The Bronx River will never be the way it used to be, but it sure looks a lot better today than it did 20 years ago. RickShaw/flickr, CC BY-SA New York City’s Bronx River used to be an open sewer, more useful for carrying industrial waste than for hosting fish. Today, thanks to the efforts […]
Category: Conservation
When a river is a person: from Ecuador to New Zealand, nature gets its day in court
The Whanganui River, seen here, is now a person under New Zealand law. AlexIndigo/Flickr, CC BY-ND In the early 2000s, the idea of giving legal rights to nature was on the fringes of environmental legal theory and public consciousness. Today, New Zealand’s Whanganui River is a person under domestic law, and India’s Ganges River was […]
Fakeademia
Academics are under pressure to produce increasing amounts of ‘academic products’, the most prestigious of which are journal articles. There’s an overall busy-bee mentality in contemporary academia that, though playing out differently in different institutions, leads to overproduction on the one hand, and insecurity on the other. Rarely are departments, or grant committees, or any […]
Cohabitation and Mutual Adaptation
At the beginning of March I visited the Sfântu Gheorghe community of the Danube Delta in order to gather the latest material on the jackal study I’ve presented here in the past. To recall, I have set up seven different camera traps to record jackal activity in key areas identified by locals. I have also conducted […]
Understanding Ourselves Through the Land
It is often said that it is since Darwin that we know of our natural history. This is unconvincing, because countless cultures before ours knew very well that they were related to animals and that they were, first and foremost, members of a wider biotic community; they simply did not have testable hypotheses as to […]
Land Abandonment in Europe
We usually think of the American and African continents as the places of big, untouched, wilderness. Whatever the merits of this view (amply and ably disputed), it at least serves to make a negative point: in Europe, the kind of nature that superficially looks untouched doesn’t really exist. What Europeans call nature is a deeply […]
On Mediocrity (happy new year)
I had often thought about keeping a blog, but it is only this year that I finally gathered the strength to do so. I had massed a pile of research and accompanying thoughts that no longer wanted to sit in a drawer. Looking back on this year and its modest amount of posts, I am […]
Wild Immigrants
The other day I had the pleasure of attending a symposium on wildlife – humans interactions. It was organized by the Centre for Nature and Society of the Radboud University, and gathered academic and practitioner voices for a very interesting discussion of the ethical and social dimensions of interacting with wild animals. The symposium was called Invasion […]
The Jackal Returns
Jackals roaming I was in the Danube Delta again last week, talking to locals of Sfântu Gheorghe about the golden jackal and downloading what our camera traps recorded in the last couple of months. Fall had just started to roll in – the first smell of burnt wood, the first cold rain – and with […]
Fishing and Natural Beauty
Conservationists often assume that nature is obviously beautiful. Or, at the very least, obviously inspiring and therefore worthy of respect. These assumptions are not at all as widespread as one might think, or want them, to be. And getting to terms with this fact is, as far as I’m concerned, key to how we will […]
