Nonhuman Communities Research Articles

An agenda for research and action toward diverse and just futures for life on Earth.

Decades of research and policy interventions on biodiversity have insufficiently addressed the dual issues of biodiversity degradation and social justice. New approaches are therefore needed. We devised a research and action agenda that calls for a collective task of revisiting biodiversity toward the goal of sustaining diverse and just futures for life on Earth. Revisiting biodiversity involves critically reflecting on past and present research, policy, and practice concerning biodiversity to inspire creative thinking about the future. The agenda was developed through a 2‐year dialogue process that involved close to 300 experts from diverse disciplines and locations. This process was informed by social science insights that show biodiversity research and action is underpinned by choices about how problems are conceptualized. Recognizing knowledge, action, and ethics as inseparable, we synthesized a set of principles that help navigate the task of revisiting biodiversity. The agenda articulates 4 thematic areas for future research. First, researchers need to revisit biodiversity narratives by challenging conceptualizations that exclude diversity and entrench the separation of humans, cultures, economies, and societies from nature. Second, researchers should focus on the relationships between the Anthropocene, biodiversity, and culture by considering humanity and biodiversity as tied together in specific contexts. Third, researchers should focus on nature and economies by better accounting for the interacting structures of economic and financial systems as core drivers of biodiversity loss. Finally, researchers should enable transformative biodiversity research and action by reconfiguring relationships between human and nonhuman communities in and through science, policy, and practice. Revisiting biodiversity necessitates a renewed focus on dialogue among biodiversity communities and beyond that critically reflects on the past to channel research and action toward fostering just and diverse futures for human and nonhuman life on Earth.

Birth-Site Selection by White-Tailed Deer in an Area with Low Risk of Predation

Risk associated with predation influences habitat selection in Odocoileus virginianus (White-tailed Deer). In the absence of predation risk, selection pressure for predator avoidance behaviors are relaxed, but behavioral traits associated with predator avoidance often persist. Our study area lacks populations of typical predators of White-tailed Deer, and our objective was to investigate birth-site selection by parturient White-tailed Deer in the absence of predation risk. We paired observed birth-sites (n = 31) with random sites and compared the vegetation characteristics using univariate paired analyses. Females selected birth-sites with 10% more vegetation density up to 1 m in comparison to random sites (P = 0.02). Parturient females have retained some degree of selection towards predator avoidance behavior despite the absence of non-human predator communities in the study area.

The Book as a Generative Agent: The Buddhist Canon as a Community Member in Book Procession Rituals of the Himalayas

In western Sikkim, when they are wrapped in offering scarves, taken to visit the homes of local Buddhist patrons, and carried around local villages and fields as part of a ritual procession, or circumambulation, known as the Bumkor, the books that make up the Bum are not just objects, but are generative, active agents that are capable of producing and renewing auspiciousness in the local human and nonhuman community that reside in the landscape. In this essay, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa discusses the Sindrang Bumkor as an example of a distinctive Tibetan and Himalayan ethnography of the book that acknowledges the active lives books have in human societies beyond their textual content that at the same time reflects or enacts that content.

Towards biocultural approaches to peatland conservation: The case for fish and livelihoods in Indonesia

Conservation projects are likely to fail if plans to preserve important wildlife habitats and species are not co-developed between conservation organisations and local communities to reflect the needs and diverse values of the latter. Tropical peatland conservation represents a case in point: local community livelihoods have only recently come into focus, particularly within academic literature. Instead, many previous studies emphasise the need to conserve intact peat swamp forests for their carbon storage, as a habitat for flagship species such as the orangutan, and to provide fire-free landscapes. Here, we explore the socio-environmental issues being faced in the peatland landscapes of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. This includes the loss of peat-swamp forest, decreases in peatland fish populations and related socio-cultural challenges such as potential loss of fishing livelihoods along with historic and continued experiences of marginalisation of indigenous communities. To find solutions to these complex and interrelated problems, an interdisciplinary approach which focuses on interdependencies and includes multiple worldviews is required. We propose an approach which deploys both Ethan Miller’s use of livelihoods (incl. Miller, 2019) and biocultural approaches to conservation to analyse human-nonhuman relationships, with a focus on fish and fishing livelihoods. We draw on data from in-depth social and ecological research in two village communities in Central Kalimantan, and in so doing illustrate how fish conservation has the potential to support important biocultural and livelihood relationships between human and nonhuman communities in peatland areas. Our findings lend support to previous calls for biocultural approaches to conservation in other socio-ecological contexts, and lead us to conclude that tropical peatland conservation initiatives that integrate such approaches will result in improved outcomes for peatlands, forests, biodiversity and people. These findings will be relevant to other tropical peatland areas with high dependence on fishing as a source of livelihood, such as the peatlands of the Amazon and Congo basins.

