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Drawing on the concept of technological mediation, this article examines the spatial politics of observation technologies and associated practices that have been used to monitor the movement of migratory wildebeests in the Serengeti from the 1950s until the 2000s. It shows that key technologies, and the types of research collaborations they sustained, mediated notably different normative ideas about human–wildlife interaction and the sharing of space in and around protected areas. During the 1950s and 1960s, observations of animal migration were conducted by airplane. Direct observation was characterized by the study of movement of migratory ungulates, such as the wildebeest, and humans across space in real time. Aerial observations depended on a close cooperation between scientists and park authorities, and on the knowledge and observational skills of game wardens. The experience of the movement of animals and people in real time allowed, to some degree, for experimentation with forms of human land-use. During the 1970s, many small-scale and short-term projects shifted the research focus toward data recording by camera. Aerial photographs created supposedly complete spatial overviews of inhabitation, which supported interpretations of spatial conflicts between humans occupying the park’s surrounding areas and animal populations inside the park. From the 1980s onward, computer technology allowed for long-term calculations of past and future trends in population densities of individual species. The understanding of the wildebeest as a keystone species and the Serengeti as a baseline ecosystem turned communities of local pastoralists and agriculturalists into a future threat. As observation technologies are here to stay, it remains important to pay attention to technologies’ potential roles in creating additional distances between researchers and research subjects. Historical insights, such as the ones presented in this article, can help reflect on how various forms of remote sensing may mediate normative views on human–wildlife interactions and consequentially affect local livelihoods.

During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.

This article engages with notions of conservation in the Anthropocene from a history-of-science perspective. It does so by looking at an iconic case of infrastructure development that since the 1970s continues to cause controversies amongst wildlife experts: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). I examine how, from the 1970s onwards, the TAPS functioned as an experimental device for ecologists to test the adaptability of migratory caribou to changed environments and their dependency on unaltered ranges. Based on archival research, published reports and interviews, I show that arguments about animal learning, despite assigning a more active role to caribou in the conservation process, did not result in more inclusive forms of development that respected ecological processes and the various stakes of the caribou. In fact, a focus on caribou crossings as an easily observable, yet sole, indicator of the pipeline's impact resulted in a simplified representation of environmental relationships, that was used by the oil industry to argue for additional extraction projects. Arguments based on the material interdependencies of caribou with their environment, though seemingly similar to traditional arguments about range preservation, emerged as part of conservationists’ attempts to account for the ecological stakes of caribou, other animals and people.

Long-term evaluations of population numbers and the movement of migrating herds are regarded as essential to devising effective conservation strategies. Since the late 1950s, observation from the air has played an important role in monitoring migration in large protected areas with difficult terrain, such as the Serengeti National Park. The introduction of light airplanes, such as Cessnas and Piper Super Cubs, into zoological fieldwork supported new ideas about land use by colonial game wardens and visiting researchers that dominated until the introduction of cheap cameras and, later, remote sensing by satellite.

This article looks at the International Biological Program (IBP) as the predecessor of UNESCO’s well-known and highly successful Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB). It argues that international conservation efforts of the 1970s, such as the MAB, must in fact be understood as a compound of two opposing attempts to reform international conservation in the 1960s. The scientific framework of the MAB has its origins in disputes between high-level conservationists affiliated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) about what the IBP meant for the future of conservation. Their respective visions entailed different ecological philosophies as much as diverging sets of political ideologies regarding the global implementation of conservation. Within the IBP’s Conservation Section, one group propagated a universal systems approach to conservation with a centralized, technocratic management of nature and society by an elite group of independent scientific experts. Within IUCN, a second group based their notion of environmental expert roles on a more descriptive and local ecology of resource mapping as practiced by UNESCO. When the IBP came to an end in 1974, both groups’ ecological philosophies played into the scientific framework underlying the MAB’s World Network or Biosphere Reserves. The article argues that it is impossible to understand the course of conservation within the MAB without studying the dynamics and discourses between the two underlying expert groups and their respective visions for reforming conservation.

During the 1960s and 1970s, widespread environmental concern created new demands for environmental expertise in intergovernmental organizations. This dissertation unravels the interlacing of science and politics in controversies on universal environmental guidelines, the political authority of scientific experts, and the social value of nature. It reveals how despite their great ambitions, their strong scientific background, and their inclusion of socially relevant themes, long-established ecologists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) struggled to make conservation a central part of international environmental politics. Insisting on the all-encompassing relevance of ecosystem ecology, their claims for environmental expertise bore the air of centralized, technocratic elitism that seemed irreconcilable with post-colonial sociopolitical reforms.

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of a conservation movement that presented itself as 'international' and 'science-based'. This article analyses the changing transnational networks of experts mobilised by this movement. It does so by studying the participant lists of 21 influential international conservation conferences held between 1913 and 1990. On the basis of a database we were able to trace changes in the national background, disciplinary allegiance and gender balance of conference attendants. Furthermore, we singled out a so-called 'congress elite' of often returning participants, whose background we analyse more in depth. The overall composition of the congress network as well as that of its elite, we show, changed only through a slow and laborious process. This process accounts for both the continuity in the sensibilities of international conservation experts and the gradual changes in their approach.