After the grizzly Alagona, Peter S
2013., 20130528, 2013, 2013-05-28
eBook
Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows ...how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.
Geographers and environmental scientists use conceptual models to understand ecological processes and support management decisions. Most of these models are based on short-term experiments and field ...observations, which might not account for longer term forces that shape ecosystems over decades to centuries. How can scholars use historical sources and methods to improve conceptual models of ecological change? In this article, we present the results of a study that employed methods from environmental history and historical geography to assess three conceptual models that researchers have used to study ecological changes on California's hardwood rangelands: the succession and climax, state and transition, and cyclical replacement models. The succession and climax model fared poorly at all spatial scales. The historical record contained substantial evidence to support the predictions of the state and transition model at the small spatial scale of the plot or field (0.1-100 ha) and the very large spatial scale of the hardwood rangeland bioregion (4 million ha). The cyclical replacement model performed well at the intermediate scale of the landscape or typical cattle ranch (100-10,000 ha). Historical data and methods hold considerable untapped potential for assessing, building on, and improving conceptual models of ecological change in geography and the environmental sciences.
Species Complex Alagona, Peter S.
Isis,
12/2016, Volume:
107, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
How does the classification of biological organisms shape efforts to conserve them? This essay addresses this key question through the scientific, administrative, and legal histories of steelhead and ...rainbow trout. Members of the diverse salmon family, these two fish have different life histories and physical appearances, but since the 1930s scientists have considered them the same species. Over the past 150 years, however, their histories diverged. Today, rainbow trout are bred by the millions in hatcheries and are among the world’s most common and widespread fish, while steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered all along the West Coast of the United States. Their remarkable story shows that conservation is not merely a political struggle over things that exist in nature; it is a perennial competition to prove the existence and define the very nature of those things that are the focus of such struggles. Biological taxonomy and classification are central to these debates, as they are to environmental history and the history of science more generally.
Large carnivores (order Carnivora) are among the world's most threatened mammals due to a confluence of ecological and social forces that have unfolded over centuries. Combining specimens from ...natural history collections with documents from archival records, we reconstructed the factors surrounding the extinction of the California grizzly bear (
), a once-abundant brown bear subspecies last seen in 1924. Historical documents portrayed California grizzlies as massive hypercarnivores that endangered public safety. Yet, morphological measurements on skulls and teeth generate smaller body size estimates in alignment with extant North American grizzly populations (approx. 200 kg). Stable isotope analysis (
C,
N) of pelts and bones (
= 57) revealed that grizzlies derived less than 10% of their nutrition from terrestrial animal sources and were therefore largely herbivorous for millennia prior to the first European arrival in this region in 1542. Later colonial land uses, beginning in 1769 with the Mission era, led grizzlies to moderately increase animal protein consumption (up to 26% of diet), but grizzlies still consumed far less livestock than otherwise claimed by contemporary accounts. We show how human activities can provoke short-term behavioural shifts, such as heightened levels of carnivory, that in turn can lead to exaggerated predation narratives and incentivize persecution, triggering rapid loss of an otherwise widespread and ecologically flexible animal.
•We interrogate conceptualisations of transformation in biodiversity conservation.•Many proposals do not consider power, politics, justice or alternative knowledge.•We thus highlight the key role of ...critical social science in transformative change.•The CONVIVA project politicises and pluralises biodiversity conservation debates.•CONVIVA also explores transformative alternatives to dominant conservation models.
Multiple proposals for transforming biodiversity conservation have been put forward, yet critical exploration of how transformative change is conceptualised in this context is lacking. Drawing on transformations to sustainability scholarship, we review recent proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, considering the suggested goals and means of transformation. We outline the crucial role for critical social scientific inquiry in transformative change by highlighting two core contributions. First, critical social science is an analytical device that politicises and pluralises debates and second, it can help facililitate the identification of transformative alternatives. We then show how such a critical social science approach is operationalised within the CONVIVA (Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Anthropocene) project to pursue transformative change in biodiversity conservation.
