Category: Human Ecology
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Multiple Bosses
In early July I visited the Varaita Valley of the Italian Alps, in the Piedmont region, on the border with France. Some days earlier I had met a resident of the valley, Denis, who shepherds his own flocks in the area, grazing them on the beautiful mountain slopes overlooking the massive Viso peak (3.841m). The…
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Restoring a beneficial relation to the natural world
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
The Civil Animal 