Wild Places Research Articles

Where the wild places are: Factors associated with people's favourite local and national wild place in the United Kingdom

Where the wild places are: Factors associated with people's favourite local and national wild place in the United Kingdom

Understanding the Hidden Costs and Benefits of Living With Grizzly Bears in Montana

Wildlife sometimes impose unmitigated costs and provide unevenly distributed benefits that exacerbate conflict among people or between wildlife and groups of people. Although previous research has primarily focused on the visible effects of wildlife, reducing conflict will require a broader understanding of wildlife effects on human well-being. Using a “noticing, collecting, thinking” analysis of 25 interviews with people living near grizzly bears in Montana, USA, we provide a nuanced profile of their perceived costs and benefits, including hidden and nonmaterial effects. Interviewees described the interconnected nature of grizzly bear effects on people, where visible effects on livelihoods, health, social relations, personal security, and freedom led to negative hidden effects such as threats to cultural identity and diminished perceptions of livelihood sustainability. Positive effects included enhanced mental, spiritual, and cultural well-being, such as enhanced feelings of connection to wild places. We discuss how this broader understanding of wildlife costs and benefits helps provide a more thorough understanding of the effects of living with grizzly bears.

Insufficient numbers and poor working conditions for rangers protecting tigers

AbstractProtected area rangers are planetary health care workers and are at the frontline of the protection of wildlife and wild places. Ensuring that there are sufficient rangers in protected areas, and that these rangers are equipped and provided with decent working conditions, is critical to protecting iconic species such as tiger Panthera tigris. Using data from a global survey of public‐sector ranger numbers, we estimate the shortfall in the number of rangers required to safeguard protected areas in Tiger Conservation Landscapes (TCLs) across the 10 Asian countries with breeding tigers. We calculate the cost required to address this shortfall in ranger numbers. We also estimate the costs for meeting a subset of the welfare needs of rangers aligned to the Chitwan Declaration of the World Ranger Congress. We estimate that a minimum of 12,500 more rangers are required across ~320,000 km2 of tiger‐bearing protected areas. We estimate this would cost US$ 45.8 million annually. The majority (63%) of these rangers are required in three Southeast Asian countries, which have declining tiger numbers. To meet a subset of the basic welfare needs of rangers, we estimate that an additional US$ 7.8 million is required annually across the 10 countries. While the funding gap that we estimate excludes many aspects of effective protected area management, we provide further evidence that protected areas in the biodiverse tropics remain underfunded. Increasing funding for rangers is a critical component of what is required to protect the tiger and tiger landscapes. We urge tiger range country governments, and the global conservation community, to secure this funding. Increasing the numbers of rangers, and effectively supporting their welfare, will increase our ability to protect the tiger and the ecologically significant landscapes in which it occurs.

The Unappreciated Significance and Source of Meaning in Wild Landscapes: An Arctic Case

Wild places are rich with meaning. This runs contrary to accounts of vast undeveloped regions like the Arctic as being devoid of meaning (and thus open for—or even in need of—resource exploitation) and to accounts that dismiss conceptualizations of the Arctic as containing substantial wilderness landscapes as an invalid colonial concept. There is rather an unappreciated commonality between Indigenous conceptions of place and conceptualizations of wilderness: both recognize undeveloped landscapes as substantial founts of meaning that are not the product of their own projections. Their senses of these meanings are not equivalent but overlap in important respects and are shared by many cultures across the globe, thus challenging premises of relativism and of meaning as merely locally produced. Furthermore, meaning is a topic often overlooked or marginalized in the context of climate change adaptation and nature preservation. The Arctic is considered as a specific case study to illustrate these points as it is one of the world's largest undeveloped areas and is particularly affected by climate change. The Arctic is rich with meaning for the Inuit and other residents who depend on it for sustenance. It also contains some of the most extensive and least developed or otherwise impacted and manipulated landscapes on the planet—a relatively small portion of which is protected as parks and wilderness, though substantial in comparison to temperate or tropical regions. Climate change threatens not only the traditional subsistence livelihoods of Arctic residents, but also the emergent meanings that inhere in these landscapes. Simultaneously, the meaning and value of protected Arctic landscapes, particularly those designated as wilderness, is also under duress. Climate change is impacting the Arctic more than many other areas, posing a threat to its meanings as a home and as a wilderness. Acknowledging the centrality of meaning, while rejecting the “received idea” inherited from constructivist thought that meaning is overlaid on a passive landscape open for—or even in need of—human created meanings, can lead to new approaches to nature preservation and to human adaptation in the era of climate change.

