William M Adams

Recent discussion of global environmental assessment processes suggests that the process of consensus creation is central to understanding the way knowledge is produced and conclusions are reached. Here we contribute to this literature by providing a case study of the World Commission on Dams, which brought together supporters and opponents of large dams, at the height of controversy about dams in the 1990s. The Commission reviewed evidence and formulated guidelines for best practice, finding a way through a political stalemate. The article draws on interviews with those involved in the Commission and discusses the historical context, form of stakeholder representation, time horizon, and leadership style as consensus-enabling conditions. We conclude that an ambitious consensual process was successful within the life of the Commission, but at the cost of carrying external actors with it, leading …

Humans, non‐human animals, and technologies are increasingly entangled. Using the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) as an illustrative example, we propose ‘technonatural history’ as a theoretical and methodological approach for observing, describing, and examining the role technologies play in shaping human relations with other species. After nearing extinction in the 20th century, peregrines have become woven into the fabric of everyday urban life and are a frequently sighted urban raptor in the UK, nesting on high‐rise buildings and church spires since the late 1990s. Their unexpected presence in cities symbolises hope for multispecies conviviality amid the contemporary ecological crisis. As their populations resurged, crucially, webcam and livestreaming technologies developed rapidly. Peregrines were one of the first animals to be broadcast over the internet via ‘nestcams’, granting broad publics …

Geography’s name derives from two words in ancient Greek—geo (Earth, land, or soil) and grapho (to write, draw, or describe), and ancient and modern geographers alike have understood their role as to describe the face of the Earth and, especially, to give an account of the things humanity has done to it and created on it. Whenever conservationists address human impacts in the biosphere, or conservation scientists study those impacts and their implications for nonhuman life on Earth, they draw consciously or unconsciously from ideas and ways of thinking that have long been important in geography. One way to think about geography is that it is built around the study of space, as history is of time—and historical geography, of course, as the combination of both! Thus, The Dictionary of Human Geography defines geography as “[the study of] the ways in which space is involved in the operation and outcome of social and biophysical processes”(Gregory et al. 2009). This fundamentally interdisciplinary inheritance is often expressed in terms of “physical geography”(concerned with Earth surface processes) and “human geography”(concerned with social, economic, political, and cultural processes). Physical geography includes a number of subfields. Geomorphology (the study of the shape of the Earth) is concerned with processes of weathering, erosion, and deposition and their outcomes in landforms. Other subfields include hydrology (the study of water movement), pedology (the study of soils), meteorology (the study of weather and climate), and biogeography (the study of the distribution of organisms and vegetation communities and particularly …

After nearing extinction in the late 1970s, peregrine falcons have adapted to urban ecosystems, becoming a UK conservation success story. This chapter tells the story of peregrine falcon resurgence in the UK, tracing three key lignes de fuite that peregrines have taken from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. First, we consider the peregrine as a revenant ghost: its transformation into spectral form, its fading from human sight as it neared extinction, and its resurgence and ecological recovery. Second, we consider the peregrine’s movement into new spaces; specifically, the built environments of urban landscapes. The revenant peregrine has become urban, occupying novel territories and displaying new mobilities closely aligned to human worlds. Third, we consider a further transition that has accompanied the peregrine’s recovery and urban flyways: its emergence in and through the fractal spaces of the digital …

The global long‐term decline of migrant birds represents an important and challenging issue for conservation scientists and practitioners. This review draws together recent research directed at the Afro‐Palaearctic flyway and considers its implications for conservation. The greatest advances in knowledge have been made in the field of tracking. These studies reveal many species to be highly dispersed in the non‐breeding season, suggesting that site‐level conservation at a small number of locations will almost certainly be of limited value for most species. Instead, widespread but ‘shallow’ land‐sharing solutions are likely to be more effective but, because any local changes in Africa will affect many European populations, any impact will be extremely difficult to detect through monitoring in the breeding grounds. Targeted action to boost productivity in Europe may help to halt declines of some species but reversing …

Conjuring up Ghosts: On Photography and Extinction - ePrints - Newcastle University Newcastle University Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search Home Browse Latest Policies About Home Browse Latest Policies About Open Access padlock ePrints Browse by author Conjuring up Ghosts: On Photography and Extinction Lookup NU author(s): Dr Shane McCorristine Downloads Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available. Publication metadata Author(s): Adams WA, McCorristine S, Searle A Editor(s): Stark H Publication type: Book Chapter Publication status: Published Book Title: Extinction and Memorial Culture: Reckoning with Species Loss in the Anthropocene Year: 2023 Pages: 137-154 Print publication date: 23/06/2023 Online publication date: 23/06/2023 Acceptance date: 14/09/2022 Publisher: Routledge Place Published: London URL: …