Uncovering a Climate Catastrophe? Media Coverage of Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires and the Revelatory Extent of the Climate Blame Frame

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be "unprecedented globally" (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.). The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration. In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.

We Are The River

The New Zealand Parliament has recently granted the Whanganui River and the Te Urewera mountain ecosystem rights as legal persons, with a Māori governing board to speak for the nonhuman entities, based upon traditional cultural precepts. Far from an isolated precedent, in what the U.N. Secretary General calls “the fastest growing legal movement of the twenty-first century,” legislatures, courts, or voters in Australia, Colombia, Ecuador, Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and the U.S. have also declared that rivers and other living systems have legal rights. This Article chronicles the movement to grant nonhuman entities legal rights. I analyze the statutes and judicial opinions driving this legal evolution, drawing extensively from interviews I conducted with key figures negotiating and advocating for these initiatives. I explain what the current and developing laws and judicial opinions seek to achieve. Deriving from disparate historical, philosophical, and legal backgrounds, they pursue disparate goals; yet all of the moves to grant legal rights to nonhuman entities aim to enshrine in the law the fundamental symbiosis between human and nonhuman ecological health, and to empower suitable stewards who will nurture that symbiosis. I describe how newly vested spokespersons for nature seek to turn novel legal theories into real legal work that protects human and nonhuman communities. I explain who now represents the nonhuman entity and discuss what improvements--for human and nonhuman communities--they hope will redound that would not have resulted from more traditional legal protections. I also discuss early results that have emerged from grants of legal personhood to nonhuman entities. As these laws inscribe new legal relationships between people and nature, they ask: what does it mean to convert from “we own the River” to “we are the River?” I conclude that by sanctifying the interdependent relationship between human needs and healthy ecosystems, granting legal *546 rights to rivers may contribute to reversing ecological degradation in this century and beyond.

Encounters with the Most Animal Other: Rabies, Biopolitics, and Disease Prevention in Bali

Abstract Since 2008, rabies has killed several thousand semi-feral dogs in Bali, but hundreds of thousands of dogs have been killed by government officials to control the disease, which continues to spread. This article tracks this rabies outbreak and the efforts to contain the disease, noting frictions that emerged between officials and animal welfare activists. The former depict the dogs as a nuisance that should be exterminated, while the latter showcase the dogs’ cultural and scientific importance. This biopolitical contest hinges on formulations of animality that position dogs in opposition to humans. Rabies complicates this conflict, as it not only violates human/nonhuman animal boundaries, rendering both human and nonhuman communities vulnerable to infection, but also transforms those who are infected into radically animal (violent, unreasonable, frothing) individuals. By rethinking animality via rabies, we may better recognize and counter articulations of animality that render vulnerable populations killable.

