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 […]
Category: Conservation
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 […]
Participating in Conservation
The idea of participation is steadily gaining ground in conservation. But what does it mean to participate, and in what exactly can (or should) one participate? These are the questions I want to reflect on in this post. I use conservation here in its widest possible sense. For example, the Bronx River Alliance has been […]
On the Jackal’s trail
Walking on a sand road leading away from the village, scouting for places to put our camera-traps, I saw my first jackal. No more than twenty meters away, it stopped to look at us before disappearing in the high grasses of the Delta. In the previous days, we had followed their tracks and knew more […]
Of Bison and Men
A couple of posts back I wrote about the introduction of the European Bison (wisent) to the forests of the Southern Carpathians, in Romania. This is part of a European push towards the rehabilitation of the species, and I explained in that post how the idea of rehabilitation is interestingly and questionably tied to ideas of […]
Who’s afraid of the big bad jackal?
For the past year, I have been doing field-work in the Romanian Danube Delta. Everybody in Europe knows of the Danube river, but very few (outside Romania and the Ukraine) know that it forms a sprawling delta before reaching the Black Sea. This area, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a Biosphere Reserve, is one […]
The Civil Animal 