"Human-nature Interactions through a Multispecies Lens"
This article introduces this issue of Conservation and Society, and argues strongly for new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens.
This article introduces this issue of Conservation and Society, and argues strongly for new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens.
Jean M. Langford explores different modes of interspecies communications at an urban parrot sanctuary, suggesting that humans can alter their interactions to ease parrots’ distress.
This special section edited by Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua considers how multispecies flourishing works when the creatures are awkward, when togetherness is difficult, when vulnerability is in the making, and death is at hand.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Jamie Lorimer addresses the growing interest in restoring components of the microbiome. His article explores some of the implications of these developments for multispecies studies through a focus on helminth therapy—the selective reintroduction of parasitic worms as “gut buddies” to tackle autoimmune disease.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.
The author attempts to reframe the classical distinction in conservation biology between native and invasive species by referring to migration and settlement of nonhuman beings as diasporas. She uses the introduction of Canadian beavers in Chilean Tierra del Fuego in 1947 as a case study.
Looking at Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), Katey Castellano shows how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.
In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.