Bewegen in het boek der natuur: buitensport als heilzame spirituele discipline

Human beings seek wild places to reflect upon ourselves and understand our place within creation. In outdoor sports, we experience the natural world through physical exertion as an expression of God’s majesty. This essay evaluates the ‘outdoor’ theologically as a spiritual discipline aimed at admiring the ‘beautiful book’ of nature, based on the experiences of students during a course, a theological exploration of Psalm 8, an aesthetic-doxological interpretation of the book metaphor, and the concept of resonance in Hartmut Rosa.

Wild Places: The Life of Naturalist David Attenborough by Hayley Rocco (review)

Wild Places: The Life of Naturalist David Attenborough by Hayley Rocco (review)

City dwellers’ experiences and attitudes towards wild places based on an urban river

City dwellers’ experiences and attitudes towards wild places based on an urban river

Understanding Conservation Conflicts in Uganda: A Political Ecology of Memory Approach

Political ecologists have linked conservation conflicts in post-independence Africa to the continuities and legacies of colonial policies that displaced and dispossessed people to create ‘wild places’. This paper introduces a political ecology of vernacular memory to discuss the Basongora people’s vernacular memories of their historical dispossession to create the Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) in Uganda. It explores how these events spurred multidirectional memories of resilience, heroism, victimhood, and resistance that the Basongora pastoralists deploy to reclaim social-political autonomy and agency. Using archival data and historical ethnography, I examine how the Basongora mobilise vernacular memory in contemporary contestations with the state and conservation authorities in QENP. Vernacular memory provides a moral authority that helps subordinated groups contest the hegemonic dominance of conservation authorities. A political ecology approach to vernacular memory reveals how people use memory politics to legitimise their claims in contested environments—an essential fact of contemporary conservation conflicts. This paper is the first to conceptualise how vernacular memories can legitimise the decolonisation of conservation narratives and community resistance against conservation.

“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”: Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University

