Search

States have long used protected areas to consolidate control over Indigenous Peoples' territories, undermining community-based governance and access to resources. Despite this history, Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly designating their own protected areas to defend ancestral territories and assert self-determination. This paper examines Indigenous conservation politics in the Salween Peace Park in Kawthoolei, an autonomous territory of the Karen (Sino-Tibetan language-speaking peoples living primarily in Burma and along the Thai-Burma border). Local villagers and the Karen National Union envision the park as a grassroots initiative for peace in an area that has suffered decades of armed conflict between the Burmese military and the Karen movement for self-determination. Using the Salween Peace Park as a case study, we engage Indigenous scholarship on politics of recognition, resurgence, and refusal. We explore intersections and tensions between these political strategies, highlighting ways that Indigenous protected areas mobilize different forms of power to advance self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation scientists increasingly recognise the value of Indigenous knowledge in conservation practice. However, studies of Indigenous knowledge and resource management systems have often tended to overlook the role and agency of more-than-human beings and ceremonial protocols in mediating human–environment relationships. This paper presents results from community-based research with Karen communities in the Salween Peace Park, an innovative Indigenous-led conservation initiative in the autonomous Karen territory of Kawthoolei, on the border between Thailand and Burma, or Myanmar. Our findings detail ways in which relations with more-than-human beings, including spirits, constitute environmental governance in Karen communities. These findings compel externally situated conservation biologists to take relational ontologies seriously, allowing local interlocutors' lived experience, knowledge, and theory to challenge culturally bound concepts such as resources, management, and conservation. In order to transform conservation biology through Indigenous perspectives, it is essential to pay attention to the relational world in which many Indigenous Peoples live. Doing so helps support a conservation practice attentive to the interdependence of all life in ways that uphold Indigenous Peoples' rights of self-determination, cultural identity, and social relations with their ancestral lands. We argue that attending to these relations is essential to building community-based conservation collaborations with Indigenous Peoples that are more effective, sustainable, and just. Conservation biologists increasingly recognise the value of Indigenous knowledge and resource management practices for conservation. Drawing on research with Karen communities, we argue that, in order for Indigenous perspectives to truly transform conservation biology, it is essential to pay attention to the relations between humans and more-than-human beings that shape Indigenous stewardship practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers-ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity-to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation. We provide practical guidance on overcoming these barriers to mainstream the social sciences in conservation science, practice, and policy. Broadly, we recommend fostering knowledge on the scope and contributions of the social sciences to conservation, including social scientists from the inception of interdisciplinary research projects, incorporating social science research and insights during all stages of conservation planning and implementation, building social science capacity at all scales in conservation organizations and agencies, and promoting engagement with the social sciences in and through global conservation policy-influencing organizations. Conservation social scientists, too, need to be willing to engage with natural science knowledge and to communicate insights and recommendations clearly. We urge the conservation community to move beyond superficial engagement with the conservation social sciences. A more inclusive and integrative conservation science-one that includes the natural and social sciences-will enable more ecologically effective and socially just conservation. Better collaboration among social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and policy makers will facilitate a renewed and more robust conservation. Mainstreaming the conservation social sciences will facilitate the uptake of the full range of insights and contributions from these fields into conservation policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been claimed that a better understanding of human or social dimensions of environmental issues will improve conservation. The social sciences are one important means through which researchers and practitioners can attain that better understanding. Yet, a lack of awareness of the scope and uncertainty about the purpose of the conservation social sciences impedes the conservation community's effective engagement with the human dimensions. This paper examines the scope and purpose of eighteen subfields of classic, interdisciplinary and applied conservation social sciences and articulates ten distinct contributions that the social sciences can make to understanding and improving conservation. In brief, the conservation social sciences can be valuable to conservation for descriptive, diagnostic, disruptive, reflexive, generative, innovative, or instrumental reasons. This review and supporting materials provides a succinct yet comprehensive reference for conservation scientists and practitioners. We contend that the social sciences can help facilitate conservation policies, actions and outcomes that are more legitimate, salient, robust and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Conservation actions most often occur in peopled seascapes and landscapes. As a result, conservation decisions cannot rely solely on evidence from the natural sciences, but must also be guided by the social sciences, the arts and the humanities. However, we are concerned that too much of the current attention is on research that serves an instrumental purpose, by which we mean that the social sciences are used to justify and promote status quo conservation