I have spent the last three months in New Zealand, immersed in a world very different from the one that defines my usual daily life. I have had the luxury of time-to-think, something that, even though I became an academic for it, is rarer by the day. I have also had the opportunity to start […]
Author: Mihnea Tanasescu
I am a postdoc at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), on a fellowship from the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO). I research the evolving practice of conservation through the study of rewilding. I am interested in human-nature-animal relations in general and find rewilding to be a good lense for thinking about how these are evolving today.
Crisis
It has been impossible lately to think of anything else but the looming disaster of climate change. It feels irresponsible to think about anything else, to let marches and organizing work go by because of ‘normal life’. Each one of us is, in their own way, insignificant. But together we can demand, in the 11th […]
Who is guarding whom?
I am currently in Aotearoa New Zealand for a three-month fellowship researching two legal persons: the river Whanganui, and the former national park and ancestral Tūhoe homeland, Te Urewera. These natural beings were recognized as persons in law, a move that has generated widespread international media coverage and fawning commentary. I will write in future […]
The Normalization of Science
The work of an academic today is disproportionately defined by the imperative to publish. This is true to the point of platitude, and there is no shortage of good writing examining this condition of the academic as publication enterprise. For better or worse, the experience of publishing one’s work allows for a pretty close view […]
Moving to a town near you
In many articles on this blog I have spoken about the reintroduction of animals to areas where they have gone extinct. This practice has become common in rewilding projects, and it has many advantages, not least the publicity that comes from releasing charismatic megafauna (yes, mostly them). The public relations campaigns of conservation and rewilding […]
The Pigeon in the Coal Mine
The Côa Valley, Eastern Portugal, is dotted with thousands of pigeon houses. It is impossible not to notice the elegant structures that seem to fit timelessly within the landscape. Though they look like they’ve always been there, this is not true. For a region with a history dating back tens of thousands of years, they […]
Trial of Fire
In mid-April I travelled to Western Iberia to visit the Faia Brava nature reserve (Portugal) and meet some of the people responsible for it. The name means ‘wild cliff’ in the Portuguese spoken in this remote, achingly beautiful area. The organisation managing the area, the Transhumance and Nature Foundation (ATN), was started in 2000 by […]
A long way to go
My newest research tries to understand what the barriers to truly inclusive conservation projects are. It is of course very hard to generalize from a couple of cases. Especially today, conservation practice has branched off into many different orientations. This being said, I think it is valuable to examine certain cases of conservation to try […]
Knowing the Jackal
The year of following the activity of Golden Jackals in the Danube Delta has sadly come to an end. I say sadly because it was great fun getting fresh batches of videos and seeing how the animals behaved. It was equally nice to be asked by people in the community of Sfântu Gheorghe (in the […]
In Projects we Trust
When I was a child in communist Romania, the butt of many jokes was the government’s five-year plans. The cincinal (from cinci, meaning five in Romanian) was always accomplished in four years and a half, and the initial production goals were always surpassed. This of course had no relation whatsoever with reality. The 1980s that […]
The Civil Animal 