As part of my postdoctoral project at the TU Eindhoven I had the pleasure to visit the campus of Pablo de Olavide University in Seville at the end of September 2027. This campus became the newest living lab in our project on Ecologies of Care, and -especially after hearing the professors of this university wonder what is non-human agency and how to practice it – I decided to write a slightly experimental blogpost about the small campus visit, guided by Santiago, a botany professor.
Arriving
It is October in Seville, and the landscape is holding its breath. The city has had a long, hot, dry summer. You know, the kind that exhausts even the Mediterranean plants that evolved for exactly this. I observe the dry grass, the bleached ground. I am a cold-blooded person and am very sensitive for this late summer heat. I asked Santiago if we might have the blessing to encounter scorpions and snakes (my fellow cold-blooded friends). He showed me an app where they have been mapping species. Yes, this place co-houses scorpions and snakes, but there has never been an accident with them.
Not only snakes and scorpions live here. More than 500 native plant species are here. Three of the five autumn-flowering daffodils the campus hosts are about to open.
I am here as part of an EcoCare meeting, a gathering of researchers, practitioners, and institutions working on ecologies of care in urban and peri-urban spaces across Europe. We have spent hours inside. Now we are outside.
A Campus That Was Not Built from Scratch
To understand the biodiversity of UPO, Santiago explains, you need to go back to the 1950s. Before the tour started, he shared a power point with us.
An aerial photograph from 1952 shows an open countryside on the outskirts of a city that was, at that point, still relatively contained. In this place, the Franco regime built the Universidad Laboral de Sevilla, intended to provide education and vocational training to young working-class people. The complex operated until 1978, after which it was abandoned. It was re-opened in 1997 and renamed after Pablo de Olavide, an 18th-century Spanish-Peruvian reformer and writer.
Almost twenty years of abandonment… where did I hear this before? Oh yes, I live now in a place which has also been twenty years ‘abandoned’ before it got ‘used’ by humans again.
Those twenty years of abandonment in this place in Seville turned out to be ecologically formative. While Seville expanded rapidly around it, the site was left largely undisturbed. Nature recovered. Grasslands established themselves. Seasonal ponds filled and dried and filled again. By the time Pablo de Olavide University was founded here in 1997 ( twenty-five years ago), it inherited a landscape that had been quietly rewilding for two decades.
The buildings themselves are now protected as assets of cultural interest, listed in the Catalogue of Andalusia Historical Heritage. The tower, which was originally a water tank, now the university’s architectural symbol, is visible from almost everywhere on campus. A central covered gallery flanked by buildings named after figures associated with Pablo de Olavide himself, functions as the campus’s spine.
The Carob Tree and the Measure of Things
The heat drove us to the shadow of a carob tree. Carob tree, algarrobo in Spanish.
The carob tree is probably fifty years old, Santi estimates. Old enough to have preceded the university, young enough to have grown up alongside it. The pods, which we cannot find now because it is not the right season, would contain seeds of remarkably consistent weight.
Twenty-four of them, historically, equalled one carat. I looked up.
Someone in the group asks about the culinary uses. The carob is having a revival. Some mobile phones appeared and people look up more information about the carob tree. Apparently, it is fashionable now as a chocolate substitute, high in calcium, good for older bones, ground into a flour that works as a natural sweetener. One of our European group members says her 86-year-old mother still uses it. In the old times, before sweets were abundant, the carob pod was what you gave children when you wanted to give them something sweet. There is a kind of circularity in that … a food that sustained working-class communities before the era of cheap sugar, now returning as a health food for those who can afford to choose their sweeteners carefully.
What the Carob Tree Said
We are standing near a large carob tree when I hear it. Not hear, exactly feel, in the way you sometimes feel a question forming before you can articulate it. Something like: this might be interesting for your upcoming learning circle on ecofeminist economics at the Ecofeminist Society.