The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) is a cosmopolitan bird with a global distribution (Drewitt 2014; Gainzarain et al. 2000; Molard et al. 2007; Ratcliffe 1993). No less than 75 subspecies have been described, although currently only 19 are recognised by biologists (White et al. 2013). Today, the peregrine is not considered a globally endangered species. On the contrary, its population is slowly growing (Birdlife International 2022). Yet, persecution and habitat destruction over the last two centuries (related to intensified agriculture in countries like the UK) resulted in its population falling to such a low level that peregrines seemed on the verge of extinction. Indeed, the peregrine became a poster child of the conservation movement.The peregrine is widely considered to be highly charismatic (see Lorimer 2007). It is reputed to be the fastest animal on Earth when it stoops to hunt prey, a factoid feted from pub quiz trivia to children's encyclopaedia. In the book Falcon, Helen Macdonald describes the long history of human fascination with the peregrine in falconry, for both its elegance as a flyer and its prowess as a killer (Macdonald 2006). Naturalists have also long singled out the peregrine for its speed, fierceness, and relative unknowability (Ratcliffe 1980). Ed Drewitt describes the peregrine stoop as" mind-boggling"(2014, p. 21), writing that" when one is in stoop dive it drops through the air with speed, grace, and perfection”(2014, p. 20). In the classic work of nature writing The Peregrine, JA Baker (1967) describes with astonishing eloquence his fleeting encounters with peregrines, which, for him, magically dominate the skies of Essex (UK), picking …

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic extend to global biodiversity and its conservation. Although short-term beneficial or adverse impacts on biodiversity have been widely discussed, there is less attention to the likely political and economic responses to the crisis and their implications for conservation. Here we describe four possible alternative future policy responses: (1) restoration of the previous economy, (2) removal of obstacles to economic growth, (3) green recovery and (4) transformative economic reconstruction. Each alternative offers opportunities and risks for conservation. They differ in the agents they emphasize to mobilize change (e.g. markets or states) and in the extent to which they prioritize or downplay the protection of nature. We analyse the advantages and disadvantages of these four options from a conservation perspective. We argue that the choice of post-COVID-19 recovery strategy has …

Table of Contents Table of Contents Full Text 2 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY VOLUME XXX VI II NUMBER 3 SPRING 2022 Poem Marianne Boruch, Cadaver, Speak: 15 Featuring Lisa Nilsson’s Tissue Series. 96 91 32 Archives Kiley Snider, Contagion Books George Perkovich reviews Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity by Daniel Deudney • John O’Brien reviews Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology by Kent H. Redford and William M. Adams DEPARTMENTS 14 11 5 FORUM Letters from Simon Dalby • Alison Parker • Joseph E. Aldy • Moussa P. Blimpo • Renee Collini • Sandra Díaz Featuring Mathemalchemy. Editor’s Journal Lisa Margonelli Governance of the Inconceivable Perspectives Diana Montaño, Electrifying Agents and the Power Thieves of Mexico City Amanda Arnold, Rules for …

The World Commission on Dams (WCD) was active between 1998 and 2000. Despite the Commission’s short life, it left a lasting mark on the global debate on large dams, one of the most intractable and conflicted issues in environmental governance. Existing accounts of the Commission focus chiefly on its recommendations and their influence on dam planners. Another major topic of interest has been the novelty of making global environmental policy through multi-stakeholder dialogue rather than through intergovernmental negotiation. This focus on technicalities, results, and institutional design underplays the Commission’s political significance. It was a bold and innovative attempt to find common ground between promoters and opponents of dams on which a new way of thinking about and planning dams could be built. In this paper, we focus on the emergence of the Commission, in response to the evolving …

Shortly after Valentine’s Day 2021, photographs of a cute baby black footed ferret Mustela nigripes graced newsfeeds (Imbler, 2021). The unusual thing about the ferret was its parentage—it was a clone of a female, Willa, who died in captivity in the 1980s without breeding, and whose cells had been cryopreserved. Cells from Willa have now been used to create an embryo by interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, which was inserted into the womb of a domestic ferret surrogate mother and successfully brought to term (Wisely et al., 2015). Cue the cute photo-op for a photogenic ferret kit, named Elizabeth Ann. Press articles about the event hailed the ‘genetic rescue’or ‘genetic restoration’of previously lost elements of the black ferret genome. This approach for enhancing the restricted genomes of threatened species seems to be working its way into the conservation mainstream (Sandler et al., 2021). The ferret …

