Symbioses is an interdisciplinary research network that connects life scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars working at the nexus of biology and social life.
The Aldo Leopold Archives in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Digital Collections serve scholars, policy leaders, and the general public who look to Aldo Leopold for insight and inspiration on how to deal with complex conservation challenges facing society in the twenty-first century.
Adam Amir follows decolonizing and feminist methodologies to develop a form of communal participatory video production for portraying the last 300 remaining Cross River gorillas and their role in indigenous values and conservation efforts.
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.
This paper uses data from a long-term ethnography of both the local people and the conservation agenda in the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, to discuss how environmentalists used the National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities (PNDSPCT) to justify the displacement of local people.
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.
Teena Gabrielson examines the visual politics at work in website photographs depicting environmental justice issues in the United States. She argues for a more inclusive socio-ecological politics which requires visual strategies that resist racialized ways of seeing and make visible the injustice of disproportionate environmental impacts on low-income communities and people of color.
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.