Solarpunks & Storytelling in the Capitalocene

Solarpunks & Storytelling in the Capitalocene Phoebe Wagner (bio) and Brontë Wieland (bio) Throughout his work on the theory of slow violence, Rob Nixon asks how writers can portray the indirect and protracted violences of capitalism, particularly when the medium of the novel does not lend itself to the temporal needs of depicting slow violence in a world of political and media spectacle. In a similar vein, Imre Szeman asks scholars to consider the sustainability of publishing a book in an energy-scarce world. Since the formation of solarpunk as not only a literary genre but a lifestyle, we’ve considered how storytelling will develop as the climate crisis becomes more immediate for corporate and wealthy culture producers, especially after the Barham Fire in the Hollywood Hills. While activism can be an important part of popular culture (or become popular culture, in the case of the much capitalized pink ribbons, blue puzzle piece, or resist imagery), there’s a distinct monetary element that is not as evident in something like, say, a Black Lives Matter march. Can publishing a novel in today’s capitalist system be an act of activism, and what might that look like in the anti-capitalist future that solarpunk envisions? As a genre, solarpunk literature actively wrestles with these ideas. Solarpunk literature imagines new futures in the shadow of and in opposition to environmental change and collapse, then works to create those futures. A solarpunk doesn’t just have ideas and beliefs; a solarpunk enacts. On paper, being a solarpunk might sound like being a Marxist, a municipalist, or another ideology entirely. Yet, a different kind of necessity turns solarpunk thought into action. Mainly extinction. In other words, solarpunk literature is not just about solar. Neither is it beat poetry for the new millennium. The emphasis on solar reminds us of environmental interconnectedness. Human-nonhuman-sunlight-nightlight-mineral-oilocean-and-and-and. It’s a nice idea — and plenty of advertisements capitalize off connection — but the climate crisis demonstrates this connectedness on the grandest scale available for human eyes. A solarpunk novel might approach contemporary problems with the following questions: How do this character’s actions impact the novel’s human and nonhuman community? What intentionality fuels this story? Do the characters’ actions dismantle a damaging system like capitalism in a realistic or relatable way? Does this character enact radical care of self and others? Solarpunk stories aim for a unity of theory and practice, showing not only that a better world is possible, but also how we can work toward it. Solarpunk — as a lifestyle and literary genre — sprouted online sometime in 2008 but became more widely recognized with the publication of Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro in 2012 and Adam Flynn’s “Notes toward a Solarpunk Manifesto” in 2014. Foundationally, solarpunk rejected the dystopian hopelessness of speculative literature trending after 9/11. This rejection of dystopia did not mean embracing utopia, however. Rather, solarpunks aimed for something in the middle, such as the ambiguous utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin’s work. The goal of solarpunk was not to dream of perfect worlds but to strive for something sustainable and resilient in the Capitalocene. This origin of the solarpunk genre foundationally questions how we tell stories. It’s difficult to point to new novels that would fit the definition of solarpunk, particularly from major presses. The most popular expression of solarpunk remains short fiction, often in collections such as the aforementioned and the independent World Weaver Press’s multiple collections. We are still waiting for the quintessential solarpunk novel, though many solarpunks point to Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) as the closest example. Walkaway focuses on an ensemble cast of people who walk away from capitalism, essentially. What forms beyond the city limits are different fluid communities, usually anarchic, that have decentralized power and utilized post-scarcity technology to create intentionally anti-capitalist gift economies. Ultimately, the characters find themselves in a technological utopia where death has been conquered, bodies may be left behind at will, and “humanity” takes on new definitions. While much of the content features a solarpunk ethos — such...

Mega-Plantations in Southeast Asia

This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we define mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the application of large amounts of capital and political power and the transnational organization of labor, capital, and material. They emerged in Southeast Asia under European colonialism in the nineteenth century and have expanded again since the 1980s at an unprecedented scale and scope to feed global appetites for agro-industrial commodities such as palm oil and rubber. While they have been contested by customary land users, smallholders, civil society organizations, and even government regulators, their displacement and transformation of Southeast Asia’s rural landscapes will likely endure for quite some time.

A Zero-Sum Politics of Identification: A Topological Analysis of Wildlife Advocacy Rhetoric in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from rai...