I am due to facilitate a session at the Ecofeminist Society next year. I have been thinking for ages (!) about what it would mean to ground economic thinking in care. In this learning circle, I plan to bring a more-than-human companion to break some boxes…
Pick me, pick me, invite me, the Carob tree says – in my head.
The Carob tree is enormous. Its canopy casting a shadow that changes the temperature of the air beneath it by several degrees. I am already loving this tree, just because of the shadow.
How? I think back at it.
Think about slow cycles and patient reproduction, and about economies that account for what is not yet visible. Work with my seeds. My seeds have an almost perfectly constant weight, which is why the word carat, the measure of gold purity, comes from the Greek for carob. Twenty-four seeds of this tree, laid on scales across centuries of trade, became the unit by which precious things are still measured today.
Hmm, is every seed perfectly the same weight?
Of course not, but that is the point. Sometimes you-we-more-than-humans should be OK with good enough.
When I invite you as a companion species… in perhaps a lesson on equivalencies and trade, what reflections might you evoke among us-human-participants?
We might bring in the challenges of equivalence. Sometimes we try to find a perfect measure, for example for care work, in terms of money, but it is not easy to find that perfect match. We can also remind you-we-more-than-humans that care is a currency too, one that is stable, that endures, that can be trusted to weigh the same every time, like our seeds.
OK, you’ve got me.
Pomegranate
The Holm Oak and the Pistache Tree
The holm oak is in the garden for ethnobotanical studies. “This is where I can touch and smell,” Santi told me. Earlier I had asked him whether there were plants to be aware of which did not like to be touched, and he said there was a garden where touching was encouraged. I heard from Santi that the holm oak is closely connected to Andalusian identity.
Are you a good economic teacher?
We all are.
Which economic word would you like to explore with some humans, informed by ecofeminism?
Perhaps budgeting. Or working with buckets, as you humans say. How much energy, or money, or whatever resource you humans try to plan, according to your own needs, which are of course attuned to the different seasons of the solar cycle, the moon cycle and other cosmic cycles.
I do a lot of bucketing. I have an excellent sheet where I keep track of my monthly fixed costs, etc. I am also trying to work harder now, so that I can rest more in winter.
Do you see rest as a currency?
Hmm, I did not know to answer… so I do what many people do… return the question.
Do you? How do you see it in your logic?
Invite me into your circle next year and we will all explore it together.
Reed
We arrive at the lagoon. There is a lot of reed. Since this year, especially after our Writing(with)Marsh Reed and Michael Marder session, I see reed in a different perspective.
Santiago says that reed facilitates one of the most difficult management challenges on campus. The seasonal ponds, restored from what had been converted into football pitches, now one of the most significant biodiversity hotspots on campus — are increasingly “colonised” (interesting word in the city where Christopher Columbus is buried, apparently) by Typha, the reed with cigar-shaped flowers, which grows into the water from the edges and is gradually obscuring the view from the two bird observation places.
In Ecologies of care, they worked with reed, but in another living lab. Reed is for sure a companion species to talk about the costs of care and maintenance. I might invite reed too. I wanted to listen to reed… but
The Mosquito and the Nile Virus
… then I noticed the bite on my hand sometime during the walk. It is red, slightly swollen… yeah, I know what it is.
Earlier, a professor mentioned that the mosquitoes here carry Nile virus. Not all of them. Possibly none of the ones near me. But the mosquitoes, he explained, have been retreating from areas with higher air pollution. This story illustrates how we might choose, often, between two evils. The dark ecologists wrote whole books about is.
Where the air is cleaner, the mosquitoes are present. Where the pollution is worse, they are not.
I look at the bite and try not to think about it too carefully. The dragonflies at the lagoon edge are catching mosquitoes in flight.
The diverse vegetation, Santiago had explained in his introductory talk, tends to attract different kinds of insects, including those that predate the ones that become pests. Monocultures of plants create monocultures of insects. The campus’s commitment to vegetational diversity is, among other things, a form of pest management that does not require pesticides. The wasps that have been causing problems this year (there were apparently several emails circulating about them) are the cost of not using chemical controls. One of the insects that thrives in a diverse landscape is a wasp.