“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University Pamela Pierce (bio) In the 1970s the Department of Radiology at Oregon Health and Science University produced a training video for transluminal angioplasty (Dotter). In addition to showing how to open up a blocked blood vessel with a small, flexible plastic tube, the training video also displayed lofty shots of Mount Hood paired with the rousing sounds of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” gives the wilderness shown in the training video an almost religious significance, “at a time when the force of religion seemed vitiated by the new scientism on the one hand and social conflict on the other, wilderness acquired special significance as a resuscitator of faith” (Nash 157). For the University of Oregon Medical School (later known as Oregon Health and Science University [OHSU]) the West was a frontier and a wilderness.1 The video starts with a wide panning shot over Mount Hood. The camera shows the viewer the famous mountain and the endless vista of lofty peaks beyond. Next, the camera travels down the Columbia River, getting closer to Portland, panning down to a street view of what looks like Burnside Street, the main road in Portland. The camera gets closer to one particular man and a voice-over shares, “This man is in pain” (Dotter). It’s time for an angioplasty. Once the angioplasty wraps up, the chords of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” strike up again, and it’s time to go back to Mount Hood. This time two elderly white men, one of whom might be Charles Dotter, head of the Department of Radiology at the University of Oregon Medical School, hike the mountain. One of them lifts the sunglass covering of his glasses up and stares pensively off [End Page 29] into the distance. The scene cuts to a nurse watching a patient literally skipping down a hallway. Finally, the camera returns to the mountain, where it all began. The words “filmed in Oregon” appear over a final shot of Mount Hood. This training video and other archival items held at Oregon Health and Science University demonstrate how OHSU’s western representation intersected with classic ideas of the West as a proving ground for educated white men seeking to define themselves, a mythology that left many people out. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash discusses this wilderness cult with Theodore Roosevelt as a major proponent. A widespread discontentment with civilization resulted in the view of wilderness “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery . . . [and] an increasing number of Americans invested wild places with aesthetic and ethical values, emphasizing the opportunity they afforded for contemplation and worship” (Nash 145). The frontier myth provided opportunities for masculine self-definitions. Peter Bayers explains that, influenced by the mythology of white western masculinity, “farmers and ranchers have sought to embody a masculine independence propagated by the frontier myth, with the rancher exemplifying a particularly rugged version of masculinity, given the lineage that links him to the cowboy and his predecessor, the hunter. . . . the farmer and hunter immerse themselves in nature, ‘regressing’ to a state of innocence through which they regenerate their masculine self-definition” (375). When the mythology of white western masculinity is mentioned, scholars often highlight Roosevelt’s essential role in propagating these myths with his buckskin costumes and references to the time he spent ranching in North Dakota (“Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota”; “Theodore Roosevelt in the West”). As a sickly New York City child and an adult fan of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Roosevelt firmly believed in the West as a proving ground and a place where things he had only read about could come to life. Literature shaped Roosevelt’s worldview throughout his life. Slotkin explains, “Roosevelt’s prior and primary engagement was with mythology; that is, with the narrative literature in which the frontier and its people existed as fantasy-projections. His reading led him from Cooper’s [End Page 30] Leatherstocking and the Norse/German sagas to Francis Parkman” (Slotkin 611). Roosevelt’s masculine western imaginary did not leave space for women...

Considering humans as integral components of “nature”

Considering humans as integral components of “nature”

Joy in the Dirt

I was born in South Africa, as were my parents and grandparents. We have descended from people who had been brought to South Africa through indenture, a colonial labour system that introduced alien agricultural methods and an alien workforce from India, to optimise monocultures like sugarcane. My very presence here is, therefore, entangled with colonialism’s domestication and mastery over land, plant, and people (Indigenous and indentured). I have never felt alien here. Why was that? What about the indenture stories of people, land and plant, beyond empire’s mastery and control—my ancestral wild places? And was there room within these wild places to heal colonial wounds across our ethnic and racial barriers? What was lost? Could my PhD2 research transcripts address some of those losses? This paper contains poems that emerged from PhD research interviews, my fieldnotes, my father's memoirs, and letters from my ancestral archives. A poetic lens gave me a decolonial language to inspect the archives and transcripts with some of these questions in mind.

An Ecological Context That Scars: Reflections on Three Nature Documentaries of 2020

An Ecological Context That Scars: Reflections on Three Nature Documentaries of 2020

Witnessing mass extinction: What's invisible, what's visible, what's possible

We are living in the time of the Sixth Mass Extinction. While many details elude us, we know that a mass extinction is underway from comparisons between background and current extinction rates, precipitous drops in wildlife populations, the shrinking of wild places, and the critical endangerment of biodiverse ecologies such as grasslands, tropical forests, wetlands, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, and continental shelves. This paper dissects the underpinnings of the Sixth Mass Extinction, with the intention of joining many other activists and thinkers to disrupt its seeming inevitability. First, I discuss what has been invisible about anthropogenic mass extinction—the event itself—and the factors of silence, ignorance, and denial underlying its invisibility. Then I turn to the visible dimension of the Sixth Mass Extinction, namely, the action orientation of “entitled instrumentalism” that is driving it; I describe entitled instrumentalism as the wholesale assimilation of the natural world into a human-owned domain. I end with considering the possibility of humanity charting an altogether different course. We must recognize mass extinction as the inevitable upshot of nature colonization and awaken to the need to restore and preserve Earth's cosmic wealth.