The construction of ‘local’ interest in New South Wales environmental planning processes

ABSTRACTDeliberative democracy in the form of community participation is considered a ‘key priority’ in New South Wales (NSW) environmental planning. Community participation plays an increasingly central role in state significant developments, which are often sites of contestation. Community participation processes draw upon particular factors of place-based identity, which engage with notions of procedural legitimacy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This paper uses a legal geography analysis to explore this link between place-based identity and the experience of procedural legitimacy. We highlight a case study in which a contested coal mining development near Lithgow, NSW was approved by the NSW Planning Assessment Commission (PAC). This analysis examines how ‘local’ justice was constructed and mobilised in specific ways by proponents and opponents alike. Spatial factors of identity manifested in distinct ways in participation processes, particularly with respect to (i) claims to legitimacy and (ii) the lived experiences of engagement in a public forum. This case study demonstrates the way in which dualistic spatial terms such as ‘outsider’ opposition and ‘local’ support can render multiple interests of both human and non-human communities invisible. In so doing we are engaging with current work on environmental justice that examines the intersection of scale, efficacy and equity in processes of environmental governance.

“Om ʼn tamatie te kan vertrou”: plantpolitiek in Jeanne Goosen se Vrydag-rubrieke (1996-1999) en Plante kan praat (2010)

SummaryThe post-humanist intellectual rush to promote the interests of non-human communities has given rise to the establishment of critical plant studies, a new transdisciplinary field of study which has so far received little attention in South African literary criticism. Pollan (2002, 2013), Hall (2011), Chamovitz (2012), Marder (2013) and Mabey (2014) criticise the zoocentric favouring of human and nonhuman animals as subjects in the Western tradition and argue that this historic preference has resulted in the exclusion of plants as category for moral consideration. Matthew Hall's model of plant personhood and biospheric integrity, based on the inclusion of, and care and respect for plants as autonomous, complex life forms, is employed here to develop a terminology for revisiting selected texts by Jeanne Goosen. Hitherto unacknowledged newspaper columns (1996-1999) from the regional newspaper, Vrydag, as well as the short story, “Plante kan praat” (in the collection of short stories by the same name) will be considered in this ecocritical reading of said texts within the contours of contemporary plant studies.

Security cosmopolitanism: the next phase

‘Security Cosmopolitanism’ was published in 2013 with the hope that it might stimulate a dialogue between traditional and critical security studies around an urgent problem: the globalisation of insecurities faced by human communities and ecosystems, along with the manifest failure of state and collective security structures to prevent or address them. This second article reflects on the very welcome debate the theory has provoked and speculates on what the next phase of research might be. These collective lines of research, without precluding others, could include mapping complex systems of insecurity across a wide range of domains; folding such diagnoses into explorations of how systemic change may be achieved in global security processes and governance; research in affected communities that can map how they experience insecurity and push their perspectives into global action; and reform plans for response systems and governance. In response to the many commentaries, this article also provides a deeper explanation of the posthuman and ecological commitments of the theory, of its ethical strategy, and of its commitment to a redefined idea of security for humanity and the biosphere in the Anthropocene. In particular, it addresses the perceived tension between a normative and universalising ethics, on the one hand, and a global project of governance and responsibility that is immanently political and perceived by some to be elitist, on the other – a project that struggles with the problems of assigning responsibility for systemic and anonymous processes and of representing its human and non-human communities of concern through the abstractions, and power relations, of international organisations and policy.

Migrations and Transformations: Human and Nonhuman Nature in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”

