Geographies Of Conservation Research Articles

Geografia da conservação: abordagens, limites e potencialidades

Biodiversity loss has been a major issue on the Global Agenda since at least the 1990s. Several scientific fields are in charge of addressing this issue, especially Conservation Biology, Landscape Ecology, and even Geography. Although the scientific and epistemological advances of the first two fields are notorious, the current causes of biodiversity loss have multiple facets, which include territorial, social, and political dimensions. To aid in the thought process of the issue, the present study used documentary research as a method, reviewing specialized literature in journals, theses, and dissertations to cover the main concepts involved in conservation studies and the contribution of related sciences. The literature review also included the perspective of Geography in conservation studies and the emergence of new perspectives, such as Conservation Geography. The main results include the initial intention of Conservation Biology to produce studies with a multidisciplinary focus, observing, however, a predominance of studies of Population Biology and Minimum Areas of Diversity. As a proposal to overcome conservation of the exclusionary type, derived from biological studies, Conservation Geography intends to coordinate the concepts of territory, landscape, and biophysical dynamics to the concept of ecosystems, producing a reading that is closer to the actors that produce the space, as well as the disputes that modify and create the territories, which are the main causes to explain the loss of biodiversity and that, in turn, would allow the production of consistent conservation designs.

Conceptualising multispecies collaboration: Work, animal labour, and Nature‐based Solutions

AbstractTracing the story of beaver restoration across California, this paper investigates the emerging discourse of ‘working with nature’ through the lens of animal work and labour, exploring possibilities for, multispecies collaboration. At the intersection of animal geographies, environmental anthropology, and geographies of conservation, this paper finds three concurrent modes of working with beaver: beaver as labourer, beaver as coworker, and beaver as community. Beaver as labourer emerges as a mode where beavers go from material resource to low‐wage labourer, their liveliness predicated on their ability to be working for humans. Beaver as coworker transitions beavers from labourers to workers, respected for their skills as ecosystem engineers to be working with. Beaver as community emerges as a mode in which beavers and humans live with each other as kin, amidst wider multispecies assemblages. This mode sets the foundation to theorise the concept of multispecies collaboration, a term often used in the literature without definition. This paper explores the concept through theories of animal work and labour, challenging the premise of work altogether, while situating multispecies collaboration as an in‐between, a both/and space of working and living with ‘nature’. This paper serves as an reflection on the ways in which humans ‘work with nature’, in a time where various nonhumans are being made to be ‘workers’. It presents and analyses these relations, ruminates on implications for governance of these multispecies spaces, and develops the concept of multispecies collaboration as a critical consideration for Nature‐based Solutions.

Conservation frontiers: understanding the geographic expansion of conservation

ABSTRACT Land-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies of conservation, connecting conservation with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly the frontier concept – allows assessing the patterns, actors, and drivers of conservation. We propose that land conservation can be analysed through three different perspectives. First, conservation can be framed as efforts to slow or stop other frontiers. Second, the expansion of conservation could itself be described as a frontier process, similarly leading to institutional and cultural reorganization, and sometimes conflicts (e.g. green grabbing). Third, frontiers can be seen as spaces where multiple land uses, including conservation, interact. Analysing conservation through these perspectives could be particularly powerful to thoroughly consider the social-ecological contexts in which conservation happens, and thus to bridge the disciplines of Land System Science and Conservation Science.

Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: a pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal

Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of an anti-poaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural residents affected by the externalities of coal mining. A range of struggles are waged against these challenges, but a hegemonic 'Biodiversity Economy' intervention has arisen, attended by projects aimed at territorializing conservation space and multiple-win scenarios. Based on four years of intermittent research in the area, this article critiques the territorialization of conservation, project outcomes, and commercialization efforts within the Umfozi Biodiversity Economy Node (UBEN). I contend that a biodiversity economy nodal approach extends neoliberal conservation strategies, and functions as a spatial aggregator to reterritorialize conservation land use over space and time. However, the findings suggest that, despite years of energy and investment there have only been limited individual successes in the UBEN, and a range of frustrations, compounded by COVID-19 complications. The analysis also highlights further costs and externalities of the initiative: as the UBEN exacerbates underlying tensions in Kwazulu-Natal's uneven conservation geography, and it aligns with problematic and often unrepresentative traditional authority structures and related accumulation networks. It is also complicit with the production of sacrificial spaces at the conservation-extraction nexus.In this context, I argue the UBEN is pyrrhic; that is, an outcome or goal strived for/achieved at too little reward and too high a cost. The article extends political-ecological critique of neoliberal conservation and the green economy to incorporate the framing and implementation of biodiversity economy nodal approaches – and their uneven and pyrrhic effects – in contested, crisis-ridden conservation contexts.

