This article contends that environmental organisations vary in type, scale and purpose in ways that help stewards self-sort into the opportunities that align with their individual motivations and environmental concerns. To explore these potential links between personal motivations and environmental organisational attributes, we rely on descriptive and inferential statistics from surveys of two partner environmental organisations: one local scale community based-organisation and one a broader scale environmental non-profit organisation, both located in Central Texas, USA. These partners were selected based on (...) their compatible pro-environmental missions but disparate spatial scales of operation. The survey results (n=377) revealed meaningful between-organisation differences in volunteer environmental stewards, which raise the possibility of a ‘First Law of Environmental Stewardship’ whereby all stewards are related (by their values), but stewards in the same organisation are more related than stewards in different organisations. These findings expose some of the nuances of environmental volunteerism by highlighting connections between personal motivations, geographic scale, and organisation type. (shrink)

In this paper, I (1) offer a general introduction of rewilding and (2) situate the concept in environmental philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I work from definitions and typologies of rewilding that have been put forth in the academic literature. To these, I add secondary notions of rewilding from outside the scientific literature that are pertinent to the meanings and motivations of rewilding beyond its use in a scientific context. I defend the continued use of rewilding as (...) a single term, despite its seemingly disparate usages, and I advance a clustered concept of eight overlapping characteristics as a way to conceptualise these. I argue that this breadth helps in understanding the wider interest in rewilding as an emerging environmental phenomenon. In the paper's second part, I turn to three key issues in environmental philosophy in order to connect rewilding with the historic themes of: (1) the exclusion of humans from wild or wilderness places, (2) the ontological purity of wilderness areas through their non-human origins and history, and (3) cultural landscapes and notions of place. I suggest that rewilding carries on some of the main themes of the wilderness debate, but considering rewilding broadly allows tensions and novel questions to manifest that are important to how rewilding should be discussed and understood going forward. (shrink)

The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are categorised as ‘native’ or ‘invasive’, belonging or not belonging. In far north Queensland, Australia, the Cape York region is a complex mixture of land tenures, including pastoral leases, National Parks and Aboriginal land, and overlapping management agreements. Weed control comprises much of the work that land managers in Cape York do. However, different land managers target different introduced species for control, and the ways in which (...) certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicate how land managers understand and seek to order landscapes. Through investigating the various positions that introduced species occupy, I will explore how Cape York emerges as a ‘hybrid landscape’ that is produced in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways, and is rife with ‘feral dynamics’. (shrink)

Rewilding is an increasingly popular strategy in landscape management, yet it is also controversial, especially when applied in culturally 'layered' landscapes. In this paper I examine what is morally at stake in debates between proponents of rewilding and those that see traditional cultural landscapes as worthy of protection. I will argue that rewilding should not only be understood as a conservation practice, but that we also need to understand its hermeneutic aspect. Rewilding implies a radical non-anthropocentric normative reinterpretation of landscape (...) and human history that calls for a critical re-examination of the cultural identities that are based on that history. (shrink)

Wild places are rich with meaning. This runs contrary to accounts of vast undeveloped regions like the Arctic as being devoid of meaning (and thus open for—or even in need of—resource exploitation) and to accounts that dismiss conceptualizations of the Arctic as containing substantial wilderness landscapes as an invalid colonial concept. There is rather an unappreciated commonality between Indigenous conceptions of place and conceptualizations of wilderness: both recognize undeveloped landscapes as substantial founts of meaning that are not the product of (...) their own projections. Their senses of these meanings are not equivalent but overlap in important respects and are shared by many cultures across the globe, thus challenging premises of relativism and of meaning as merely locally produced. Furthermore, meaning is a topic often overlooked or marginalized in the context of climate change adaptation and nature preservation. The Arctic is considered as a specific case study to illustrate these points as it is one of the world's largest undeveloped areas and is particularly affected by climate change. The Arctic is rich with meaning for the Inuit and other residents who depend on it for sustenance. It also contains some of the most extensive and least developed or otherwise impacted and manipulated landscapes on the planet—a relatively small portion of which is protected as parks and wilderness, though substantial in comparison to temperate or tropical regions. Climate change threatens not only the traditional subsistence livelihoods of Arctic residents, but also the emergent meanings that inhere in these landscapes. Simultaneously, the meaning and value of protected Arctic landscapes, particularly those designated as wilderness, is also under duress. Climate change is impacting the Arctic more than many other areas, posing a threat to its meanings as a home and as a wilderness. Acknowledging the centrality of meaning, while rejecting the “received idea” inherited from constructivist thought that meaning is overlaid on a passive landscape open for—or even in need of—human created meanings, can lead to new approaches to nature preservation and to human adaptation in the era of climate change. (shrink)

Review of the book Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot, Penguin Books, London 2014.

Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about how we should conduct conservation activities in a world of human-altered biophysical conditions. The ‘novel ecosystems’ perspective has emerged as a way to meet this challenge. Yet its focus on accepting ‘new natures’ as the ‘new normal’ has drawn much criticism from those wedded to conventional forms of conservation, such as ‘ecological restoration’. This paper: 1) provides a much needed review of this dispute; 2) formulates and deploys an original analytical framework, which draws (...) on Thomas Kuhn's ‘theoretical history’ of science and Charles Taylor's moral philosophy to extricate the entangled moral and material ontologies of nature which conflate facts with values in the world-building activities of disputants; and 3) identifies and examines the processes underlying these world-building activities. The paper closes by offering an initial suggestion on how to explore options for resolving this highly contentious debate. (shrink)