Migrations and Transformations:Human and Nonhuman Nature in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” Mae Miller Claxton (bio) Works by southern female writers have often been categorized as “regional,” suggesting that their subject matter is limited, circumscribed, “domestic.” In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty characterizes the term “regional” as “careless” and “condescending” (Stories 796). She argues instead that most writing could be called “regional” because the writer writes from the place he or she knows (796). In 2015, more than sixty years after Welty’s essay was written, our views of “place” and “region” have changed dramatically, influenced by issues ranging from local food production to the global environmental and human devastation of war. Karen Halttunen, in her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, mentioned Welty’s discussion of place in fiction in her call for more attention to fields of inquiry such as bioregionalism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. Halttunen believes that “space and place have never been more analytically important than they have recently become in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating that globalization—with its acceleration of border crossings—has actually made place more important, not less” (2). She concludes, “In literature, the new [End Page 73] regionalism and the booming field of ecocriticism foreground what had been considered mere background or setting, taking seriously Eudora Welty’s affirmation that ‘fiction depends for its life on place,’ and exploring new relationships between natural places and human culture” (2). In “A Worn Path,” one of her best-known stories, Welty creates a transformative space through which her main character moves. As Phoenix journeys through the forest to Natchez, her path takes her from a nonhuman natural world into a space impacted by human issues of race, gender, and class. The contrast between human and nonhuman introduces layers of complexity into the seemingly simple story of an old African American woman seeking medicine for her sick grandson. In “A Worn Path,” Welty creates a story that contrasts the cruelties and injustices of human nature with the balance and order of nonhuman nature. Readers are left to wonder what kind of medicine can provide healing to the world Phoenix journeys through. Throughout her fiction, Welty displays a complex awareness of the relationships between place and the human and nonhuman communities that inhabit these spaces. The repeated emphasis in Welty’s fiction on the human community intersecting with the nonhuman community rather than the human community dominating the nonhuman community displays her awareness of the differences between what Patrick D. Murphy calls “things-in-themselves” as opposed to “things-for-us” (4). Scholars have long associated Phoenix Jackson, the main character in “A Worn Path,” with the natural world instead of the large town she travels toward. In her discussion of Welty’s photographs in The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Suzanne Marrs argues that “setting does far more than lend credibility to the story’s action. The natural world of the Trace is Phoenix’s home, and its qualities are to some extent her own. Her life has been relatively untouched by ‘progress.’ She is not removed from nature but lives naturally” (84). Ruth Vande Kieft discusses Phoenix’s “sense of familiarity with nature—the ease with which she talks to the birds and animals” (29). She concludes that Phoenix is, “like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, a completely and beautifully harmonious person—something one does not often find in the fiction of either Eudora Welty or Faulkner” (29). These scholars are correct in their assessments of Phoenix, but connecting women, especially African American women, with nature can lead to dismissive stereotyping. In fact, even with the challenges she faces as an elderly African American woman, [End Page 74] Phoenix successfully achieves her goal in the story, negotiating both nonhuman and human communities. Ecofeminist scholars have debated at length about the problematic association of women with nature, especially African American women, who often provide a connection to nature, or magic, or God in films and books. Noël Sturgeon explains, “A constant and ongoing focus of ecofeminist theorizing, as well as...

C19 2014—Chapel Hill, NC: Melville in Common: History, Politics, Aesthetics, and C19 Studies

