Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks (original) (raw)
Related papers
Framing the relationship between people and nature in the context of European conservation
Linnell, J. D. C., Kaczensky, P., Wotschikowsky, U., Lescureux, N., & Boitani, L. (2015). Framing the relationship between people and nature in the context of European conservation. Conservation Biology, 29(4), 978-985.
A key controversy in conservation is the framing of the relationship between people and nature. The extent to which the realms of nature and human culture are viewed as separate (dualistic view) or integrated is often discussed in the social sciences. To explore how this relationship is represented in the practice of conservation in Europe, we considered examples of cultural landscapes, wildlife (red deer, reindeer, horses), and protected area management. We found little support, for a dualistic worldview, where people and nature are regarded as separate in the traditional practice of conservation in Europe. The borders between nature and culture, wild and domestic, public land and private land, and between protected areas and the wider landscape were blurred and dynamic. The institutionalized (in practice and legislation) view is of an interactive mutualistic system in which humans and nature share the whole landscape. However, more dualistic ideals, such as wilderness and rewilding that are challenging established practices are expanding. In the context of modern day Europe, wilderness conservation and rewilding are not valid for the whole landscape, although it is possible to integrate some areas of low-intervention management into a wider matrix. A precondition for success is to recognize and plan for a plurality of values concerning the most valid approaches to conservation and to plan for this plurality at the landscape scale.
The Culture of Nature: Protected Landscapes as Sites of Conflict
National Parks are intensively researched regions for various reasons: There is a great demand on the part of the administration for knowledge as to what is actually being protected, and in an era of widely-heralded climate change and environmental crisis these areas serve as laboratories for scientific research. These scientific activities do not, however, always elicit equal affection amongst locals. The underlying question is the role played by the natural sciences in the specific 'culture of nature', as it is represented by the national park.
Protected Areas, Conservation Stakeholders and the Naturalization of Southern Europe
Forum for Development Studies, 2014
The critical analysis of conservation conflicts in Protected Areas (PAs) raises interesting questions about the redefinition of human-environment relations in the current ecological crisis. In recent years these debates have unveiled that, in the attempt to define the ‘proper’ place of humans in nature, PAs have embodied modern dualistic worldviews, which understand nature as a realm different from society, culture and ’civilisation’. In this paper, I suggest that the utilisation of these worldviews should be understood as part of the conceptual apparatus that enables a transition in management roles in Protected Areas, through which new empowered groups are granted the right to control and use natural resources. By analysing the practices and discourses of conservation stakeholders at the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, in southern Spain, I show that modern ideas of nature are essential to the collective appropriation of Cabo de Gata by new empowered groups because these ideas justify a new way of managing local resources in accordance with their own interests and desires. I conclude that this has deep implications for the study of people-park conflicts and the problems associated to the promotion of more environmentally friendly ways of mastering the environment, which must be approached in the light of the power relations associated to the appropriation of territory and natural resources. I also conclude that, in order to understand how the nature-society dualism still dictates the way we should relate to the environment, we must trace the practices of those who bear this worldview and unveil the strategies and mechanisms that are used.