► It is impossible to ‘Leave No Trace’ even when following the program’s principles. ► LNT may reduce local impacts by displacing them to distant locations. ► LNT obscures connections between outdoor ...products and their production impacts. ► Contradictions supported by public–private alliances and conservation enclosures. ► Also supported by nearsighted environmental citizenship and ethical consumerism.
Leave No Trace (LNT) is a United States government educational program guiding outdoor recreationist behavior on public lands. The program consists of seven principles imploring outdoor enthusiasts to “enjoy the outdoors responsibly.” This essay employs a political ecology framework, comprised by critical consumption research and political economic analysis, to engage the LNT program across temporal and spatial scales. We illustrate, first, the impossibility of ’leaving no trace’ even when adhering to the program’s principles. Second, we describe how LNT minimizes local environmental impacts by displacing them to distant locations. Third, we illustrate how LNT obscures connections between the uses of outdoor products and their production and disposal impacts. Along with challenging notions of responsible recreation and ethical consumerism, a close examination of Leave No Trace reveals four mechanisms that produce and maintain program contradictions: the development of private-nonprofit alliances; the indirect enclosure of public conservation areas; the perpetuation of truncated notions of environmental citizenship; and the cultivation of ethical consumer subjects that shop at retail outlets like Recreation Equipment Incorporated (REI).
Assisting adaptation in a changing world Webster, Michael M.; Twohey, Becky; Alagona, Peter S. ...
Frontiers in environmental science,
09/2023, Volume:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Today, all ecosystems are undergoing environmental change due to human activity, and in many cases the rate of change is accelerating due to climate change. Consequently, conservation programs are ...increasingly focused on the response of organisms, populations, and ecosystems to novel conditions. In parallel, the field of conservation biology is developing and deploying new tools to assist adaptation, which we define as aiming to increase the probability that organisms, populations, and ecosystems successfully adapt to ongoing change in biotic and abiotic conditions. Practitioners are aiming to assist a suite of adaptive processes, including acclimatization, range shifts, and evolution, at the individual and population level, while influencing the aggregate of these responses to assist ecosystem reorganization. The practice of assisting adaptation holds promise for environmental conservation, but effective policy and implementation will require thoughtful consideration of potential social and biological benefits and risks.
Lessons for conservation from beneath the pavement Mychajliw, Alexis M.; Ellwood, Elizabeth R.; Alagona, Peter S. ...
Conservation biology,
December 2022, 2022-12-00, 20221201, Volume:
36, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Species reintroductions involve considerable uncertainty, especially in highly altered landscapes. Historical, geographic, and taxonomic analogies can help reduce this uncertainty by enabling ...conservationists to better assess habitat suitability in proposed reintroduction sites. We illustrate this approach using the example of the California grizzly, an iconic species proposed for reintroduction.
Meeting at the crossroads McInturff, Alex; Cannon Clare E B; Alagona Peter S ...
Elementa (Washington, D.C.),
12/2021, Volume:
9, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As global environmental changes continue to accelerate, research and practice in the field of conservation biology may be essential to help forestall precipitous declines in the earth’s ability to ...sustain a diversity of life. However, many conservation programs have faced scrutiny for the social injustices they create, especially within the paradigm of demarcating protected lands. Currently, a new conservation paradigm emphasizing landscapes shared by people and wildlife is emerging, and with it, an opportunity to ensure that justice for both human and beyond-human groups is given consideration. Here, we examine a practice emblematic of this new conservation paradigm, the reintroduction and recovery of large carnivore species, and draw from theories in environmental justice to detail the many forms of justice at stake in these efforts. Our analysis shows that a pluralistic application of justice is required to ensure that new conservation practices do not produce and reproduce injustices for people. In addition, we show that the success of these emerging programs in meeting their conservation goals in fact depends on meaningfully addressing a range of justice concerns. By developing this framework, we also identify domains in which environmental justice scholarship can expand its scope. To this end, we introduce the novel concept of affective environmental justice, which describes the complex role of emotions as environmental harms, as disruptors of understanding other forms of justice, and as links between logics of oppression. Our framework offers a comprehensive resource to work through in planning and implementing large carnivore reintroduction and recovery programs, and we conclude by describing the challenges and opportunities for further aligning conservation and environmental justice in research and practice.
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