C19 2014—Chapel Hill, NCMelville in Common: History, Politics, Aesthetics, and C19 Studies Jennifer Greiman, Chair A writer who seemed to have little in common with his contemporaries, Herman Melville has become the author whom nineteenth-century Americanists now have most in common with one another. As Maurice Lee showed in the review of 130 nineteenth-century US literature survey courses that he presented at the 2014 C19 conference—and as the conference program itself indicated—Melville is taught and talked about more than any other single author in nineteenth-century American literature. This panel took this year’s conference theme, “Commons,” as an opportunity to reflect on how and why scholars find so much common ground in thinking through and with Melville. Contemporary research on Melville represents an astonishing variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, with the best-known works in Melville’s corpus (Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno”) standing at the center of studies on legal history, labor and capital, poverty and race, democracy and political theory, philosophy, form, aesthetics, and so on. All of these presenters spoke to what this common ground in Melville tells us about canonicity, genre, periodization, and methodology in the field. But they did this, not by returning to the most familiar texts in Melville’s corpus, but by considering Melville’s common appeal from the perspective of far less familiar sites in Melville’s work and its critical history: the man-haters, the verse within the prose, the early critical debates, and the late poetry. [End Page 99] Melville’s Misanthropology and the Limits of the Common Michael Jonik, University of Sussex At the same time that it is populated by cosy loving pairs or fraternal allies, universal citizens or de-particularized Bartlebies from a community to come, Melville’s writing provides manifold figures of disaggregation and non-commonality. From Ahab to Claggart, from the Dog-King to Timophanes, and from the Marquesan missionaries to the metaphysicians of Indian-hating, his communitarians are irrevocably complemented by his isolatos, man-haters, and misanthropes. What would happen, then, if instead of taking Bartleby or Ishmael-Queequeg as our starting points for thinking about commonality, we took Melville’s misanthropes? How might they mark the limits of the common or put into question how we have come to deploy his scenes of commonality? Do misanthropes merely thwart the intersubjective possibilities of the common—through egotism, paternal power, mistrust, or hatred—or do they at once open another space of difference (not-sameness) and/or irreducible singularity? To sketch a provisional response to these questions, I explore what could be called Melville’s “misanthropology.” This misanthropology is most fully realized in The Confidence-Man through a series of interwoven philosophical guises and interlocutors—Pitch, Charlie Noble, Moredock, Judge Hall, Francis Goodman, Charlemont, a cosmopolitan, and a stranger—as Melville teases out the paradoxes inherent to the misanthrope and considers not only the vacillations of a man, but those of this strange “we” that is the common. Lastly, I gesture toward a mis-anthropology that critiques the “advance of genialization” insofar as it self-justifies Indian-hating on the basis of Christian philanthropy, as well as a post-human mis-anthropology that is dramatized in the non-human communities of “The Encantadas.” Sharing Poetry in Mardi and White-Jacket ; Or, Why American Poetry is American Literature Lauren Kimball, Rutgers University Mardi and White-Jacket are early examples of Melville thinking with and about poetry, particularly poetry’s ability to represent a community. Like the sailorbard of Mardi who sings history in real-time, Melville uses verse in Mardi to narrate collective experience, an important development in perspective and experimentation with dramatic chorus that anticipates his later fiction. For the crew of the Neversink in White-Jacket, poetic performance is a highly desired [End Page 100] and inevitable part of shipboard public life best expressed in their attempt to stage a theatrical performance at sea. Their ship culture does not, by contrast, support the private musings of the solitary poet or conformity to the Christian philanthropic ideal of the pious and literate worker. As what Marcus Rediker calls a diverse “speech community” that self-selects a shared...

Environmental Democracy and Forest Carbon (REDD+)

Public funders and private investors are pouring billions of dollars into Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) in the developing world. In REDD+, investors pay people to preserve carbon in trees, and then sell credits based on the stored carbon to those who wish to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. REDD+ promises a dynamic synergism that mitigates climate change, conserves biodiversity, and alleviates poverty. When done poorly, however, REDD+ may dispossess already impoverished people from their sources of sustenance and may do little to mitigate climate change or conserve biodiversity. Including indigenous, forest-dependent, and other local people in all aspects of planning and implementing REDD+ is not only prudent practice — it is increasingly required by international law, and, I explain, is an essential ingredient in sustainable (effective, synergistic, and equitable) REDD+ Yet fulfilling these Environmental Democracy norms is nigh impossible in REDD+. What then? In this project, I review the current international legal status of Environmental Democracy, i.e., the right to participate in environmental decision making; the right to acquire information on environmental decisions; the right to redress and remedy when environmental rights are violated; and the right to Free Prior and Informed Consent when decisions are made that will affect vital resources and lands. I explain and expand current thinking of how the aspirational language of the principles ought to be implemented, and connect the principles’ relevance to REDD+, currently the most important laboratory for expanding Environmental Democracy in international conservation and development work. To illustrate how Environmental Democracy is or is not working in REDD+, I explore examples from Vietnam and Cambodia, where I conducted fieldwork in December 2012. I conclude that while stakeholders in REDD+ are making progress towards genuine Environmental Democracy, they have a ways to go to fulfill their legal and ethical obligations towards communities in which REDD+ is launching. After explaining why genuine Environmental Democracy in REDD+ is currently impracticable — and perhaps impossible — I conclude that REDD+’s promised benefits nonetheless justify carefully continuing it. I suggest how REDD+ project developers can fulfill the legal exigencies of Environmental Democracy, both as a matter of equity, and as a pragmatic approach to maximizing benefits for human and nonhuman communities.