Dam planning and construction is notoriously difficult. It is highly complex, involving a multitude of social, environmental, economic and technological questions that often become politicised in the process; negative impacts are often concentrated on small, vulnerable groups within society, while the benefits are typically spread in a much more diffuse pattern; it requires changing riverine ecosystems, often irreversibly so; and it takes a very long time, with often harsh consequences if mistakes are made. These challenges have generated decades of debate around dams and development, yet it is not clear how dam planning and management can be improved. To address this question, the present study used Q methodology to analyse the views of social and environmental researchers on dams in Latin America on the principles that should guide dam development. The Q analysis rendered three idealised viewpoints: The first suggested that defending the rights of vulnerable people should be the main priority, as a counterbalance to the natural bias towards economically and politically powerful actors within the political economy of dam construction. The second implied adoption of a holistic and scientific vision towards dam decision-making and a focus of efforts on perfecting formal procedures and participatory processes to build better dams in the future. The third called into question the need for dams altogether and concentrated attention on invisible and overlooked aspects of dam decision-making, particularly past injustices, and the rights of indigenous communities to determine their own model of development. Each viewpoint represents an …

The lack of progress in reversing the declining global trend in biodiversity is partly due to a mismatch between how living nature is conceived and valued by the conservation movement on the one hand, and by many different people, including marginalized communities, on the other. Addressing this problem calls for a pluralistic perspective on biodiversity. This requires consideration of the use of the concept of biodiversity, willingness to expand its ambit, and engagement with the multiple and multi-level drivers of change. We propose ways for conservation science, policy and practice to deliver more effective and socially just conservation outcomes.

Dam planning and construction is notoriously difficult. It is highly complex, involving a multitude of social, environmental, economic and technological questions that often become politicised in the process; negative impacts are often concentrated on small, vulnerable groups within society, while the benefits are typically spread in a much more diffuse pattern; it requires changing riverine ecosystems, often irreversibly so; and it takes a very long time, with often harsh consequences if mistakes are made. These challenges have generated decades of debate around dams and development, yet it is not clear how dam planning and management can be improved. To address this question, the present study used Q methodology to analyse the views of social and environmental researchers on dams in Latin America on the principles that should guide dam development. The Q analysis rendered three idealised …

Nino David Jordan• 155 other theoretical traditions, for example, the more rationalist institutionalist accounts associated with Robert Keohane, coauthor of the accountability definition that serves as a common thread throughout the various chapters. This volume has achieved significant steps toward problematizing the relation between accountability mechanisms and environmental degradation. The individual contributions stay within the confines of an assessment of second-tier accountability and how it relates to first-tier accountability, however. That feedback loops from second-to first-tier accountability alone do not lead out of the “accountability trap” is clear. Park and Kramarz argue that accountability should be used “as a means of exposing the underlying politics of choice, learning and reconstituting [global environmental governance] to lead to better environmental outcomes”(220). Future scholarship should …

A growing conservation science literature is exploring possible conservation applications of gene editing (eg, Phelps et al., 2019; Piaggio et al., 2016; Redford et al., 2019). Proposals mainly focus on 2 approaches. First, to change the genomes of species of conservation concern to enhance their ability to survive threats like disease, for example, amphibians threatened by chytrid fungus, or anthropogenic environmental changes, for example, reef-building corals threatened by warming oceans. Second, to change the genomes of species that threaten the survival of rare or endemic species, for example, invasive species on oceanic islands.Most discussion of conservation applications of gene editing is still more or less speculative, discussing the use of newly developed tools and procedures or wishfully hoping for novel solutions to intractable conservation problems. There is no serious funding available for such conservation applications, be they blue-sky or practical. Development and application are much more advanced in human health, veterinary science, and agriculture, where gene editing is an increasingly mainstream technique.

