Simon Pooley

Hunting Down the Chimera of Multiple Disciplinarity in Conservation Science

The consensus is that both ecological and social factors are essential dimensions of conservation research and practice. However, much of the literature on multiple disciplinary collaboration focuses on the difficulties of undertaking it. This review of the challenges of conducting multiple disciplinary collaboration offers a framework for thinking about the diversity and complexity of this endeavor. We focused on conceptual challenges, of which 5 main categories emerged: methodological challenges, value judgments, theories of knowledge, disciplinary prejudices, and interdisciplinary communication. The major problems identified in these areas have proved remarkably persistent in the literature surveyed (c.1960–2012). Reasons for these failures to learn from past experience include the pressure to produce positive outcomes and gloss over disagreements, the ephemeral nature of many such projects and resulting lack of institutional memory, and the apparent complexity and incoherence of the endeavor. We suggest that multiple disciplinary collaboration requires conceptual integration among carefully selected multiple disciplinary team members united in investigating a shared problem or question. We outline a 9-point sequence of steps for setting up a successful multiple disciplinary project. This encompasses points on recruitment, involving stakeholders, developing research questions, negotiating power dynamics and hidden values and conceptual differences, explaining and choosing appropriate methods, developing a shared language, facilitating on-going communications, and discussing data integration and project outcomes. Although numerous solutions to the challenges of multiple disciplinary research have been proposed, lessons learned are often lost when projects end or experienced individuals move on. We urge multiple disciplinary teams to capture the challenges recognized, and solutions proposed, by their researchers while projects are in process. A database of well-documented case studies would showcase theories and methods from a variety of disciplines and their interactions, enable better comparative study and evaluation, and provide a useful resource for developing future projects and training multiple disciplinary researchers.

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.

Don't forget to look down - collaborative approaches to predator conservation

Finding effective ways of conserving large carnivores is widely recognised as a priority in conservation. However, there is disagreement about the most effective way to do this, with some favouring top‐down ‘command and control’ approaches and others favouring collaboration. Arguments for coercive top‐down approaches have been presented elsewhere; here we present arguments for collaboration. In many parts of the developed world, flexibility of approach is built into the legislation, so that conservation objectives are balanced with other legitimate goals. In the developing world, limited resources, poverty and weak governance mean that collaborative approaches are likely to play a particularly important part in carnivore conservation. In general, coercive policies may lead to the deterioration of political legitimacy and potentially to non‐compliance issues such as illegal killing, whereas collaborative approaches may lead to psychological ownership, enhanced trust, learning, and better social outcomes. Sustainable hunting/trapping plays a crucial part in the conservation and management of many large carnivores. There are many different models for how to conserve carnivores effectively across the world, research is now required to reduce uncertainty and examine the effectiveness of these approaches in different contexts.

No conservation silver lining to Ebola

In August 2014, the United Nations health authority declared the Ebola epidemic centered on Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea an “international public health emergency” (WHO 2014). By October, public commentaries were omnipresent in print and online, including several statements in the mass media by wildlife conservationists. Their comments raise a number of uncomfortable issues about the consumption and trade of bushmeat in the region and in Africa more broadly that merit unpacking and rebuttal. The Ebola epidemic should not, in our view, be used as a Trojan horse to achieve wildlife conservation ends. This is both because some of the proposed conservation measures are of questionable efficacy, and may even backfire, and because doing so raises unfortunate associations with the long history of an outdated discourse of conservation in Africa that favored wildlife over people.

The Entangled Relations of Humans and Nile Crocodiles in Africa, c.1840-1992

The nature of European explorers’ and hunters’ perceptions of the wildlife they encountered during their travels, and how this shaped their responses to it, has been surprisingly little studied. This may in part be because of the wealth of primary material and the dearth of secondary sources. Animal studies has come of age in recent decades, with a focus on how humans have conceptualised and related to animals, but much of this new field concerns domesticated or captive animals and has tended towards philosophical, political and theoretical approaches. Yet there is much to be gained from a historical exploration of the abundant sources on Europeans’ encounter with wildlife, notably during the height of colonial exploration and adventuring in Africa. This review focuses on the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) in Africa. Crocodiles had a major impact on European travellers, elicited extreme reactions and reveal an irrational difference in attitudes to large mammalian predators, as opposed to reptilian. The oft-repeated statement that Nile crocodiles kill more humans and are more hated than any other predator (or even, all other predators) in Africa is still current. The expansion of human settlement and activities into the habitats of crocodiles and increasing demands on water supplies is resulting in escalating conflicts and some experts regard crocodiles as a ‘growing threat to rural livelihoods and development’. If these important apex predators of the continent’s waterways are to be conserved, then a good place to start seems to be with an exploration of the long history of interactions with them that have shaped expert and public perceptions of crocodile.