Blue governmentality: Elemental activism with conservation technologies on plundered seas

For the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the atmosphere and ocean are channels for movement that are to be used and overcome in direct actions to protect marine environments. To accomplish these missions, they deploy a fleet of ships, helicopters, and drones that intervene to stop violations of conservation laws. In this way, oceanic elements—waves, winds, icebergs, and storms—mediate conservation and conservation technologies. The elements and the technologies that Sea Shepherd exploit both inhibit and make conservation possible.This paper argues that the drone is an exteriorization of the human body whose liberatory potentials are mediated by the atmosphere and ocean. Through ethnographic, textual, and videographic analysis, this article explores blue governmentality—how the azure sky and cyan ocean and the technologies that flow through these elements at once afford and constrain the control of biopower. Understanding blue governmentality means appreciating how the elements mediate movement, communication, and life itself. It requires comprehending how technologies emerge from the body, extend political intentionality, work across the elements, and network with other technologies. This article challenges conservation geography to see governmentality not as a totalizing force but one that is tempered by elemental mediations, technological affordances, and human fallibility.

Extinctionscapes: Spatializing the commodification of animal lives and afterlives in conservation landscapes

ABSTRACT This article advances a more-than-human perspective on geographies of death and dying, engaging with extinctionscapes as spaces where the memorialization of nonhuman life generates affective and commodifiable experiences with species loss in conservation landscapes. Bringing geographical concepts, such as absence-presence, into conversation with recent literature on lively commodities, we describe how animals at the threshold of life and death are made to work for conservation as well as how their afterlives are subjected to ongoing forms of commodification through acts of memorialization in landscape. Specifically, our analysis focuses on the stories of three rhinos at a conservancy in Kenya to consider the themes of death and dying, value, and commodification in relation to endangered species conservation. By situating the lives and afterlives of these rhinos in the history of settler colonialism and capitalism in Kenya, we examine how commodification, as a social and cultural process, becomes entangled with the corporeal and discorporate lives of animals and contributes to the reproduction of historic injustices through extinctionscapes. Ultimately, we argue for ongoing critical engagement with the amorphous borderland of life and death in geographies of conservation, which represents an important space of biopolitics and commodification.

From Biopower to Ontopower? Violent Responses to Wildlife Crime and the New Geographies of Conservation

Intensifying global dynamics of wildlife crime are rapidly reshaping conservation politics, practices and geographies. Most pronounced are the manifold violent responses to wildlife crime, including direct lethal action and increasing anticipatory action to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place. This paper reflects on these dynamics in relation to recent literature that employs Foucault's concept of biopower to understand the governance of increasingly precarious human and non-human life. Building on Brian Massumi's exposition of ontopower – an 'environmental power' that “alters the life environment's conditions of emergence” – I explore whether we are seeing a move from bio- to ontopower where the imperative is less the construction of systemic forms of governmentality to ensure life's ‘optimisation’ than on processually pre-empting incipient tendencies towards unknown but certain future threats to life. Phrased differently, ontopower focuses on how to prevent nature's destruction in the future through pre-emptive measures in the present. Drawing on empirical research on violent responses to rhino poaching in South Africa, the paper argues that we are seeing the uneven emergence of new geographies of conservation based on ontopower. It concludes by speculating whether conservation's insecurity is turning into its pre-emptive other by making (green) war necessary for non-human life's survival.

