Traditional Cultural Landscapes Revisited: Classification, Diversity, Services, and Their Restoration

Due to urbanization, land-use intensification as well as land abandonment, traditional cultural landscapes are continuously declining worldwide. However, those landscapes often exhibit a high biodiversity and can provide numerous ecosystem and landscape services. Accordingly, traditional cultural landscapes with their low-input land-use systems might act as a blueprint for sustainable land use and landscape development. Against this background, a classification of traditional cultural landscapes is suggested as a basis for further research and for environmental or rural development policies. This is based on a holistic understanding of landscapes and cultural landscapes, respectively, and the perception of traditions. The criteria for the classification of traditional cultural landscapes encompass prevailing land-use types (e.g., pastures, agroforestry systems), particular land-use practices in order to overcome natural limitations for land use (e.g., terracing of slopes, irrigation), and/or cultural-historical drivers for long-term landscape development (e.g., impact of monasteries). The value of traditional cultural landscapes for nature conservation and sustainable rural development is given through ecological/environmental, social, and economic multifunctionality and multifaceted landscape services. Through their often embedded indigenous and local (ecological) knowledge, they can also contribute to current environmental and socio-economic challenges such as climate change adaptation. A global Red Books of Threatened Landscapes, already suggested in the 1990ies, could support national and international environmental and rural development policies. The restoration of traditional cultural landscapes will not only contribute positively to biodiversity on all levels and the re-establishment of lost or degraded ecosystem and landscape services but will also promote sustainable social-ecological systems

Disrupting Colonial Trauma Through the Hyperconsumption of Outside Foods in India? A Digital Food Consumer Citizenship

This article addresses the understudied intersection of digital food cultures, consumer citizenship, and colonial trauma within the context of India. While existing scholarship has examined food cultures in India and their colonial legacies, the role of internet-mediated practices in reconfiguring these dynamics remains understudied. This article bridges this gap by conceptualizing digital food consumer citizenship and analyzing how digital spaces mediate aspirational eating of outside foods as both a continuation of socio economic inequalities and a potential disruption of colonial trauma. To begin, the article examines the global history of Indian cuisine, exposing how colonial culinary politics shaped enduring inequalities and cultural hierarchies. Secondly, consumer citizenship debates open perspectives on participation in the era of economic liberalization and food cultures crossing class and urban-rural boundaries. Third, the analysis of digital food economies introduces the concept of smart food spaces to describe digital and sensor-driven transformations in food consumption settings, critiquing their role in hyperconsumption alongside their disruptive possibilities. The article moves on to explore aspirational eating in internet-mediated food cultures among India’s heterogenous urban middle classes, particularly younger generations, as an expression of participatory global food citizenship that challenges post-colonial classifications. By foregrounding subaltern agency and diverse innovative practices, such as adaptive digital platforms of local community kitchens, the article explores the potential of digital food cultures to de-center global power structures, disrupt colonial legacies, and create counter spaces that thrive otherwise. Finally, it proposes empirical research directions to further understand digital food consumer citizenship and its implications for food justice

More-Than-Human Borderlands and Mobilities

This editorial contextualizes the research presented in the special issue on More-than-Human Borderlands and Mobilities. The contributions seek to unravel some of the complex more-than-human assemblages that constitute spatial mobilities and territorial bordering processes. The five research articles engage with emerging debates on posthuman border studies through empirical case studies from different regional contexts in Europe and Asia. The articles signal the productive potentials for scholars to integrate nonhuman entities in the study of borders and cross-border movements

More-Than-Human Borderlands of Wilderness— Transactional Relationships and Intra-Active Entanglements Between Wolves and Humans in the Swiss Calanda Region

Human attempts to draw clear boundaries between the wild and the civilized are typically subject to negotiations, discourses, and conflicts between environmental authorities, environmentalists, and the local population. However, this perspective often overlooks the agency of nonhumans in b/ordering space. Against this background, this paper offers a new conceptualization of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. They are understood as spaces of continuous negotiation processes co-constituted by complex, relational, and hybrid entanglements of humans, animals, materialities, regulations, politics, discursive-material practices and transactions, in which the boundaries between the civilized and the wild are constituted, enacted, and challenged. Using the empirical study of returning wolves to Switzerland, this paper exemplifies the transactional constitution of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. It demonstrates that the returning animals challenge human b/orderings of wilderness by following their prey, hunting (domestic) animals or entering settlement areas, whereas humans attempt to restabilize the boundary between the wilderness and the civilized by putting the wilderness back in place through new regulations and b/ordering practices that allow, for instance, the hunting of “problem wolves.” Thus, the boundaries between the wilderness and the cultivated are always being challenged by the transactions and intra-actions of humans, wolves, and other morethan-human entities, thereby constituting the borderlands of wilderness that cut across human territorial and b/ordering claims. Therefore, investigating wolves’ actions and the intra-active human attempts to restabilize their ideas of the “right place” for the wild allows a deeper understanding of wilderness in a co-created, fluid, and dynamic way

Bordering Through Biosecurity: Wild Boars and Veterinary Fences in the German-Polish Borderlands

