How not to consult indigenous people
Like Canada, Brazil, the whole of Africa, and many other places in the world, Cameroon has the combination of indigenous people and a special fondness for big industry.…
Tag: conservation
Alive in the Flapping of Infinite Orange Wings
Monarch butterflies’ epic annual migration from North America to Mexico inspires an anthropologist to reflect on this insect’s precarious life cycles through the lens of “multispecies ethnography.” …
How Can Societies Decolonize Conservation?
Two archaeologists reflect on how social hierarchies harm biodiversity and how to move away from conservation efforts based on colonialist values. ✽ When I (Tim) arrived in Hanalei,…
Resurrecting a wolf for conservation?
Many herders, especailly in the Sub-Arctic, are threatened by the increased number of wolves, eating entire reindeer herds. In Australia they go the opposite way now: they try…
An Ecology of Knowledges: An Interview with Micha Rahder
An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation By Micha Rahder, Independent Scholar 336pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke…
Fuel Maps: Digitizing Grass and Sensing Fire in Brazil
Guilherme M. Fagundes, Princeton University § Part and parcel of the technological repertoire in wildland fire management, fuel maps invite us to reflect on the everyday life of…
Feral Atlas, a Review
Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. 2021. Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. http://doi.org/10.21627/2020f…
Through the Lens of the Anthropocene: The Shared Histories and Futures of Ethnographic and Natural History Filmmaking
By Alejandra Melian-Morse, McGill University § The very first scene of the BBC’s Planet Earth II (Berlowitz et al. 2016) breaks the mould of early BBC natural history…
Decolonising protected areas: Sapelli in eastern Cameroon
By Simon Hoyte In 2018, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar remarked: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions What he’s referring to…
Decolonising protected areas: Sapelli in eastern Cameroon
In 2018, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar remarked: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions What he’s referring to is that the…
Iowa’s Grapes of Wrath: Preserving Land for Food Production in the U.S.
Paul Durrenberger In Grapes of Wrath American writer John Steinbeck told the disheartening story of defeated farmers in 1939 Oklahoma. A bulldozer demolishes a shanty as the family…
Indigenous-led technology can boost biodiversity and ensure human rights
by Simon Hoyte, Alice Sheppard, Marcos Moreu, Megan Laws, and Jerome Lewis Over recent years there have been high profile legal challenges, investigative articles in the media, and…
Indigenous-led technology can boost biodiversity and ensure human rights
Simon Hoyte, Alice Sheppard, Marcos Moreu, Megan Laws & Jerome Lewis Extreme Citizen Science Research Group Over recent years there have been high profile legal challenges, investigative…
Violence, corruption, and false promises: Conservation and the Baka in Cameroon
Originally published by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs; Written by me and Catherine Clarke Spending time with the Baka, as we have both done over several…
#Review: An Ecology of Knowledges
Micha Rahder’s An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation is an ethnographically rich account of the dense conservation networks and politics that operat…
“We are weeping with our knowledge of the forest”
I have been living with the Baka, one of Central Africa’s hunter-gatherer groups, for the last 5 months. As an anthropologist, this form of immersion is common because…
The Tragic Intersection of the Coronavirus and Ecotourism
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ecotourists like these, shown here viewing an Asian elephant, packed river boats on the Kinabatangan River in Borneo, Malaysia. Mark Sisson/Minden Pictures/AP …
AES 2020 Abstract: Mediating Multispecies Relations Through Western and Indigenous Conservation
Western notions of modernity have situated human society apart from nature, which encompasses those spaces and beings that are unmodified and unsullied by human activity. The Western conception…
Spiritual Conservation
“Ecosystems are being destroyed because Africans have severed their relationship between ecosystems and spirituality. It is very very important for people to reintroduce that link, that relationship b…
The Sargassum Question
Close-up of sargasso, Puerto Morelos, 2019. Photo by the author. Sitting in her office, I could smell the sharp scent of hydrogen sulfide coming from the beach. She…
Decolonizing Extinction: An Interview with Juno Salazar Parreñas
Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation By Juno Salazar Parreñas, The Ohio State University 288pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. § Colin Hoag spoke with…
This Is Not a Goldmine: Capital, Conservation, and the Politics of Recruitment in the Deep Bismarck Sea
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2018 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Does recycling actually conserve or preserve things?
By Samantha MacBride There are a series of assumptions behind the familiar assertion that recycling saves resources and energy, and in so doing, protects the environment. These assumptions…
The Endangered Fishers of the Archipelago Sea #WhoseGreen?
Regulation and the Archipelago Sea ”You are looking at the last generation of coastal fishers!” a fisherman told me, as I was getting my coffee at a seminar…