The bite on my hand is probably nothing. I am probably not among the many who are sensitive to Nile virus. But probably is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the anxiety that flickers through is itself a kind of knowledge.
Sometimes I wished I was not so aware of the knowledge of being a body in a landscape that is not only beautiful but also teeming with life that has its own agendas, its own needs, its own vectors.
Care, as a practice, includes this discomfort.
I asked at some point if there were accidents with wasps. Santi paused. I had asked this after asking about the scorpions and snakes. No, he said, after a little pauze that signaled a small realization. We did not had to continue.
Political ecologies
The area Santiago is most concerned about is the one at the geographic centre of the campus. This is the place, he explains, that university administration looks at first when new infrastructure is needed. It is the obvious location, you know, central, flat, visible.
Unsurprisingly, every discussion for a new building project begins with someone pointing at this grassland.
However, this central grassland is one of the ecologically most significant parts of the campus. The species recorded here qualify it as a European protected habitat under the EU Habitats Directive. The dry grass that people walk past between lectures, thinking it could do with some attention from the gardening team, is in fact a fragment of a habitat type that is declining across Europe.
The farm land just beyond the campus boundary is owned by the university but leased to an agricultural operator. Whether pesticides are used there is uncertain. It falls outside the university’s direct management remit, and the lease conditions, while they include some environmental clauses, do not amount to full ecological stewardship. There are proposals to reforest that area, Santiago mentions, but it is unclear where those proposals will go.
What has worked, more than ecological arguments, is the economic argument. If students in environmental science, biology, and related disciplines can do their practical fieldwork on campus, the university saves hundreds or thousands of euros per cohort in field trip costs. That calculation (not the European habitat designation, not the botanical rarity) is what has been most effective in persuading administrators to hold the line…
Who Does the Caring?
The environmental management of the campus sits under the SEI-Cambio office, which sets guidelines for the gardening team. Gardeners, Santiago notes, are trained to mow. That is what gardening has historically meant in institutional settings. Retraining a gardening team to leave vegetation alone, to allow plants to complete their life cycles, to resist the impulse to tidy, is genuinely difficult. The campus does not use pesticides or herbicides. When a wasp problem emerges, the solution is to understand the ecology, not to spray. When the lagoon fills with reeds, the options are expensive mechanical intervention during the dry summer months or learning to manage the ponds differently.
Students are involved, though more on a voluntary basis than as a formal part of their curriculum. There is a nature classroom. Student volunteers build insect hotels, collect waste from the campus, and contribute to the biodiversity recording project. That project, launched in November 2020 on the iNaturalist citizen science platform, has grown significantly: from 1,000 species recorded in March 2024 to more than 1,600 species based on over 14,000 observations by approximately 500 users. In two years, the number of observations has nearly tripled. The map of these observations, colour-coded by organism group is already revealing patterns in where biodiversity concentrates and where it thins.
This is citizen science as a form of institutional care: the ongoing, distributed act of noticing what is there. The capacity to notice is itself something that has to be cultivated, through interpretive panels, through guided walks, through published identification books, through the experience of being outside on a university campus and having someone point out that the dry grass in front of you is a European protected habitat.
Outdoor class room in the pine forest
And then we arrived at my favorite spot: outdoor class rooms which were installed during the COVID pandemic. I am not going to spend more words. The photographs tell enough. Imagine I could do the learning circle here…
Pablo de Olavide University (UPO) is located on the outskirts of Seville, Andalusia, Spain. Its campus biodiversity project operates on the iNaturalist platform. This case study is part of the Ecologies of Care series, documenting practices of commons-based ecological stewardship and multispecies design across Europe. The Ecologies of Care project (EcoCARE) runs from January 2026 to December 2028, funded under the DUT 2024 Call (CUE Transition Pathway), coordinated by TU Eindhoven with eight partner institutions.
Discover more from Stories from the Wood Wide Web
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.