What’s the Buzz About Native Bees?

Most plants depend on insects for pollination. Honey bees pollinate many of the foods people eat, but did you know that wild plants, and animals like birds and bears, also depend on pollinators? Native bees are the most diverse and efficient pollinators. Thousands of bee species transport pollen between plants in deserts, forests, mountains, meadows, and many other habitats. This service helps plants reproduce successfully, and the plants provide food and shelter for other animals. Bees are important for keeping our wild landscapes healthy. Scientists are discovering that climate change and other human-caused threats are changing bee populations. Therefore, it is important that we learn more about pollinators in wild places like national parks and that we support bees in our own backyards.

Posthuman Creativities: Pluralist Ecologies and the Question of How

This editorial lays the groundwork and context for this special issue addressing a range of posthuman ecological approaches to the study and theorization of creativity, and its potential to transform understandings of 21st-century learning events and environments, including cities, schools, museums, parklands, digital environments, wild places, and more. Importantly, this collection establishes an ethics and politics of posthumanism as it intersects with creativity, including attention to the necessity and ethics of the ways in which Indigenous knowing and knowledge creation are changing and expanding traditional academic framings of arts-based research, creativity, and posthuman scholarship.

I have a passion for wild places

Tell us about your work I have always been fascinated by the processes that underpin volcanic eruptions and motivated by the need to understand their environmental and societal impacts. My research focuses on volcanic emissions – from the generation of volcanic ash during eruptions and its transport in the atmosphere, to the geochemical controls on […]

Chasing atmospheric plastic

In 2017, biogeochemist Janice Brahney was collecting dust deposited in remote wilderness areas in the western US. She wanted to study how phosphorus that was transported through the air to these wild places might disrupt their ecosystems. But Brahney’s samples contained more than the soil particles she was expecting. Under the microscope were “enormous amounts of plastic,” the Utah State University researcher says. There were fibers, spheres, and chunks of the stuff, in all different colors. Plastic is ubiquitous wherever people go, but Brahney’s study areas—including remote parts of the High Uintas Wilderness in Utah and Rocky Mountain National Park—don’t get a lot of human traffic. She was determined to figure out how microplastics could have gotten there. She didn’t have funding to work on the problem, so she investigated this mystery in her spare time, spending years of evenings and weekends cataloging the plastic bits. Her detailed investigation led

Our Ancient Forests: Virtual Visiting and Art for Conservation

This article reflects upon two virtual reality experiences included in the Our Ancient Forests exhibition at the Sunshine Coast Arts Council: Sanctuary: The Dakota Bear Ancient Forest Experience and Tree Earth Sky. It works through questions about the use of virtual reality both as a means of visiting a wild place and as a means of moving audiences to environmentalist and anticolonial action. In doing so, it considers settler desires for deeper relationships with wild places and the more-than-human world and settler responsibilities within environmental and anticolonial movements.

Nathan Snaza, Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Duke University Press, 2019); Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020); Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University, 2018)

When people think of academic libraries, they don’t usually think of them as wild places, or <em>de</em>humanizing institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact. The disciplinary order of the library is generally considered to be, along with higher education itself, an expression of the highest form of humanist discourse and ideals. Not only do these books bear an intellectual kinship with one another, but they are also all published by Duke University Press, and in their writings, the authors have each acknowledged one another as friends. The lessons offered by Nathan Snaza, Jack Halberstam, and Julietta Singh are useful to academic librarians because they call into question some of the metaphors, objectives, and stated values of our profession—things we tend to take for granted like mastery, discipline, universality, and order—and describe some of the ways in which these concepts are derived from colonial projects. Together, these books provide insight into what queer desire and decolonization have to do with each other, calling some of librarianship’s foundational principles into question and expanding the range of what can be thought in our own field.

COVID Roundtable

COVID Roundtable