Maan Barua

Mobilizing metaphors: the popular use of keystone, flagship and umbrella species concepts

Misrepresentation of terminology is a major impediment for attempts at enhancing public conservation literacy. Despite being critically important for improving conservation practice, there have been few systematic analyses of the popular use of conservation terminology. This paper draws from science communication studies and metaphor analysis, to examine how keystone, flagship and umbrella species concepts are used and represented in non-academic contexts. 557 news articles containing these terms were systematically analyzed. Mammals featured in 60% of articles on keystones, 55% on flagships and 63% on umbrella species. Number of articles explaining the terms keystone (35%) and flagship (31%) was low, and keystones were the most misrepresented term. Keystones were metaphorically linked with balance, flagships with representation and umbrella species with protection. These metaphors influenced public interpretation of scientific terminology, oriented actions towards select species, and led to a valuation of such actions. Together, the findings highlight three important aspects of popular use of conservation terminology: (1) communication is largely biased towards mammals, (2) everyday language plays a vital role in the interpretation of concepts, and (3) metaphors influence peoples’ actions and understanding. Conservation biologists need to engage with issues of language if public conservation literacy is to be improved. Further evaluations of concepts with high public and policy relevance, systematic identification of communication shortfalls, and linguistic assessments prior to promoting new terms are potential ways of achieving this.

Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing

Giant isopods are one of the star attractions in the Toba Aquarium, Japan. Under normal circumstances these crustaceans live at depth on the cold, dark ocean floor, scavenging flesh from dead fish and whales. Their alien appearance, as well as the strangeness of their lives, instills a combination of fascination, fear, and disgust in the aquarium visitor. In 2007, one specimen—29 centimetres long and weighing just over a kilogram—was plucked from waters off the Mexican coast and sent to the aquarium. He was named Giant Isopod No.1. No.1 refused to eat for the first year at the aquarium. In 2008 he took two small bites of fish, and again in 2009, but stopped eating completely thereafter. For five years he refused all food, and every attempt to coax the creature into eating failed. Then, one morning his caretaker, Takeya Moritaki, found Giant Isopod No.1 lying listless on the bottom of its tank. By 5pm No. 1 was dead. No.1’s captivity and death captures the themes addressed by this special section: the awkwardness of being together in multispecies entanglements; the differential vulnerability that both precedes and is reshaped by being drawn together; the way killing and death circulate alongside care and life. This special section aims to enrich our understanding of the ethics of living with nonhuman others. We are interested in creatures that bite, or sting, or—like giant isopods—fascinate but repulse us, and in creatures that must die so that others may live: awkward creatures, in other words, which tend not to fit off-the-shelf ethics. 1 Toba Aquarium, “ダイオウグソクムシについてのお知らせ” (News about the Giant Isopod). Accessed 29 April 2014, http://www.aquarium.co.jp/topics/index.php?id=250. 2 Nikkei Inc., “絶食6年目、ダイオウグソクムシ死ぬ 鳥羽水族館” (After Six Years of Fasting, a Giant Isopod Died: Toba Aquarium). Accessed 29 April 2014, http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFK1404F_U4A210C1000000.

Bio-geo-graphy: : Landscape, dwelling, and the political ecology of human-elephant relations

The relation between the bio and the geo has been amongst geographys most enduring concerns. This paper contributes to ongoing attempts in human geography to politicise the dynamics and distribution of life. Drawing upon postcolonial environmental history, animal ecology, and more-than-human geography, the paper examines how humans and elephants cohabit with and against the grain of cartographic design. Through fieldwork in northeast India, it develops a ‘dwelt political ecology’ that reanimates landscape as a dwelt achievement whilst remaining sensitive to postcolonial histories and subaltern concerns. The paper conceptualises and deploys a methodology of ‘tracking’ through which archival material, elephant ecology, and voices of the marginalised can be integrated and mapped. It concludes by discussing the implications of this work for fostering new conversations between more-than-human geography and subaltern political ecology.

The Elephant Vanishes: Impact of human-elephant conflict on people's wellbeing

Human-wildlife conflicts impact upon the wellbeing of marginalised people, worldwide. Although tangible losses from such conflicts are well documented, hidden health consequences remain under-researched. Based on preliminary clinical ethnographic inquiries and sustained fieldwork in Assam, India, this paper documents mental health antecedents and consequences including severe untreated psychiatric morbidity and substance abuse. The case studies presented make visible the hidden mental health dimensions of human-elephant conflict. The paper illustrates how health impacts of conflicts penetrate far deeper than immediate physical threat from elephants, worsens pre-existing mental illness of marginalised people, and leads to newer psychiatric and social pathologies. These conflicts are enacted and perpetuated in institutional spaces of inequality. The authors argue that both wildlife conservation and community mental health disciplines would be enhanced by coordinated intervention. The paper concludes by generating questions that are fundamental for a new interdisciplinary paradigm that bridges ecology and the clinic.

