The categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.
Content
Susanne Schmitt explores the multifaceted ways in which the Syngnathid family is caught up in networks of care and storytelling.
Ursula Münster shows us in her essay on silenced and silent practices of avian care in a postcolonial conservation landscape of South India, that care is never innocent, it plays out within established hierarchies and power relations, and it can reinforce long traditions of imperialism and exclusion.
Emily O’Gorman focuses on the Australian pelicans of South Australia’s Coorong region to examine how historical and contemporary ways of protecting these birds have been entangled with class politics, cross-cultural relationships, and the law.
Caring for one set of species at the cost of another is the subject of Amir Zelinger’s article about bird conservation and its implications for the life of cats in Imperial Germany.
Allan Curtis and Terry De Lacey analyze perceptions of the Australian grassroots movement “Landcare” through landholder surveys, thereby discussing wider concepts of natural resource management, stewardship and sustainable agriculture in Australia.
Martin Mulligan explores the Australian conservation movement, arguing that future conservation strategies need to tackle “frontier mentality” and a heavy reliance on scientific rationale. He suggests learning from the Australian Aborigines and non-rational approaches to nature conservation.
Carsten Helm and Udo Simonis develop a proposal for distributing common resources with regard to international climate policy, based on widely accepted equity criteria.
Holmes Rolston III discusses nature and development in an invited response to other articles in this issue of Environmental Values.
