled “Amazonian conservation across archipelagos of Indigenous territories,” published in Conservation Biology. In this paper, the authors describe a new concept to describe Native Amazonian Lands in South America: archipelagos of Indigenous territories (AITs), or clusters of Indigenous territories that span geographies but are connected through shared cultural or political ties. AITs cover 45% of Amazonian land area, have high species richness and carbon stocks, and are under great pressure from extractive industries.
Lu also co-authored “Conservation and care: Cofan lessons for stewarding abundance in Amazonia” for Human Ecology. The paper describes asettu’cho, a community-based system developed by the Cofan of Ecuadorian Amazonia, as an ethics of care for human and non-human life. It starkly contrasts with Western conservationist approaches that withdraw care for people living in conservation areas, enact epistemic exclusion, and operate from a frame of scarcity and restriction rather than abundance and relationality.
Lastly, Lu co-authored the paper “Shuar women confronting extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A feminist and community-centered political ecology” with Kati Alvarez and Gabriela Valdivia in the Journal of Latin American Geography. This article describes how oil companies cause ruptures in the reorganization of community social reproduction of the Centro Shuar of Tiguano. The authors focus on the struggles of the Indigenous women of the community of Tiguano, describing their daily patterns and spaces of negotiation with, adaptation to, and rejection of extractive activities.