Susana Costa, Catarina Casanova, and Phyllis Lee present a study of the obstacles to women’s participation in conservation strategies associated with Cantanhez Forest National Park (CFNP), in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. The findings revealed that the women felt the Park was responsible for malnutrition in the communities due to damage of crops by wildlife.
Carter et al. translate key themes from scenario narratives into spatial representations using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). They apply this technique to a Tasmanian case study exploring future scenarios for biodiversity in a predominantly privately-owned agricultural landscape, enabling land managers to explore outcomes from potential interventions and identify strategies that might mitigate the impact of future issues of environmental concern.
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya draws attention to the persistent justice debates in Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus the enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) and the role of norms in constraining and shaping policy designs and outcomes.
Alison Lullfitz, Joe Dortch, Stephen D. Hopper, Carol Pettersen, Ron (Doc) Reynolds, and David Guilfoyle use the lens of Human Niche Construction theory to examine Noongar (an indigenous people of southwestern Australia) relationships with southwestern Australian flora, and suggest influences of these relationships on contemporary botanical patterns in this global biodiversity hotspot.
El-Hajj Rita, Khater Carla, Tatoni Thierry, Ali Adam and Vela Errol present a review of ecological and socioeconomic indicators globally used to orient conservation planning on the global and national levels. Their paper suggests a set of suitable, relevant, and practical set of indicators, adapted to Mediterranean-type continental environments.
Amitangshu Acharya and Alison Ormsby explore devithans—Nepali sacred groves—in the eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, India. Given that historically the Buddhist Lepcha-Bhutias’ cultural association with Sikkim’s sacred landscape has been celebrated, while that of Nepali ethnic groups has been largely invisibilized, they argue that devithans have emerged as a potential political instrument for the latter to validate political and cultural claims to Sikkim’s sacred landscape.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, David Dunér scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research, particularly the last three factors of the Drake equation.
In looking back at Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler through contemporary art, Susan Ballard suggests that in the art gallery can provide an opportunity to locate ourselves in the place of others. She argues that sympathy read alongside machinic evolution can offer a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.
Gordon M. Sayre explores the metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the Alexandrian library. He argues that this obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books and that, in essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.
Stefan Helmreich’s foreword to a Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that the anthropology of outer space these days is a machine for chaotic and cosmic travel, chrono-synclastic infundibulation, and analogical involution, a wrinkle in the discipline and its companion fields that changes what can count as both the “environment” and the “humanities.”
