Hodgetts, Timothy. “Connectivity.” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 456-59. doi:10.1215/22011919-4215412.
Ecologies depend on connectivity; and where it is compromised, ecologies unravel. Habitat fragmentation has become a familiar symptom and underlying cause in contemporary diagnoses of ecological degradation (Primack, Essentials of Conservation Biology). Simplified cultures of concrete and corn divide up the green and leave multispecies ecological communities isolated and vulnerable. But new connections are also being made in response: some with a hybrid human hand and others with more of a nonhuman provenance. Some new connections are championed as modes of management more suited to the Anthropocene than the nature-reserve fences of modernity: woodland corridors, toad tunnels, and squirrel rope bridges for the right type (red squirrels in the United Kingdom) capture the popular imagination. But not all connectivities are welcomed: “nonnative invasive” species that make their own connections, such as the eastern grays in England, become targets for discipline, expulsion, and death. (…) (Excerpt)
© Timothy Hodgetts 2017. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).