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 […]
Recent Posts
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 […]
Learning to Speak
Several months ago, my research funding body sent out an e-mail offering travel grants for the upcoming ESOF 2016 conference (EuroScience Open Forum), held this year in Manchester, UK. Being myself a product of the transformation of academic research into a market, I applied without really knowing what I applied for. The market scarcity imposed […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 tangle of resurrection
I ended my first blog post by asking what the point of reviving (or trying to) extinct species might be. Here, I want to take this question up and puzzle over it some more. It makes intuitive sense that, in the age of massive human-induced extinctions, the idea of reviving those already gone is gaining ground. […]
Purer than thou
You might have seen articles lately (for example here and here) announcing the return of the European bison (Bison bonasus), a seeming success story for the rewilding movement in Europe. Surely, it is a great thing to have an animal come back from the brink! However, what is less talked about, and what I want to […]
Looking back to go forward
Before humans domesticated wild animals, meaning before we managed to control the reproductive cycle of animals with the goal of using their abilities for our gain, there was a wealth of beasts that might have become servants of the human project. Only a fraction of them were amenable to domestication (as Jared Diamond has argued […]