Defining flagship uses is critical for flagship selection: a critique of the IUCN climate change flagship fleet.

At the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposed ten additional species to “share the polar bear’s burden” and “illustrate” global effects of climate change (IUCN 2009). Images of polar bears in melting ice have become synonymous with environmentalist climate campaigns (Stirling and Derocher 2007). The IUCN proposal adopts the logic that if one flagship species for global climate change can apparently influence public opinion, a whole fleet of flagships would have an even greater effect. The new IUCN climate change flagship fleet includes staghorn corals, the ringed seal, the leatherback turtle, the emperor penguin, the quiver tree, clownfish, the arctic fox, salmon, the koala, and the beluga whale (IUCN 2009). The perceived value of flagship species, or “popular charismatic species that serve as symbols and rallying points to stimulate conservation awareness and action” (Heywood 1995), is demonstrated by the regular promotion of new examples. In addition to IUCN’s climate flagships, recent proposals for new flagship species include a species of frog in India (Agrawal 2004), the axolotl in Mexico (Bride et al. 2008) and a chameleon in Madagascar (Gehring et al. 2010). Despite the proliferation of flagships in conservation, their impacts on public attitudes and ability to deliver strategic conservation goals are rarely evaluated (Bride et al. 2008). We argue that critical attention now needs to turn towards how flagships actually work, e.g. how they are deployed within and perceived by different societies and cultures, and whether this produces the desired conservation outcome. Here, we use the IUCN climate change flagship fleet (CCFF) to illustrate approaches that can be adopted to enhance the impact of flagship development and deployment.

Volatile Ecologies: Towards a Material Politics of Human—Animal Relations

Political ecology has had a long connection with materials, going back to some of its canonical concerns. Yet materials are rendered inert with no capacity to mobilize political action. Further, the influence of matter in wider ecologies of human–animal cohabitation is poorly acknowledged. This paper examines the role of materials in mediating peoples relationships with elephants in rural northeast India. Drawing upon ethnographic research and ethological studies of elephants, the paper shows that human–elephant conflict is not simply a linear outcome of interactions between elephants and people. Materials, in this case alcohol, play a vital role. Alcohol binds people and elephants in unforeseen ways. The sociopolitical outcomes alcohol generates have deep impacts on the livelihoods of the rural poor and the well-being of elephants. This examination of social and political life through concerted interactions between humans, animals, and materials ecologizes politics, making it more attuned to the more-than-human collectivities within which material lives are lived. The paper strives towards a political ecology that is symmetrical and challenges the disciplines humanist focus. It concludes with a discussion of the future implications and potential of this approach.

Whose Issue? Representations of Human-Elephant Conflict in Indian and International Media

The media play a key role in communicating conservation issues such as human-wildlife conflict, but corresponding literature on how issues are represented is limited. This article traces the depiction of human-elephant conflict in the media by examining (a) how conflicts are framed and (b) how ultimate and proximate causes are communicated in Indian and international newspapers. Issues were often polarized or framed in dramatic terms, and consonance in reporting causes was lacking. Active engagement with the media is needed to produce a nuanced debate on conflict, for which recognizing the role of different actors and working closely with individual journalists are vital.

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.

Lively commodities and encounter value

Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified but fails to analyse the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy.

Are Protected Areas Required to Maintain Functional Diversity in Human-Modified Landscapes?

The conversion of forest to agriculture across the world’s tropics, and the limited space for protected areas, has increased the need to identify effective conservation strategies in human-modified landscapes. Isolated trees are believed to conserve elements of ecological structure, providing micro-sites for conservation in matrix landscapes, and facilitating seed dispersal and forest restoration. Here we investigate the role of isolated Ficus trees, which are of critical importance to tropical forest ecosystems, in conserving frugivore composition and function in a human-modified landscape in Assam, India. We surveyed the frugivorous birds feeding at 122 isolated Ficus trees, 33 fruit trees, and 31 other large trees across a range of 32 km from the nearest intact forest. We found that Ficus trees attracted richer and more abundant assemblages of frugivores than the other tree categories. However, incidence function estimates revealed that forest specialist species decreased dramatically within the first kilometre of the forest edge. Despite this, species richness and functional diversity remained consistent across the human-modified landscape, as habitat generalists replaced forest-dependent frugivores, and accounted for most of the ecological function found in Ficus trees near the forest edge. We recommend that isolated Ficus trees are awarded greater conservation status, and suggest that their conservation can support ecologically functional networks of frugivorous bird communities.