Wildlife conservation and research benefits enormously from automated and interconnected monitoring tools. Some of these tools, such as drones, remote cameras, and social media, can collect data on humans, either accidentally or deliberately. They can therefore be thought of as conservation surveillance technologies (CSTs). There is increasing evidence that CSTs, and the data they yield, can have both positive and negative impacts on people, raising ethical questions about how to use them responsibly. CST use may accelerate because of the COVID‐19 pandemic, adding urgency to addressing these ethical challenges. We propose a provisional set of principles for the responsible use of such tools and their data: (a) recognize and acknowledge CSTs can have social impacts; (b) deploy CSTs based on necessity and proportionality relative to the conservation problem; (c) evaluate all potential impacts of …

Drones are rapidly becoming widely adopted within the construction industry with a 58% annual growth rate in use. Benefits arise due to the unique perspective achieved through the data captured. These include improved documentation, operations, and productivity gains. Drone technology can be implemented to monitor progress, aid in health and safety inspections and assist quality assurance through specialist thermal imaging cameras. Construction companies can benefit from Photogrammetry outputs such as orthomosaic drawings, topography surveys, and 3D model generation. A case study in the development of a drone programme by a building contractor found that developing an in-house team allowed more scalability and flexibility to carry out drone flights to meet the needs of specific projects. A qualitative review found that there are time savings achieved on a project through drone data captured, however this is difficult to accurately quantify. Photogrammetry can increase the benefit of drone outputs in construction, for instance through volume calculations, validation of work to date, and communication to the project team through image annotation. Drone data is a tool that can be used to aid in the management of a construction project but does not replace the need for human interpretation. Looking to the future, drones can become more integral to the construction project through hardware development by adding attachments to the drone for specific tasks such an exoskeleton for internal building inspections or stakes for setting out coordinates. Software development will play a major role in construction drone use with the …

Tanzania and Kenya are renowned for their extensive safari tourism on vast protected areas teeming with diverse wildlife. The most celebrated of such destinations is the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem (GSME), which comprises the Serengeti National Park, the Maasai Mara National Reserve and a wide range of protected areas surrounding these across Northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. The GSME is also home to traditional pastoral and agro-pastoral communities. The main protected areas were established more than six decades ago on land that was curved out of what used to be shared by wildlife and people who were forced to settle in adjacent smaller and often sub-optimal areas. Using four interrelated articles, this thesis provides nuanced critiques of the conservation policies and practices in the GSME. It argues that conservation in the region is guided by underlying narratives that emphasise the disconnections between humans and nature the origin of which can be traced to colonial history. Historically, such narratives resulted in the creation of protected areas that excluded local people. Following global calls to save dwindling wildlife numbers in recent years, governments and other conservation actors in Kenya and Tanzania have been working to include adjacent communal lands, into the more exclusive protected areas. In Kenya, the communal lands around protected areas were first privatized and then regrouped to form semi-private conservancies, causing waves of land use changes including widespread fencing in the remaining non-protected segments and dramatic shifts in livelihood pathways of the Maasai. In …

This first issue of Annals of Crosscuts includes eleven richly textured films that speak from the growing environmental humanities with strong intent and originality. The films speaks to the theme of" Ruptured Times" and forms a testimony to the integrative ambitions of the environmental humanities. The contributors come from a range of disciplines, schools and practices including artistic research, urban and architectural studies, social movements of the urban south, political ecologies of water, studies of mining legacies, decolonial performance aesthetics, science studies and ethnographies of conservation, toxicity and more-than-human relations. Made in ten countries, at four continents, the films are the final outcomes of a collaborative peer-review process that started in the first half of 2019, screened at the Crosscuts festival in late 2019 and published as a film-based special issue at Zenodo, CERN, in 2021 with a reflection from chief editor Jacob von Heland.

In 1974, Winstanley et al. asked ‘Where have all the whitethroats gone?’. This followed the failure of this small migrant bird to recover from a 77% decline in the UK breeding population in 19 (8–19 (9, the suggested cause being drought-related mortality in the Sahel. Whitethroats have slowly recovered, but many other small, Afro-Palearctic migrant passerines continue to decline. Despite a wealth of research, the underlying causes remain elusive (Vickery et al., 2014).Put simply, developing and implementing initiatives to stem population declines requires knowing whether they are driven by changes in breeding success or survival. For most migrant passerines we are struggling to provide this information—but why? Firstly, these small migrant passerines represent a broad suite of ecologically different species, including aerial foragers such as the swift and swallow, woodland birds such as the nightingale and pied …

As of April 2020, billions of people around the world are living under differing degrees of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, reshaping the ways in which we represent, affect, and sense urban space. Covid-19 has altered the mobilities and ordinary affects of human and nonhuman animal life in unprecedented ways (Stewart 2007). Confinement has shaken up the quotidian rhythms of urbanites, both human and nonhuman, actual and virtual. We explore these quarantine urban ecologies as they manifest in two prominent and interlinked forms: digital ecologies and ecologies of abandonment. We feel these ecologies differently, and feel differently about them, because they are ecologically different. Until now only virtually evoked through thought experiments (eg, Weisman 2007), Covid-19 is actualizing these ecologies on a global scale.

