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: political ecology
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
