Resistance and Rewilding: The Return of Beavers to Knapdale Forest
Beavers have been successfully reintroduced into Knapdale Forest, Scotland, an area where they went extinct over 400 years ago.
Beavers have been successfully reintroduced into Knapdale Forest, Scotland, an area where they went extinct over 400 years ago.
This collection brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle, while others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces.
Drawing on sources ranging from gardening books and magazines to statistics and oral history, Andrea Gaynor’s book challenges some of the widespread myths about food production in Australian cities and traces the reasons for its enduring popularity.
Owain Jones, a Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, offers ideas and resources about environmental humanities in this blog.
In this article, Monica Vasile discusses the recent reintroduction of bison in the Romanian Carpathians, and the surrounding local narratives and unresolved tensions.
McKenzie F. Johnson, Krithi K. Karanth, and Erika Weinthal evaluate compensation as a mitigation policy for human-wildlife conflict around four protected areas in Rajasthan (Jaisamand, Sitamata, Phulwari, and Kumbhalgarh), finding efforts insensitive to local livelihoods.
Etienne Sabatier and Charlie Huveneers examine media portrayals of human-shark encounters between 2011 and 2013 in the state of Western Australia, arguing that negative framing by media feeds public anxiety.
Victoria Gonzalez Carman and Maria Carman focus on the interaction between a fishing community and a group of conservation experts in Brazil. They find that although fishers classify species according to their capacity to be exploited as a resource, they may also be willing to become strategic conservationists by negotiating with conservation experts to protect some of these species.
In this special section on affective ecologies, Julia Hobson Haggerty, Elizabeth Lynne Rink, Robert McAnally, and Elizabeth Bird study the restoration of bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana in the United States. They argue that ecological restoration can promote and facilitate emergent and dynamic processes of reconnection at the scale of individuals, across species and within communities.
Aimee L. Schmidt and Douglas A. Clark examine the response of local people and agencies to a polar bear-inflicted human injury in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, showing how human-bear conflict is often widely publicized and controversial, and how it shapes public expectations around bear management.