practices. The reasons for engaging the social sciences, as well as the arts and the humanities, go well beyond making conservation more effective. In this editorial, we briefly reflect on how expanding the types of social science research and the contributions of the arts and the humanities can help to achieve the transformative potential of conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic politics are an important, but under-examined, dynamic in the restructuring of agrarian labour. This paper examines how the discursive construction of ethnic identity has facilitated the particular form of agrarian intensification and labour restructuring under way in the uplands of Thailand. Agricultural intensification, followed by the promotion of 'safe' and then 'organic' production, has relied upon the construction of Hmong farmers as environmentally destructive and in need of development, while Shan labour arriving from Burma are simultaneously constructed as 'illegal migrants' (as opposed to refugees), a social nuisance and hard workers, helping to make them into an available, willing and preferred labour force. We argue that the construction of ethnic identity in these instances enables the agricultural changes under way and, thus, the particularities of agricultural change cannot be understood without careful attention to ethnic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The logic of the market economy increasingly informs the design and the outcomes of conservation in the developing world. This paper uses case studies from Thailand and the Philippines to investigate this changing conservation landscape and argues first that such conservation governance does not abandon but rather rearticulates forms of coercive conservation and second that the particular manifestations of neoliberal conservation are shaped by the national policies, local histories, and livelihoods of recipient communities. The conclusion asserts that market-based conservation governance may constrain as well as support farmer freedom to pursue particular livelihoods, resulting in contradictory outcomes for neoliberal conservation governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluntary resettlement of people from national parks has emerged as a potential solution to long entrenched people-park conflicts. Yet critical examination of its associated policy and practice is rare. After identifying a trend toward voluntary resettlement in policy and practice, this article examines a resettlement project at Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam. An analysis of the agreement and negotiation processes with local communities reveals that genuine efforts and organizational commitments to voluntary resettlement can take on qualities associated with forced relocations. The Cat Tien National Park Conservation Project, supported by a major international conservation organization, operated on a principle of voluntary agreements while also applying international resettlement standards based on the World Bank's safeguard policies for involuntary resettlement. This apparent confusion in policy was further reflected in practice with the safeguard policies perversely reinforcing, rather than alleviating, involuntary aspects of the project. This article recognizes the potential of voluntary resettlement as an equitable conservation tool, but warns against applying it as an inconspicuous solution to the problems generally associated with involuntary resettlement. Distinctions between voluntary and involuntary resettlement are ambiguous at best; resettlement policy and guidelines need to reflect and clarify this ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory mapping has become an indispensable tool in the struggle of indigenous peoples to claim their rights to land and resources. It has also, however, come under criticism for its potential to increase state regulation, replace indigenous conceptions of territory and property, and to create conflict. This paper starts from the premise that the problem is not mapping per se, but the conception of abstract space we allow to frame and guide our representation of indigenous territories, resource use and management. The development of a more effective participatory mapping practice thus requires a critical engagement with the conception of space that participatory mappers are attempting to map. Using research conducted in two Karen communities in Thailand, this paper develops a conception of 'dwelling space' meant to better capture the complex spatiality of indigenous resource use and serve as a potential alternative to abstract space. I conclude by arguing for a renewed practice of community-based mapping that takes seriously the spatial complexity of indigenous territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest resource management in Thailand bears the mark of its historical position on the margins of colonial power and its present position in a biodiversity hotspot. During the colonial era, British forestry in Burma and India had a fundamental influence on the knowledge and techniques used in Thai forest management. More recently, international conservation agendas and organisations have influenced the ways in which the Thai government regulates the forest within its boundaries. The treatment of forests as a national and international resource, defined in interaction with colonial neighbours and global partners, has resulted in legal constructs, spatially simplistic conservation mechanisms and a conception of nature ill-suited to managing forests as a local resource. This paper investigates the manifestation of Thailand's historical legacy in local park-people conflicts by drawing on research conducted in a region where the government is establishing a national park. It finds that the continued use of laws, tools and concepts derived from colonial and global influences undermines the forestry department's ability to address the contemporary challenge of managing forests as a local, as well as a national/global, commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the advancing reconciliation in the Canadian boreal forest. Topics discussed include information on the protection and conservation of the boreal forest ecology; discussions on the impacts of the human residence and land use on the biodiversity of the forest; and the information on the vulnerability to climate change and expanding industrial activity.

