|
McInturff, Alex, Clare EB Cannon, Peter S Alagona, David N Pellow. "Meeting at the crossroads: An environmental justice framework for large carnivore reintroductions and recoveries." Elementa.
|
Abstract
|
December 2021
|
As global environmental changes continue to accelerate, research and practice in the field of <i>conservation biology</i> 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 and practices from <i>environmental justice</i> to detail the many forms of justice at stake in this practice. 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 an environmental harm, as a disruptor of understanding other forms of justice, and as a link between logics of oppression. Our framework offers a comprehensive resource to work through in planning and implementing a large carnivore reintroduction and recovery, and we conclude by describing the challenges and opportunities for further aligning conservation and environmental justice in research and practice.
|
|
Martinez, Deniss, Clare Cannon, Alex McInturff, Peter Alagona, David Pellow. "Back to the Future: Indigenous Relationality, Kincentricity and the North American Model of Wildlife Management." Environmental Science and Policy. 2023.
|
Abstract
|
December 2023
|
For more than a century, wildlife conservation in the United States has been built on the notion that nonhuman animal populations are resources to be regulated by law and managed efficiently, according to the best available science and in the public trust. This approach, known as the North American Model of Wildlife Management, has proved effective by many metrics, but it has come under increasing criticism for excluding diverse viewpoints that have the potential to advance both conservation and environmental justice goals. How might the greater inclusion of Indigenous worldviews and Indigenous Studies concepts, such as radical relationality and kincentricity , improve traditional wildlife management? In this paper, we review three case studies of tribal wildlife stewardship programs in California—the Maidu Summit Consortium’s beaver restoration project, the Karuk Tribe’s elk management program, and the Yurok Tribe’s condor recovery effort—that illuminate generative connections among ecological restoration, Indigenous cultural practices, community wellbeing, and environmental justice. Radical relationality and kincentricity offer enormous potential for informing stewardship and recovery efforts that produce more just outcomes for both people and wildlife.
|
|
Kurz, David J., Arthur D. Middleton, Melissa S. Chapman, Bruce R. Huber, Alex McInturff, Jeremy Sorgen, Kyle S. Van Houtan, Christine E. Wilkinson, Lauren Withey, and Justin S. Brashares. "Including Rural America in academic conservation science." Accepted, Frontiers in Conservation Science.
|
Abstract
|
August 2023
|
Conservation has made great strides by embracing DEIJ efforts, but these efforts can improve the science and practice of conservation further by attending to rural populations. Here we offer strategies for strengthening inclusion of rural Americans in conservation science and practice. We suggest three pathways toward this goal: (i) emphasize knowledge co - production and partnerships that resonate with rural lifestyles and values; (ii) recruit and train rural students in conservation science degree programs; and (iii) reshape academic advancement criteria to promote rural engagement. We suggest that investments in academic - rural collaboration hold potential to build knowledge, trust, inclusion, and justice in the United States.
|
|
Cannon, C.E., McInturff, A., Alagona, P. and Pellow, D., 2023. Wild Urban Injustice: A Critical POET Model to Advance Environmental Justice. Environmental Justice.
|
Abstract
|
February 2023
|
<b><i>Background:</i></b> People and wildlife can both be the subjects of environmental injustice. Although their experiences are clearly not the same, shared logics of oppression often impose harms through the environment on vulnerable and marginalized people and free-living nonhuman animals. Critical environmental justice provides a matrix for analyzing and addressing arrangements of power across categories of difference, whereas human ecology approaches offer frameworks for analyzing interactions across human and environmental systems in urban contexts. We develop a new analytical model—critical population, organization, environment, technology (POET)—to strengthen approaches to studying human–environmental problems by integrating the four pillars of critical environmental justice with the four dimensions of the human ecology POET model.<br><b><i>Methods:</i></b> This article uses a case study approach of coyotes living in urban areas to demonstrate one use of the critical POET model to analyze linkages between injustices across humans, wildlife, and the environment.<br><b><i>Results:</i></b> Urbanization as a core spatial logic—through the twin forces of institutional racism and speciesism—has perpetrated harms against people of color and coyotes.<br><b><i>Discussion:</i></b> Identifying shared logics of oppression is a key step toward the realization of a robust multispecies approach to environmental justice.<br><b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> The critical POET model provides a matrix for analyzing interactions and relationships that produce and maintain social and environmental injustices for historically and contemporarily marginalized groups, both human and nonhuman.
|