Towards a Global History of National Parks
2012
National parks and related forms of protected areas have been the most important tool of nature conservation since the late nineteenth century. Ever since the United States invented the label of a 'national park' to preserve the natural wonders of Yellowstone in 1872, the idea of confi ning 'nature' to a 'park' and assigning it the status of a national heritage has been transferred to a wide and diverse range of political, social and ecological settings. At the moment of this writing, national governments have offi cially assigned some degree of protection to around 130,000 areas, i.e. almost 13 per cent of the global land mass in 2010. 1 Th e increase of protected areas in both number and geographical extent has been nothing but staggering over the last few decades, and there is no end foreseeable to this boom. Judged merely by their impressive extension in size and number, parks and protected areas appear to have been a phenomenal success. However, the past performance of protected areas casts doubt on such an optimistic outlook. Bill Adams, one of the foremost experts in conservation history, states that the '20th century saw conservation's creation but nature's decline'. 2 Although the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) hails protected areas as 'the world's most cost eff ective tool for biodiversity conservation' , 3 they have apparently been unable to bring a halt to the rampant loss of biodiversity. According to the same organization, the current species extinction rate is estimated 'between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than it would naturally be'. 4 Conservation biologists routinely blame the apparent failure of protected areas to safeguard global biodiversity on their fragmented geography and lack of coherence. Today's protected areas would neither encompass all biodiversity 'hotspots' nor even the most representative biomes of each continent. Parks and protected areas are more akin to thousands of isolated islands of conservation in a global sea of continuing transformation and degradation of land, nature and ecosystems. As it seems, the eff orts to harness ever-changing dynamic ecological systems within rigid boundaries have turned out to be as futile as nailing the infamous jelly to the wall. 5
Journal of Mountain Science, 2018
Nature tourism and particularly tourism in national parks have acquired significant importance in contemporary societies. Post-Fordist consumers have reevaluated the meanings of 'nature' and 'natural spaces' and now avoid standardization to seek singularity. Tourism in national parks is a consequence of this tendency and has both positive and negative aspects. The purpose of this sociological research is to describe the most relevant conflicts in the Picos de Europa National Park (Spain) involving the park's conservation, local economic development, and tourism. Seven in-depth interviews and three focus groups were addressed to key local stakeholders. In this research were identified three chief areas of existing or potential interrelated conflicts and the main actors interacting with them. The first is on population, particularly, the negative consequences of depopulations on the local socioeconomic development and the environment. A second source of conflicts identified is caused by the difficult conciliation between commercial exploitation and conservation of the protected natural area. More precisely, this specific form of tourism positively contributes to the economy of local communities whilst problems can arise for the conservation goals of National Parks. Thirdly, in this research is also analyzed the institutional governance and the inter and intra-governmental conflicts as well as with the Park's management body. These findings provide important information for the improved management of tourism and conflicting interests in natural parks.
Protecting life: The common goals of nature reserves and architectural heritage sites
Journal of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, 2020
This study addresses the general protection of sites through the idea of preserving the "environment" as a functional whole. Within this broad framework, the text focuses on the meaning and goal of the so-called conservation areas. The first part examines how and when a holistic concept of protection emerged. The second part reviews the current state of affairs, while the third section develops an argument in favor of a holistic understanding of the environment based on interdisciplinary research and complex adaptive systems. The study emphasizes the pioneering impulses from 19th-century Central Europe for the protection of the style and "memory" of historical cities, the creation of nature reserves, the protection of landscape character, the democratization of conservationist initiatives, and the discussion about these initiatives' motivations. It further argues that traditional environments, today preserved in conservation areas, differ starkly from unprotected areas in terms of these environments' systemic qualities. Traditional environments have the natural qualities of living structures, which explains their attractiveness, making "preservation of life" the common goal of the entire conservation movement.
Acta horticulturae, 2010
Historical communal parks are local hotspots of biodiversity within the urban area and crucial elements for liveable cities in our future warmer world, provide a wide range of ecological services and are a part of our common European cultural heritage. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we analysed the effects of horticultural history of urban parks originating from the 19 th and early 20 th centuries on local floras along a gradient from Central to South Eastern Europe. We focused on principles of park design, historical planting patterns and their impacts on current species distribution. Early results revealed the existence of a transnational network of garden designers at that time. Our results also suggest a trend at the European scale towards a common fashion of planting exotics, as 66% of species on the planting lists were exotics, 59% of the species were planted in two or more parks in Germany and Hungary and similarities in planting lists did not decrease with increasing geographical distance of parks. Thus far, 20% of the exotics planted in the studied parks have become naturalised and established far from the former sites of cultivation. Plantings in urban parks drive biological invasions. Our ongoing project is expected to offer further insights into the interplay of cultural and ecological processes in urban landscapes over decades by quantifying the spread of a large set of cultivated exotics in specific historical parks across Europe. We have evidence that current species composition and distribution patterns-which will strongly influence the future spread of species-can be traced back to historical planting patterns.
Forests as the Sentient Bridge between German Landscape and Identity
Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape, 2022
Interest in environmental anthropology has grown steadily in recent years, refl ecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. This major new international series, which continues a series fi rst published by Harwood and Routledge, is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places, or peoples that focus on the interrelationship between society, culture, and environment. Relevant areas include human ecology, the perception and representation of the environment, ethno-ecological knowledge, the human dimension of biodiversity conservation, and the ethnography of environmental problems. While the underlying ethos of the series will be anthropological, the approach is interdisciplinary.