Despite the widespread use of spectral metaphors, the spectral quality of debates about extinction is little remarked by researchers in conservation science. In this article, we ask the following question: does a sense of the spectral create the conditions for hopeful thoughts and actions about biodiversity? Does becoming ‘haunted’ by species loss accomplish anything? Our intervention is timely because the field of biodiversity conservation reflects the power of ghosts, haunting, and absence in framing the crisis of biodiversity loss and in the moral tales that it uses to justify urgent conservation action. These spectral ideas have power to shape the way conservationists think and act. Yet, crucially, the connections between ghosts, haunting and conservation are not much acknowledged or discussed in conservation itself. Here, we explore the hopeful potential for conservation’s ghostly engagement by drawing on the …

As the concept of ecosystem services is applied more widely in conservation, its users will encounter the issue of poverty alleviation. Policy initiatives involving ecosystem services are often marked by their use of win-win narratives that conceal the trade-offs they must entail. Modelling this paper on an earlier essay about conservation and poverty, we explore the different views that underlie apparent agreement. We identify five positions that reflect different mixes of concern for ecosystem condition, poverty and economic growth, and we suggest that acknowledging these helps to uncover the subjacent goals of policy interventions and the trade-offs they involve in practice. Recognizing their existence and foundations can ultimately support the emergence of more legitimate and robust policies.

Digitalization changes the idea of the animal, meaning a form of organic organisation and performance associated with the living body. Digitalization may go beyond simply recording a crude and simplified version of the animal’s physical life. It may involve the creation of new digital lives, which have no analogue in nature.

On 16 November 2000, the World Commission on Dams (WCD) launched its final report in London, in the presence of Nelson Mandela. This event marked the conclusion of an unlikely process. WCD was composed of 12 eminent personalities whose mandate was to review the global evidence base on dams and development and make recommendations for best practices in dam planning, construction, operation, and decommissioning. They were activists, engineers, academics, and government officials covering a diverse range of perspectives on dams and development.Theirs was no simple task. The 1990s had seen tensions and conflicts around dams all around the world. The World Bank was a frequent target of campaigns against dams, whose reservoirs would submerge villages and flood indigenous territories, disrupt rural people’s livelihoods, and irreversibly modify riverine ecosystems. In a number of cases, these protests led to a review of projects, and even the withdrawal of World Bank support, as for example in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Indian Narmada River.

This paper comments on the idea of engineering novel and artificial forms of life to combat anthropogenic climate change by ‘terraforming' the Earth. The idea of ‘Nature-based Solutions' that sustain biodiversity while supporting human well-being connects conservation and climate change. However, the technologies of synthetic biology, particularly gene-editing, challenge the notion that only naturally-evolved organisms and ecosystems are capable of influencing in climate. The release of genetically-engineered organisms poses risks to biodiversity. Synthetic biology's engineering vision for the organic world is bold. But , terraforming with synthetic organisms is at odds with the conservationist’s concern for living diversity and diverse ecologies.

Quarantine conditions led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals. Here, we explore three prominent forms: creaturely cameos, avatar acquaintances and background birding. These virtual encounters afforded during lockdown life generated novel and affective human–animal relations that could have lasting effects for humans and nonhumans post-quarantine, posing interesting questions for more-than-human scholarship.

This paper comments on the idea of engineering novel and artificial forms of life to combat anthropogenic climate change by'terraforming'the Earth. The idea of'Nature-based Solutions' that sustain biodiversity while supporting human well-being connects conservation and climate change. However, the technologies of synthetic biology, particularly gene-editing, challenge the notion that only naturally-evolved organisms and ecosystems are capable of influencing in climate. The release of geneticallyengineered organisms poses risks to biodiversity. Synthetic biology's engineering vision for the organic world is bold. But, terraforming with synthetic organisms is at odds with the conservationist's concern for living diversity and diverse ecologies.

There is a rich literature by geographers on the spatial imagination and ambition of conservation, and particularly the long-established strategy of creating protected areas such as national parks. This report highlights five ways in which the spatial ambitions, imaginations and practices of conservation are changing. First, appetite for the expansion of protected areas continues to grow, with proposals for marine reserves and up to half of the earth under protection. Second, substantial intensification of agriculture is proposed to free up land for such expansion, a policy of land sparing. Third, areas being protected are increasingly privately owned, and conservation is serving as a powerful form of legitimization of large-scale private landholding. Fourth, in many countries conservation management is being extended beyond formal protected areas in mosaics of public, private and community land. Fifth, the political and …