Periodicals

Bas Verschuuren reviews the book World Heritage Sites and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, edited by Stefan Disko and Helen Tugehndhat.

Drawing on interviews with the managers of 56 internationally adjoining protected areas in 18 countries in the Americas, the study focuses on the link between land use change and environmental change, and on three adaptation strategies, namely diversification, pooling, and out-migration. It suggests that the impact of adaptation depends on the adaptation strategy chosen.

Bradley M. Jones explores the cultivation of life in ruins, through a multi-species ecological ethic revealed in the life and labor of a permaculture farmer in the Appalachian foothills.

Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.

The authors illuminate the power relations between state actors and the local people in accessing fuelwood in Zimbabwe, and how discourses of scarcity enhance these power dynamics.

With a focus on global cancer epidemics, Nina Lykke discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make populations live and tendencies to let them die are intertwined.

In this introduction to a special section on toxic embodiment, Olga Cielemęcka and Cecilia Åsberg examine variously situated bodies, land- and waterscapes, and their naturalcultural interactions with toxicity.

The authors draw on empirical experience to assess the extent of the impact of race and social equity in conservation, with the aim of promoting sustainable and more inclusive conservation practices in South Africa. Their findings suggest conservation practices in post-apartheid South Africa are still exclusionary for the majority black population.

Ludger Brenner analyzes the potentials and limitations of multi-stakeholder platforms (known as advisory councils) in Mexico that are involved in protected area and resource management in the peripheral regions.

The authors explore the case of a Privately Protected Area (PPA) in Chilean Patagonia to learn its impact on local residents. Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, they find that the park has been detrimental to local livelihoods, has disrupted systems of production, and has elicited a negative emotional response.