George Holmes

There is a broad set of human beliefs, attitudes and behaviours around the issue of magical animals, referring to both mythical animals not recognized by science and extant animals that are recognized by science but have magical properties. This is a broad issue ranging from spiritual beliefs around mythical animals living in Malagasy forests , to cultural heritage associated with the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland. Beliefs and behaviours around magical animals can have positive and negative impacts on biodiversity conservation goals. Yet, so far, the discipline of conservation biology has not adequately considered magical animals, neglecting to account for the broader knowledge from outside the natural sciences on this issue, and taking a narrow, utilitarian approach to how magical animals should be managed, without necessarily considering the broader impacts on conservation goals or ethics. Here we explore how magical animals can influence conservation goals, how conservation biology and practice has thought about magical animals, and some of the limitations of current approaches, particularly the failure to consider magical animals as part of wider systems of belief and culture. We argue that magical animals and their implications for conservation merit wider consideration.

This paper examines how Southern Andean Patagonia has been increasingly incorporated within networks of global capital since the 1990s. Once defined by military violence against indigenous societies, white settler colonialism, and livestock farming, this remote region has become an iconic center for green development in Latin America. This article develops the argument that a regional territorial imaginary—grounded in a history of borderland geopolitics—has facilitated this recent shift towards green development across the resource domains of land conservation, hydropower, and forestry. The discussion addresses the different ways in which forests, waterways, and protected areas (public and private) have been integrated into a hegemonic vision promoting eco-regionalism among state, corporate, and civil society actors. This analysis thus contributes to scholarship on global capitalism, natural resource governance, and green development in Latin America by developing the concept of the regional territorial imaginary to describe these dynamics. This analytic highlights how processes of capitalist specialization and region-alization occur through the open-ended consolidation of master images that build upon spatial histories, transnational regimes of representational value, and political struggles

In a world of shrinking habitats and increasing competition for natural resources, potentially dangerous predators bring the challenges of coexisting with wildlife sharply into focus. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between authors trained in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, this paper offers a review of current approaches and a vision for future approaches to understanding and mitigating adverse human-predator encounters. The paper first reviews some limitations to current approaches to mitigation. Second, it reviews an emerging interdisciplinary literature, identifying key perspectives on how to better frame and therefore successfully mitigate such conservation conflicts. Third, it discusses the implications for future research and management practice. It is concluded that a demand for rapid, ‘win-win’ solutions for conservation and development favours dispute resolution and technical fixes, obscuring important underlying drivers of conflicts. Without due cognisance of these underlying drivers, our well intentioned efforts, focussed on ‘human wildlife conflicts,’ will fail.

Protected areas (PAs) are a key strategy for protecting biological resources, but they vary considerably in their effectiveness, and are frequently reported as having negative impacts on local people. This has contributed to a divisive and unresolved debate concerning the compatibility of environmental and socioeconomic development goals. Elucidating the relationship between positive and negative social impacts and conservation outcomes of PAs is key for the development of more effective and socially just conservation. Here, we conduct a global analysis of how PAs affect the wellbeing of local people, the factors associated with these impacts, and crucially the relationship between PAs’ conservation and socioeconomic outcomes. Our results show that PAs reporting positive socioeconomic outcomes are more likely to report positive conservation outcomes. We find positive conservation and socioeconomic outcomes are more likely to occur when PAs adopt co-management regimes, empower local people, reduce economic inequalities and maintain cultural and livelihood benefits. While the strictest regimes of PA management attempt to exclude anthropogenic influences to achieve biological conservation objectives, our study provides evidence that PAs that explicitly integrate local people as stakeholders tend to be more effective at achieving joint biological conservation and socioeconomic development outcomes. Strict protection may be needed in some circumstances, yet our results demonstrate that conservation and development objectives can be synergistic and highlight management strategies that increase the probability of achieving win-win scenarios that maximize conservation performance and development outcomes of PAs.

"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop

25th October 2013, University of York

Call for Papers – deadline 13th September

Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture.

Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land.

This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.

Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:

Water privatisation
Water on film
Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
Gendered engagements with water
Water in religion, performance and ritual
Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
Disasters and reconstruction
Embodiment, memory and affect
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.

This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."