Jamie Lorimer

Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society. It also challenges the modern science-politics settlement, where natural science speaks for a stable, objective Nature. This paper reviews recent efforts to develop ‘multinatural’ alternatives that provide an environmentalism that need not make recourse to Nature. Focusing on biodiversity conservation, the paper draws together work in the social and natural sciences to present an interdisciplinary biogeography for conservation in the Anthropocene. This approach is developed through an engagement with the critiques of neoliberal natures offered by political ecology.

Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies

There is a growing interest in cultural geography in the potential of moving imagery and moving image methodologies for grasping the more-than-human and non-representational dimensions of life. This paper explores this potential to develop moving image methodologies for witnessing and evoking human-nonhuman interactions. Drawing on recent work in film theory, anthropology and ethology, it develops both a practical methodology and a critical, affirmative vocabulary for unpacking the work done by circulating imagery and engaging with its micropolitical power and promise. This analysis is illustrated through a focus on elephants and images of their behaviours, ecologies and interactions with diverse humans. It outlines how video techniques can be used to witness and make sense of elephant encounters. It then maps and compares four of the many affective logics according to which elephants are evoked in popular moving imagery. It reflects on the techniques and the micropolitics of such evocations, before examining what they offer for new ways of engaging with nonhuman difference. Elephants provide an accessible, popular and telegenic nonhuman case study.

Counting Corncrakes The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census

This paper traces the efforts of a small number of ornithologists and bird surveyors to design and implement a national census for the corncrake (Crex crex), a rare migratory bird, in north-west Scotland. Drawing on concepts and methodologies from the sociology of science and the recent ethological turn in social theory, it follows corncrake scientists as they tune in to the birds ecology and behaviour and devise and distribute a standardized set of methods for a national census. It examines how these methods were implemented in practice in the field and explores the embodied skills and emotions involved in counting corncrakes. Finally, it follows how, as the outcome of the census, the corncrake was framed for the first time as a dynamic population and given voice through a representing assemblage. The paper concludes with some more general observations about the benefits of understanding the field sciences as affective practices and draws attention to the importance of embodied skill, emotion and an ethical sensibility in the generation of scientific representations.

Methodologies for animals’ geographies: cultures, communication and genomics:

The recent renaissance within animal geography has tended to focus on the spatial orderings of animals by humans, rather than on the lived geographies and experiences of animals themselves. We suggest that one reason for this imbalance is methodological – a persistent commitment to human-centred methods somewhat at odds with the more-than-human aspirations of the sub-discipline. In this paper we review and critically assess methodological developments in three areas that we consider to be especially significant for developing animals’ geographies: (i) techniques for tracking the spatialities of animal culture; (ii) scientific and artistic engagements in inter-species communication; and (iii) geographic tools afforded by genetic analyses. In conclusion, we reflect on the promise and some of the challenges to developing these methods within (what is still largely known as) human geography.

Living Roofs and Brownfield Wildlife: Towards a Fluid Biogeography of UK Nature Conservation:

This paper follows the trials and tribulations of a loose alliance of urban conservationists seeking to create and maintain spaces for brownfield wildlife in East London. It focuses, in particular, on the construction of living roofs—an innovative conservation strategy where wildlife habitat is created on top of new and old buildings in the city. The paper identifies three obstacles that have challenged the development of brownfield conservation, which relate to the urban geographies, lively temporalities, and inconspicuous forms of brownfield wildlife and wild-living. These obstacles differ markedly from those of the nonhumans prioritised in mainstream conservation. Brownfield conservationists have developed a novel and fluid model of practice, whose emergence and characteristics can be linked to wider developments in UK nature conservation. This model chimes clearly with new approaches to theorising human-nonhuman interaction that have been developed in nonequilibrium ecology and relational geography. Drawing together these empirical and theoretical innovations, the paper concludes by outlining the parameters of a fluid biogeography of UK wildlife conservation to help understand and guide future conservation practice.

What about the nematodes? Taxonomic partialities in the scope of UK biodiversity conservation

Since their inception in 1980 the concept of biodiversity and the practical techniques of biodiversity conservation have experienced a meteoric rise in popularity as a mode of understanding and governing the environment. This paper draws on concepts from science studies and posthumanist geography to outline a new approach to biodiversity. In contrast to the objective, disembodied and panoptic definition offered in the official documentation, it explores what biodiversity comes to mean in practice in a UK context. It argues that biodiversity must be understood as the discursive and material outcome of a socio-material assemblage of people, practices, technologies and other non-humans. It then applies this understanding to examine the scope of the assemblage that performs UK biodiversity conservation. In so doing it maps a set of taxonomic divisions. Drawing on empirical fieldwork, it examines one particular arena within this assemblage—species surveillance—and identifies the importance of the detectability of a species and taxonomic divisions in resources for accounting for these partialities. In conclusion, it reflects upon the benefits of this new approach for understanding biodiversity and biodiversity conservation.

International conservation volunteering from the UK: what does it contribute?

