conservation

In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.

In the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section” of Environmental Humanities, Maan Barua reveals encounters as spatializing and “ecologizing” politics in ways that are vital for the environmental humanities’ efforts to redistribute powers to act and to flourish.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Celia Lowe and Ursula Münster present three open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zürich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, where the country’s last free-ranging elephants live. They call attention to the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction through the elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.

This article introduces this issue of Conservation and Society, and argues strongly for new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens.

Kamaljit Kaur Sangha and Jeremy Russell-Smith propose an integrated ecosystem services (ES) valuation framework for an indigenous savanna estate in northern Australia, describing how capabilities along with biophysical and socio-cultural ES benefits play a vital role for peoples’ well-being.

Allison L. Mayberry, Alice J. Hovorka and Kate E. Evans use qualitative methods to explore human experiences with elephants and perceived impacts of elephants on human well-being in northern Botswana. They emphasize the importance of investigating both visible and hidden impacts of elephants on human well-being to foster holistic understanding of human-elephant conflict scenarios and to inform future mitigation strategies.

Monika Krause and Katherine Robinson follow up on the observation that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation by investigating how cultural schemas and organizational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly.

Crystal A. Crown and Kalli F. Doubleday explore media representation of Human-Leopard Interactions (HLI) in India, focusing on detecting agenda-setting and framing in articles, and whether these differ with the level of association with HLI. They conclude that the largely negative depiction, and differences in representation between geographic locations, could hinder mitigation strategies and policy by presenting stakeholders with incomplete information.

Catrina A. MacKenzie, Rebecca K. Fuda, Sadie Jane Ryan, and Joel Hartter use interviews and focus group discussions to assess the interaction of oil exploration with the three primary conservation policies employed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority: protectionism, neoliberal capital accumulation, and community-based conservation.

Sorrel Jones, Malcolm D. Burgess, Frazer Sinclair, Jeremy Lindsell and Juliet Vickery present new data on rule-breaking prevalence in Gola Rainforest National Park, Sierra Leone, and use these data in spatially explicit simulations to assess the survey effort and design required to detect change and assess the effect of rule-breaker behavior to these designs.