Living in a Cage: The Intimate Geographies of Conservation in South Africa and Tanzania

National parks are socially produced conservation spaces that shape the lives, understandings, and behaviours of the men and women who live and work within them. This article draws on 18 months of comparative ethnographic research with men and women who are employed and reside inside in protected areas in northern Tanzania and South Africa's Kruger National Park. Protected area management decisions regarding the migration, isolation, concentration, and living arrangements of employees combine with structural forces of relational material inequality and varied understandings of gender relations to produce geographies of intimacy that shape both perceptions and patterns of sexual and emotive behaviours in powerful, and potentially troublesome, ways among conservation actors. Although the specific configuration of this constellation of forces is context dependent and unique to each location, there are also discernable similarities across national context. Given the human resource intensive nature of conservation, these findings have direct relevance for the future success of national parks in both countries and for conservation more generally.

Geographies of conservation II: Technology, surveillance and conservation by algorithm

The wide range of wildlife tracking and surveillance technologies (radio and satellite tracking, cameras, and audio) that are being deployed in conservation have important implications for a geographical understanding of care for non-human nature. This report explores four dimensions of their influence. First, their detailed view of spatial dimensions of non-human lives affects conservation’s demarcation and control of space. Second, the application of surveillance technologies to people is central to the rise of coercive conservation strategies. Third, such technologies enable the creation and commoditization of spectacular nature. Fourth, spatial digital data enables the automation of conservation decisions, a trend described here as ‘conservation by algorithm’.

Heritage as Weapon: Contested Geographies of Conservation and Culture in the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area, India

Mountains are one of the last refuges of biodiversity worldwide. As the global discourse on nature conservation becomes prominent within sustainability debates and local populations continue to be blamed for environmental destruction, projected territorial expansion of protected areas will likely lead to high levels of conflict and contestation around mountains of the world. At the same time, deeper penetration of transnational advocacy networks and wider connections of civil society will bring new tools of resistance to bear on this conflict. We propose that democracy plays an increasingly critical role in assisting local opposition to thwart new restrictions on access to natural areas prioritized for conservation. We illustrate this larger argument through the case of the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA), recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Indian Himalayas. In their opposition to exclusion, local communities have employed heritage as a weapon, successfully marshaling the representation of the region as the “Valley of the Gods” and putting their cultural heritage to work against global conservation agendas. Tourism posters depicting the sacred geography of numerous local deities allow local communities to justify opposition to the conservation status that restricts access to their gods, while channeling their demands through elected representatives. The state navigates this complex territory between global and local heritage uneasily, primarily through a series of compromises at the local level. This article focuses on the ways in which mountain heritage—local and global, cultural and natural—is negotiated in the crucible of democracy.

Geographies of conservation I

Extinction has long been a central concern in biodiversity conservation. Today, de-extinction offers interesting possibilities of restoring charismatic species and ecosystem function, but also risks and costs. Most de-extinction depends on genetic engineering and synthetic biology. These technologies are also proposed for use in ‘gene tweaking’ in wild species to enhance their chance of survival. Within conservation, the resulting debates pit an optimistic world of high-tech ‘precision conservation’ against a more conventional vision of biodiversity conservation achieved primarily through protected areas. De-extinction is a fashionable idea that brings the complex debates about the ethics and wisdom of genetic engineering to a central position within conservation science

Breaking the bundle of rights: Conservation easements and the legal geographies of individuating nature

This paper bridges critical legal geography and geographical work on neoliberal natures to illustrate the vital role that US law has played in reimagining the values of nature as divisible from their supporting contexts and the spatial outcomes of this “individuation.” The development and widespread use of conservation easements by nonprofit land trust groups serves as a precedent-setting case study. I review the two major pieces of enabling legislation: the Uniform Conservation Easement Act, and the addition of Section 170(h) to the federal tax code, to argue that these legal changes mark a pivotal moment of reregulation that has been significant for regularizing the separation of conservation values from their socio-ecological contexts. Finally, I offer three examples of the spatial manifestations of the legal foundations of conservation easements: shifting geographies of conservation prompted by highest and best use valuation and tax deductibility, an altered public/private divide in protected areas, and the creation of new spaces of accumulation, through the use of easement law by entrepreneurial forest carbon firms.