What Was Politics to the Denisovan?

What does it mean that humans were not the only hominin? Or, more importantly, what does it mean that other hominins held cultural, biological, and perhaps even linguistic equivalence to human beings? Drawing on mitochondrial DNA analyses, theories of deep history, and attention to the inhuman, this essay argues that such equivalence entails not only the reality of human/nonhuman genetic compatibility but the existence of politics in places and times without humans. Such a politics of non-humans would entail political and social forms playing a central role in the development of humanity. If politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human hominin communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the development of humanity is an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it.

Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verifying (MMRV): Negotiating Trust in Transnational Contracts for REDD+

Efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas build-up through quantifying and controlling the world's forests highlight new directions in international transnational conservation contracts. The emerging regime of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verifying (MMRV) in global climate change cooperation, with a particular focus on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), shows how transnational conservation contracts are helping to reconstruct sovereignty--a cornerstone of international law--to adapt to 21st-century perils that demand unprecedented cooperation between nations. While negotiating a Kyoto Protocol successor, Northern nations have pledged US$30 billion in fast track mitigation aid to Southern nations between 2010-2012, and pledged US$100 billion yearly by 2020 to support mitigation and adaptation activities in Southern nations. This is to be managed in a global under the auspices of the World Bank. (1) Despite opposition, (2) REDD+ will attract a large proportion of these funds, as diverse stakeholders prize the South's dwindling forests. Tropical deforestation accounts for about 15-20% of GHG emissions--a greater contribution than all forms of transport combined, and equal to the annual emissions of China or the United States. (3) Extant forests, now viewed as a repository of greenhouse gases fungible with industrialized emissions, have been brought under an international cross-boundary trading regime. (4) Northern governments, businesses, and citizens are investing billions of dollars in the vast, imperiled forests of the South. (5) Funds come not just from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) architecture, but also from parallel, legally mandated offsetting programs in Norway (spending US$3 billion on REDD+), California, and elsewhere, as well as a voluntary market where concerned citizens and businesses offset their GHG consumption through investing in REDD+ in developing nations. (6) In a REDD+ project, an entity--a government, community, private developer, or individual landowner--commits to reforest land or to preserve a forest that would otherwise be cut down or degraded. The entity may then sell the carbon, now sequestered in the trees, for a contracted period of time. (7) REDD+ may happen on a project-by-project basis--one developer, one landowner. Or REDD+ may happen on a broader scale, i.e., a nation or state/province pledges to use REDD+ funding to reduce deforestation or foment reforestation resulting in sequestered GHGs above a business as usual baseline. (8) If REDD+ lived up to its synergistic potential, it would mitigate greenhouse gas buildup, alleviate rural poverty, and preserve biodiversity. (9) To make this transfer of funds possible--and thus sustain tropical forests and the human and nonhuman communities that depend upon them--the acronym has become key to mutually beneficial transnational contracts. The acronym MRV first arose in the 2007 UNFCCC Conference of Parties: The Bali Action Plan called for MRV as a crucial element of any new international agreement. (10) stands for Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verifying. (11) Without a comprehensive, rigorous, reciprocal--and in many cases, intrusive--system of MMRV, it is unlikely that global leaders will invest in the Green Fund or find common will for a multilateral environmental agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. (12) Outside the formal UNFCCC process, investors in REDD+ are developing MMRV protocols to ensure multiple, synergistic returns on their investments. (13) MMRV OVERVIEW MMRV is key to forging transnational conservation contracts that use REDD+ to battle climate change, and simultaneously to staunch deforestation and reduce poverty. (14) The precise parameters--who must meet which MMRV obligations, on what subjects, with what intrusive oversight--have been pivotal in negotiations to forge multilateral climate change cooperation. …

Neighborliness at the Co-op: Community and Biospheric Literacy

In this ethnographic study of an organic foods cooperative, I examine community through three different facets—the Voluntary Association, the Lifestyle Enclave, and the Neighborhood. I use fieldnote examples to show how each of these community facets corresponds with the three visions of discourse for social change considered by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. Peck et al.’s most powerful discouse, community literacy, corresponds to the Neighborhood facet of community. The neighborhood holds promise for developing a Biospheric Literacy as developed by Anne Mareck in the introduction to this special issue. The kinds of meanings that she says acknowledge biospherically interdependent human and non-human community members are, I suggest, ritually enacted through neighborly communication. Further, it is through the cordial talk of neighbors that we communicate the kinds of understandings needed to affect positive social change and limit damage to our biosphere.