Hypersaline environments pose major challenges to their microbial residents. Microorganisms have to cope with increased osmotic pressure and low water activity and therefore require specific adaptation mechanisms. Although mechanisms have already been thoroughly investigated in the green alga Dunaliella salina and some halophilic yeasts, strategies for osmoadaptation in other protistan groups (especially heterotrophs) are neither as well known nor as deeply investigated as for their prokaryotic counterpart. This is not only due to the recent awareness of the high protistan diversity and ecological relevance in hypersaline systems, but also due to methodological shortcomings. We provide the first experimental study on haloadaptation in heterotrophic microeukaryotes, using the halophilic ciliate Schmidingerothrix salinarum as a model organism. We established three approaches to investigate fundamental adaptation strategies known from prokaryotes. First, hydrogen-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) spectroscopy was used for the detection, identification, and quantification of intracellular compatible solutes. Second, ion-imaging with cation-specific fluorescent dyes was employed to analyze changes in the relative ion concentrations in intact cells. Third, the effect of salt concentrations on the catalytic performance of S. salinarum malate dehydrogenase (MDH) and isocitrate dehydrogenase (ICDH) was determined. 1H-NMR spectroscopy identified glycine betaine (GB) and ectoine (Ect) as the main compatible solutes in S. salinarum. Moreover, a significant positive correlation of intracellular GB and Ect concentrations and external salinity was observed. The addition of exogenous GB, Ect, and choline (Ch) stimulated the cell growth notably, indicating that S. salinarum accumulates the solutes from the external medium. Addition of external 13C2-Ch resulted in conversion to 13C2-GB, indicating biosynthesis of GB from Ch. An increase of external salinity up to 21% did not result in an increase in cytoplasmic sodium concentration in S. salinarum. This, together with the decrease in the catalytic activities of MDH and ICDH at high salt concentration, demonstrates that S. salinarum employs the salt-out strategy for haloadaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the significance of spatial organization of traditional environmental knowledge, based on a case study of conservation conflicts in the inhabited forest of Northern Thailand. The study examines the links between knowledge and space across scale to contribute to the task of integrating the knowledge used in traditional environmental management. This case shows that the management of tropical forests to meet the needs of both local communities and the global commons requires cooperation across scale between national forestry departments and local communities. It is argued that documenting the spatial organization of environmental practices and management institutions will contribute to the understanding not only of traditional and scientific management institutions but also of the challenges to and possibilities for their integration.