The Long and Entangled History of Humans and Invasive Introduced Plants on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula

This chapter provides an environmental history of plant introductions and fire—and how their unintended consequences have been framed and managed—at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The chapter explains why the plants which have proved invasive were introduced to the region, examines the effects of urbanisation on attitudes to introduced tree plantations, and describes the development of concern over the effects of fires and introduced plants on the indigenous fynbos vegetation. The chapter recounts the complex history of environmental management on the Peninsula, discussing the advantages and limitations of the powerful narrative linking invasive introduced plant control with fires and water supplies, and recent controversies between invasion biologists and commercial forestry managers.

Using predator attack data to save lives, human and crocodilian

As human populations grow and transform unde- veloped terrestrial and aquatic habitats, human-wildlife conflict inevitably increases. This is particularly problematic forlargepredatorsandthehumanswholivealongsidethem. Relatively little research has been conducted on alleviating adverse human encounters with one of the most significant predator species in Africa, the Nile crocodile Crocodylus ni- loticus. This short communication raises questions about some of the general statements made to explain the inci- dence of attacks by crocodiles. Some of the limitations of the data on such attacks are considered, with recommenda- tions on what kinds of dataarerequired. Datacollection and analysis, and how they can inform more effective mitigation efforts, are discussed.

Introduction: Historical Perspectives on Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean Region

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book and states its aims and scope. It defines and provides an overview of the study region, discussing the biophysical and historiographical dimensions of defining a ‘Mediterranean region’. Key polemics arising in debates over how to think about bioinvasions are considered, and the editors’ positions clarified. An overview of the book’s ten chapters follows, informing a concluding discussion on directions for future study of bioinvasions in the Mediterranean region.

Response to Osofsky's “Misrepresentation by Citation”

Steven Osofsky (2015)is very concernedthat he has been misrepresented by citation in Pooley et al. (2015). However, we believe he misrepresents our article in turn by inferring that Osofsky (2014) (referenced alongside several others in the first instance) is of more than passing relevance to our comment on conservation responses to the Ebola crisis. He assumes that, like himself, other readers may draw inferences about his position on these issues from the juxtaposition of the citation; we have yet to encounter this reader reaction. We also fail to see how our piece suggests that public health, conservation, and animal rights communities are of like mind. We stand by our comment that the “prominent conservation-oriented response” was to advocate stopping Africans from eating bushmeat, reiterated when Osofsky (2014) said in his CNN piece that “we should worktodiscouragethecapture,killing,andconsumption of bats . . . The same can be said for primates, our closest relatives.” We were simply making the point that this was a widely made response so as to set up the point that we do not think that trying to stop Africans from eating these species is practical and that it may have unintended conservation consequences. These consequences may run counter to desired positive conservation outcomes. Surely, both Williams and Osofsky have positive conservation goals in mind? We acknowledge that we could have cited Redford et al. (2014) in support of our point on interdisciplinary research, but as this was an opinion piece, we did not seek to conduct an in-depth analysis based on a literature reviewofthefield.Itwasaswiftresponsetoadeveloping issueinthemedia,andwewantedtodistanceourselvesas conservationists from the silver-lining approach Williams (2014) advocated in New Scientist. WeagreethattheWildlifeConservationSociety(WCS) isdoingexcellentworkinthisareaandnotethatnowhere in our piece do we refer to the WCS, to Osofsky’s colleagues, or to his program. We refer to an article in the popular media by Osofsky only. Further, we make it very clear in our concluding paragraph that the silver-lining argument applies only to Williams’ piece. If any harm has been done to Steven Osofsky’s program, or to his reputation, then we can only say we are sincerely sorry about this unintended consequence of our article.

Afforestation, Plant Invasions and Fire

Thomas Pakenham’s beautiful book on his ‘safari’ to find great trees in southern Africa was controversial (for some) in that nearly a quarter of his chosen trees are introductions to the region. Pakenham feared that these trees were under threat as undesirable ‘aliens’, including Tokai Arboretum’s world famous collection of Eucalypts and other introduced Australian trees: It turns out that when the boundaries of Table Mountain national Park were decided in the 1990s Tokai Arboretum was included within the park. And the authorities who manage this national park are seized by one simple idea supplied by the Talibans: restore the former glory of Table Mountain by removing all the trees … within the park which are not indigenous to the region.2