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 […]
Category: Human Ecology
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Paving the fields, eating the city
Last week I attended the 21st conference of the Society for Human Ecology (SHE). The Society, started about 30 years ago, is dedicated to the advancement of human ecology, an area of research and teaching that focuses on human – environment interactions. In other words, it considers the human being from an ecological perspective, being […]