Keywords: wilderness; conservation; decolonization; Indigenous peoples; Parks Canada; milieu sauvage; décolonisation; Autochtones; Parcs Canada EN wilderness conservation decolonization Indigenous peoples Parks Canada FR milieu sauvage décolonisation Autochtones Parcs Canada 232 249 18 06/04/20 20200601 NES 200601 Introduction: Canada's "wilderness" ethic For better or worse, wilderness has long been emblematic of the Canadian national imaginary (Campbell [13]; Erickson [20]). Canada's assumed legitimacy and authority is based on the racist assumption that Indigenous peoples were too primitive to hold sovereign authority over their lands upon contact with European colonizers (Coulthard [17]). And so when Chief Justice Thomas Berger, the lawyer representing conservation groups and First Nations against the Yukon Government in the Supreme Court hearings, stated that the Peel Watershed "is a wilderness that is sacred to the First Nations" (Berger [4]), the comment is taken in stride, revealing the complex, contentious, and enduring place of the wilderness ethic in the Peel, in Yukon, and in Canadian conservation. Conclusion Although wilderness-thinking continues to structure conservation in Canada in certain problematic ways, the emerging Indigenous-led conservation movement gives us hope for a post-wilderness conservation practice. By critically analyzing the state of wilderness-thinking in present-day conservation in Canada, we are able to better outline the floor for a post-wilderness conservation practice, and hopefully inspire conservationists and critical scholars alike to continue pushing the height of the ceiling. [Extracted from the article]

Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geography in order to investigate socio-ecological relations, while emphasizing the place-specific materiality of these relations. This progress report examines how geographers have put the framework into scholarly practice. The conceptual approach has enabled researchers to: 1) articulate the territoriality and materiality of networks as assemblages, which may be simultaneously rooted and mobile; 2) discern diverse types of power that flow through network connections; and 3) conduct analyses that unearth multiply-situated knowledges within networks. Challenges emerge as we seek to integrate the approach more fully with disciplinary traditions, including organizing complex relationships into bounded scholarly formats; choosing which aspects of the network are most salient to analyze; and illustrating networks for effective communication. We describe the ways in which rooted networks can be used as a tool for action, as a pedagogical guide, and to strengthen collective capacity to imagine and negotiate alternative futures based on 'seeing multiple.' Finally, we call for geographers and other scholars, researchers and activists to build upon a rooted networks framework as a tool for design, analysis, understanding and communication in the search for more socially just and ecologically viable futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating knowledge from across the natural and social sciences is necessary to effectively address societal tradeoffs between human use of biological diversity and its preservation. Collaborative processes can change the ways decision makers think about scientific evidence, enhance levels of mutual trust and credibility, and advance the conservation policy discourse. Canada has responsibility for a large fraction of some major ecosystems, such as boreal forests, Arctic tundra, wetlands, and temperate and Arctic oceans. Stressors to biological diversity within these ecosystems arise from activities of the country's resource-based economy, as well as external drivers of environmental change. Effective management is complicated by incongruence between ecological and political boundaries and conflicting perspectives on social and economic goals. Many knowledge gaps about stressors and their management might be reduced through targeted, timely research. We identify 40 questions that, if addressed or answered, would advance research that has a high probability of supporting development of effective policies and management strategies for species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in Canada. A total of 396 candidate questions drawn from natural and social science disciplines were contributed by individuals with diverse organizational affiliations. These were collaboratively winnowed to 40 by our team of collaborators. The questions emphasize understanding ecosystems, the effects and mitigation of climate change, coordinating governance and management efforts across multiple jurisdictions, and examining relations between conservation policy and the social and economic well-being of Aboriginal peoples. The questions we identified provide potential links between evidence from the conservation sciences and formulation of policies for conservation and resource management. Our collaborative process of communication and engagement between scientists and decision makers for generating and prioritizing research questions at a national level could be a model for similar efforts beyond Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several Archstone Foundation funded projects developed and implemented training curricula on elder abuse for mandated reporters such as dentists, adult protective services workers, paramedics, and coroner investigators. Common education and training issues emerged, including the need to provide basic content on normal aging and the need for creating standardized trainings. Strategies include integrating elder abuse and neglect content into existing courses, building relationships with stakeholders, and customizing content and delivery to student needs and preferences. Projects developed relevant, practice-based content, decided on curriculum delivery methods, engaged learners, and provided feedback to them. A main outcome is the permanent institution of elder abuse content in training curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecologists and conservation biologists conducting long-term research programs in the tropics must confront serious ethical challenges that revolve around economic inequalities, cultural differences, supporting the local communities as much as possible, and sharing the knowledge produced by the research. In this collective article, researchers share their experiences and perspectives in dealing with the ethical issues that arise during research activities and cannot be ignored. • Long-term research programs in the tropics confront ethical challenges revolving around economic inequalities and cultural differences. • In 9 short essays, experienced researchers offer perspectives on ethical questions that arise during research activities. • Three principal responsibilities of researchers working in another country and culture are • to understand cultural differences and adapt to them as much as possible, • to be sure the research project brings added value to the local community, • to share the resulting information and knowledge with local people, students, the scientific community, and government agencies. • Locations range across the global tropics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]