Seagrass Loss in Belize: Studies of Turtlegrass (Thalassia testudinum) Habitat Using Remote Sensing and Ground-Truth Data

Spatial and temporal change in turtlegrass (Thalassia testudinum) habitat of the South Water Caye Marine Reserve (SWCMR) in Belize were analyzed using satellite images backed up with ground-truth data. We had two primary objectives. First, we wanted to determine areal expanse of seagrass across a large area (~12 km by 3 km) of the SWCMR, and address its change over time. We used paired satellite images taken during 2001 and 2005 to determine coverage by seagrass and measure temporal variables. These analyses recorded an overall seagrass loss of 1.8% (52.3 ha) during the 4 yr period. Secondly, we wanted to determine whether seagrass gains or losses were consistent across the study area. Replicate sampling was used as a statistical basis and confi rmed a signifi cant loss of seagrass across the region. It also helped identify two regions of signifi cant seagrass loss; one 600 ha area lost 12.4% of its seagrass; another 240 ha area lost nearly 40%. These components helped us assess seagrass habitat in an area perceived as critical to Belize fi sheries, and provided the scale and statistical rigor necessary to adequately assess a broad region of study. The salient results from our study were not the magnitude of seagrass loss per se, but the loss in seagrass habitat from an area that is thought to be relatively pristine. Seagrass-habitat loss in this region of the Caribbean Sea may be evidence that even near-pristine areas can be impacted by anthropogenic factors. Determining the causes of habitat loss may help prevent loss of productivity, habitat, and livelihood for the associated human and nonhuman communities. INTRODUCTION Seagrass ecosystems are among the most productive on earth, and their ecological and economic importance is becoming obvious as they diminish worldwide. Seagrass habitats are vital primary producers that improve water quality, promote sedimentation, recycle nutrients, and provide structure that serves as refuge and nursery ground for fisheries species (e.g., Moriarty and O’Donohue 1994, Hall et al. 1999, Short and Wyllie-Echeverria 2000, Gillanders et al. 2003, Green and Short 2003, Corlett and Jones 2005). The interest in seagrass is global, as is the research effort to assess changes in seagrass habitat. Many studies centered around areas of long-term loss of seagrass (e.g., Short and Short 2003, Duarte et al. 2008), while others documented regions of seagrass recovery (e.g., Virnstein et al. 2007). Turtlegrass (Thalassia testudinum) is a common seagrass species in waters of the tropical western Atlantic from Venezuela to eastern Florida and the Bahamas (den Hartog 1970), and is one of many species adversely affected by natural and anthropogenic factors. Researchers contend that protecting seagrass habitat may prevent loss of commercial fisheries, improve water quality, and help maintain healthy interrelated communities (Ward 1998). The purpose of this study was to discern the stability of the turtlegrass-dominated seagrass community in the South Water Caye Marine Reserve (SWCMR) of Belize by using satellite imagery. This reserve is generally perceived to be pristine, far from the coastal influences that adversely affect most other seagrass communities, and an area of interest to Belize fisheries and tourism. We had two primary objectives. First, we wanted to determine areal expanse of seagrass, and address its change over time by analyzing satellite images taken 4 years apart. Secondly, we wanted to determine whether seagrass gains or losses were consistent across the study area, and used ground truthing to confirm our observations by visiting sites of concern identified by satellite images. The multiple components of our study helped assess seagrass habitat in an area perceived as critical to Belize fisheries, and provided the scale and statistical rigor necessary to adequately assess a broad region of study.