Increasing numbers of fee-paying volunteers now travel from the UK to work on conservation projects in middle and low income countries. The time and resources they commit have important implications for international conservation practice. This article provides an overview of this sector, comprising data on its size, value and key organizations. I map the scope of volunteer-led conservation in 2007 in terms of the countries, species and habitats prioritized for attention, and identify distinct geographical and taxonomic partialities towards particular taxa, countries and habitats. I outline how conservation priorities are established and reflect on two factors that help account for the identified partialities: the history and politics of international conservation and the cultural preferences of volunteers. In conclusion I argue that volunteering can help international conservation but is not a panacea for comprehensive efforts to protect threatened biodiversity.

An interdisciplinary review of current and future approaches to improving human-predator relations

In a world of shrinking habitats and increasing competition for natural resources, potentially dangerous predators bring the challenges of coexisting with wildlife sharply into focus. Through interdisciplinary collaboration among authors trained in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, we reviewed current approaches to mitigating adverse human-predator encounters and devised a vision for future approaches to understanding and mitigating such encounters. Limitations to current approaches to mitigation include too much focus on negative impacts; oversimplified equating of levels of damage with levels of conflict; and unsuccessful technical fixes resulting from failure to engage locals, address hidden costs, or understand cultural (nonscientific) explanations of the causality of attacks. An emerging interdisciplinary literature suggests that to better frame and successfully mitigate negative human-predator relations conservation professionals need to consider dispensing with conflict as the dominant framework for thinking about human-predator encounters; work out what conflicts are really about (they may be human-human conflicts); unravel the historical contexts of particular conflicts; and explore different cultural ways of thinking about animals. The idea of cosmopolitan natures may help conservation professionals think more clearly about human-predator relations in both local and global context. These new perspectives for future research practice include a recommendation for focused interdisciplinary research and the use of new approaches, including human-animal geography, multispecies ethnography, and approaches from the environmental humanities notably environmental history. Managers should think carefully about how they engage with local cultural beliefs about wildlife, work with all parties to agree on what constitutes good evidence, develop processes and methods to mitigate conflicts, and decide how to monitor and evaluate these. Demand for immediate solutions that benefit both conservation and development favors dispute resolution and technical fixes, which obscures important underlying drivers of conflicts. If these drivers are not considered, well-intentioned efforts focused on human-wildlife conflicts will fail.

Gut Buddies Multispecies Studies and the Microbiome

Recent work in the life sciences presents the human as a superorganism, composed of and kept alive by diverse microbial kin. We learn that this life is changing fast as a result of modern lifestyles, and that missing microbes are causing epidemics of absence. There is a growing interest in restoring components of the microbiome. This paper explores some of the implications of these developments for multispecies studies through a focus on helminth therapy – the selective reintroduction of parasitic worms, as gut buddies, to tackle autoimmune disease. It first traces the visceral vectors, cycles and assemblages through which people are differentially entangled, disentangled and re-entangled with helminths. It then analyses these entanglements with reference to literatures on the science and politics of (auto)immunity. The paper places helminth therapy in the vanguard of new ways of enacting immunity. Scientists writing about helminths are reworking binary, martial models of immunity as the defense of the self to consider immunity as the tolerance, recruitment and creative experimentation with microbial symbionts. Here immunity is enacted in contrasting multispecies assemblages that illustrate the communal and the immunitarian characteristics of contemporary biomedicine. In conclusion the paper reflects on how the probiotic relations of helminth therapy suggest new ways of thinking companionship and hospitality as more-than-, but not post-, human achievements.

On Auks and Awkwardness

Awkward Not upward or downward, backward or forward, but awkward. Awk-wards: a vector. The (now obsolete) word awk means out of the way, strange, even sinister in nature and disposition. As an adverb, awkward suggests an action in the wrong, or at least a tangential direction. It evokes disjuncture, discord and incompatibility. Things have gone awry. As an adjective, awkward describes the unfamiliar, the clumsy and the unskilled. It conveys embarrassment, inconvenience and risk. To be awkward is to be ill at ease, uncomfortable or untoward. Awkward offers a rich, polysemous term through which we might specify and explore creatures and modes of multispecies relations. As adjective and adverb it has at least two important valences for animal studies and the environmental humanities that I will explore in this short commentary. I open with some general observations before proffering another awkward creature and mode of relating. First, to be awkward is to be different and difficult. As the editors of this section make clear, attending to awkwardness draws attention away from the familiar subjects that have tended to preoccupy recent work in animal studies. The concern here is less with organisms that are ‘big-like-us’ and more with those that are ‘smaller than a mouse’ (to borrow the title of a 2014 meeting of the British Animal Studies Network), cryptic and remote. While awkward encounters are no doubt possible across all taxa and spaces, the interest in awkwardness exemplified in this strand of work foregrounds lifeforms that are corporeally, ecologically and socially strange—both in theory and in practice. Insects, fungi and other microbes feature prominently here. As do submarine, subterranean and nocturnal worlds alien to prevalent human geographies. 1 I take these definitions from The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (2014). 2 Franklin Ginn, Uli Biesel and Maan Barua, “Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing,” Environmental Humanities (2014): 113-123. 3 Myra Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 4 See www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk 5 For an illustrative range of examples see Chris Bear and Sally Eden, “Thinking Like a Fish? Engaging with Nonhuman Difference through Recreational Angling,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 336-352; Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Random House, 2010); Astrid