I am currently in Aotearoa New Zealand for a three-month fellowship researching two legal persons: the river Whanganui, and the former national park and ancestral Tūhoe homeland, Te Urewera. These natural beings were recognized as persons in law, a move that has generated widespread international media coverage and fawning commentary. I will write in future […]
Recent Posts
The Normalization of Science
The work of an academic today is disproportionately defined by the imperative to publish. This is true to the point of platitude, and there is no shortage of good writing examining this condition of the academic as publication enterprise. For better or worse, the experience of publishing one’s work allows for a pretty close view […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Knowing the Jackal
The year of following the activity of Golden Jackals in the Danube Delta has sadly come to an end. I say sadly because it was great fun getting fresh batches of videos and seeing how the animals behaved. It was equally nice to be asked by people in the community of Sfântu Gheorghe (in the […]
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 […]
The quest to revive the Aurochs: a brief history of how and why
This Auroch skeleton from Denmark dates to around 7,500BC. The circles indicate where the animal was wounded by arrows. Malene Thyssen./Wikimedia, CC BY-NC Rewilding and restoration of land often rely on the reintroduction of species. But what happens when what you want to reintroduce no longer exists? What if the animal in question is not […]
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 […]
The Civil Animal 