Caring for one set of species at the cost of another is the subject of Amir Zelinger’s article about bird conservation and its implications for the life of cats in Imperial Germany.
Daniel Münster takes us to the troubled history of improving dairy production in India, from the crossbreeding and high-cost industrialized care of delicate hybrids to the equally complex implications of a native-cow revival.
Harriet Ritvo’s article complicates the categorical separation of “wild” and “domesticated” that has organized much Western thought on species distinctions. Ritvo invites us to think beyond the boundaries and fixedness of dominant concepts.
Jean Langford discusses what happens “when species fall apart” in the relationships of care at primate and parrot sanctuaries. Care involves an improvised orchestration of social life—through spatial arrangements and regulation of movement—to facilitate often nonnormative, intraspecies, and cross-species intimacies.
Ellis argues that the unparalleled capacity of human societies to construct ecological niches at growing social and spatial scales has allowed them to alter the Earth permanently and profoundly.
Kluiving and Hamel explore why the Anthropocene emerged. They suggest that an analysis of global changes in human niche construction using geoarchaeological data offers new perspectives on the causes and effects of the Anthropocene.
Martin’s essay examines the influence of the human-built environment on the evolution of other species. Studying these relationships offers us a new way of thinking about human niche construction and the Anthropocene.
Portera posits that human niche construction can provide insight into how aesthetic standards develop within human societies and cultures. Standards of beauty tend to evolve through cultural niche construction behavior and biological evolution.
Eriksson and Arnell address the ecological and cultural effects of the Swedish infield system in Scandinavia. Their essay sheds light on how the human construction and management of infields maintained a spatial continuity that greatly altered, and continues to impact, how humans and other organisms have developed.
David Bello explores the fraught struggle between humans and locusts for occupancy of the agricultural niches created by farmers during China’s Qing dynasty.