Emerging Geographies of Conservation and Indigenous Land in Australia

ABSTRACTInternational examples of interactions between Indigenous peoples and the new conservation paradigm come mainly from developing countries and suggest divisions over priorities. As a Western settler society, Australia is at a critical time in conservation and Indigenous peoples' rights. Innovative approaches to conservation are promoted. The role and influence of non-governmental organisations is increasing. Indigenous peoples' rights to land are recognised and Indigenous involvement in conservation is growing. Yet, despite Australia being considered a leader in these arenas, particularly the latter, there has been little analysis of the relationship between innovative approaches to conservation and Indigenous Australians under the new paradigm. This paper describes how the spatial manifestations of approaches under the new conservation paradigm and Indigenous land in Australia are creating new geographies. We identify geographies of overlap, dichotomy and absence. The paper identifies research needs into these geographies, including: examining the influence of ‘recognition’ in engagements between conservation and Indigenous Australians; investigating the impacts of approaches under the new paradigm such as scaling-up, territorialism and differing governance structures on Indigenous Australians; and questioning the social responsibilities of the non-governmental organisations towards Indigenous Australians.

New geographies of conservation and globalisation: the spatiality of development for conservation in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa

This paper analyses spatial conflicts in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park (IWP) in South Africa, a state-led ‘development for conservation’ project and UNESCO World Heritage Site. With inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's theory on the production of space, it examines dialectical processes of the production of conservation space empirically. Two arenas of conflict: fencing and punitive actions against conservation transgressors are discussed in terms of state power in its relational engagement with local space. Spatial conflicts emerge through tensions between the imposed objectives for the conservation of ecological World Heritage – and the subjective space of users and inhabitants. Market-based modernisation and economic growth strategies, which view land as a commodity, rather than as a social-ecological resource for livelihood generation, perpetuate historical insecurities through the alienation of local people from both land and management practices. Other alienating effects include the socially differentiated effects of new rules of governance, the reshaping of old ethnic identities as a result of envisaged benefits from ecotourism and the imposition of new social-ecological values.

Imbricated Geographies of Conservation and Consumption in the Stikine Plateau

Abstract This paper interrogates the role of animals and hunting, conservation and consumption in the making of the Stikine, a vast though nebulously defined plateau that covers much of the northwest corner of British Columbia. In 1905, Arthur Bryan Williams, the newly appointed Provincial Game Warden enacted a new regime of control over landscape, animals and ecology. New laws on closed seasons, kill limits, an enforcement network and a careful system of accounting re-scripted what animals meant in the province and fundamentally changed the interactions between people, nature and the state. I show how hunting, conservation and the changes to consumption worked to shift understandings of nature in the Stikine. The geographies of conservation and consumption, operating across multiple scales, were a fundamental component of place-making in the Stikine in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The human-geographic perspective of environmental studies

The ecological approach in geography became very prominent in the 1970s and has been of great importance for the further development of this science. Together with the expansion of environmental pollution, this has had an impact on the current treatment of environmental protection in social geography. This research is a part of cultural ecology - political ecology, where the influence of geography is evident, as well as in other scientific fields, such as environmental geography, geo-ecology, and conservation geography. The importance of social geography in environmental studies is particularly obvious in the context of global initiatives and action concerning nature protection, where every initiative is directly faced with numerous problems, like relations with local communities, borders and cross-border cooperation (in the example of internationally protected areas).

Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation edited by ‐ Karl Zimmerer

<i>Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation</i> edited by ‐ Karl Zimmerer

Globalization and the New Geographies of Conservation (review)

Globalization and the New Geographies of Conservation (review)

Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation ‐ Edited by Karl S Zimmerer

The Geographical JournalVolume 173, Issue 3 p. 292-293 Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation - Edited by Karl S Zimmerer Anthony Bebbington, Anthony Bebbington University of ManchesterSearch for more papers by this author Anthony Bebbington, Anthony Bebbington University of ManchesterSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 August 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2007.252_10.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume173, Issue3September 2007Pages 292-293 RelatedInformation

De la biologie à la géographie de la conservation (From conservation biology to conservation geography)

During the 1990s, the biodiversity became a major issue at the global scale. The Conservation Biology aims to understand the root-causes of the biodiversity loss, to stop it and to promote the wise use of natural resources. However, the multi-field approach recommended by its founders often contrast with a lack of integration of social and economical issues. Aiming to prevent geodiversity loss, the geographers can use their knowledge to initiate a Conservation Geography that would contribute to a more integrative approach by extending the study of biodiversity to the study of geodisparity.