This article analyzes how the “risky” mobilities of animals and viruses provoke government reactions that result in bordering processes: From 2020 onwards, German authorities erected hundreds of kilometers of fence along the Eastern border with Poland in response to the spreading of African swine fever (ASF), a highly contagious viral disease that affects both wild boars and domesticated pigs. The government’s main intention behind fencing was to secure the German borderline against the unwanted border crossings of potentially infected wild boars from Poland. At this point in time, the animals were framed as a disease reservoir, while their wayward spatial movements were depicted as a biosecurity threat to the export-dependent German pig sector. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the state of Saxony, the article illustrates how government actors employed three techniques seeking to depoliticize the erection of veterinary fences, presenting them as an apolitical matter of concern, while withdrawing them from public scrutiny and contestation: first, re-scaling authority to the sub-national level; second, securitization; and third, disinformation. Yet, adopting a more-than-human approach to the study of borders, the article also points out how a number of human and nonhuman entities forged wayward relations that worked towards a repoliticization of the fences, while counteracting government intentions in the management and control of disease

Bringing Culinary Justice to the Table: A Conceptual Approach to Enrich the Debate on Food Justice

The concept of food justice is widely used in urban geography and agri-food studies in the Anglophone context. Much of the literature revolves around questions of how access to the land and resources to produce food can increase the ability to fulfil the food needs of low-income communities and communities of color, as well as the issue of food access in urban contexts. Less attention has been paid thus far to food preparation practices and culinary aspects. Against this background, we propose the concept of culinary justice, which links culinary practices and power, pointing to injustices in food provisioning and eating while also focusing on the symbolic and cultural components of food. Our central argument is that culinary elements and practices are important dimensions in questions about justice, as they enable a more nuanced understanding of socio-cultural, ecological, political, and historical food (in)equalities.Building on a review of existing approaches that touch upon the issues of culinarity and food justice in the areas of critical food studies, Black food studies, and postcolonial studies, we apply the concept of culinary justice to four contexts: private households, commercial restaurants, public catering, and community kitchens. In each area, we illustrate the role of food knowledge, care work, commensality, and spatial settings in issues of justice. As part of our contribution, we point toward future directions in food justice research, as well as future research needs in the practical field of food inequalities in culinary contexts

How Do Environmental and Methodological Factors Influence Study Participants’ Answers in Surveys on Risk Perception in the Context of Climate Change and Heat Stress?

Research on climate change and impacts of natural hazards, such as heat waves, on human health has increased in recent years. Various approaches are used to study people’s attitudes and actions in this context, but little is known about the extent to which different modes or other environmental variables influence the results. Therefore, we ex- amined differences between surveys in three German cities, compared survey modes and investigated the influence of the temperature on the day of the survey and the previous days. We conducted two surveys on the topics of climate change risk perception and heat risk perception. In summer and autumn of 2019, in total 1,417 people from the three medium-sized German cities of Potsdam, Remscheid and Würzburg were surveyed via telephone or online. In sum- mer of 2020, 280 people were surveyed face-to-face in public parks in Potsdam. Climate change risk perception, the perception of heat waves as a health threat and the knowledge of heat warnings differed depending on place of resi- dence, survey mode and temperature. Participants of the online survey showed higher scores of risk perception than participants of the telephone and face-to-face surveys, indicating a self-selection bias. Increased temperature was associated with slightly higher levels of respondents’ heat wave risk perception and, among participants surveyed outside, climate change risk perception. The finding that both survey mode and environmental factors can influence survey results should be heeded when planning or interpreting and comparing studies

The Politics of Pine Tree Disease: Interspecies Politics in the Inter-Korean Borderlands

This study explores the politics of interspecies relationships in the inter-Korean borderlands. Pine trees (Pinus) are regarded as significant national symbols in both North and South Korea, making them a relevant topic in interKorean politics. As a result, diseases affecting pine trees have come to be viewed as an enemy of the state for the two Koreas. The spread of pine tree disease from the southern regions of South Korea to the northern parts of the Korean Peninsula has prompted both states to implement biosecurity measures. This research demonstrates how these biosecurity measures are enforced despite restrictions on human access to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas. To better understand this, I propose a framework of more-than-human territoriality, which analyzes how biosecurity measures shape and are shaped by interspecies interactions, highlighting the geopolitical implications of these dynamics. This dual process emphasizes how biosecurity measures mediate species mobility, reflecting geopolitical priorities while challenging conventional notions of sovereignty in the Korean DMZ. By framing inter-Korean politics within the context of interspecies dynamics, this paper challenges the conventional view of the DMZ as a “pure” and “untouched” natural area. This study reframes the DMZ as a politically contested and ecologically dynamic space where interspecies relationships actively influence territorial practices and state sovereignty.

Sovereignty Beyond the Human: ASF in the German-Polish Borderland

In this paper, we explore sovereignty over territory and animal population health (intersecting borderlines) via spatial logics of disease control measures addressing African swine fever (ASF), a hemorrhagic fever caused by a virus (African swine fever virus; ASFV) that is deadly for wild boars and pigs. Biosecurity understandings rooted in epidemiology and situated at the farm and lab are challenged by the expansive geography of ASF. Wild boars’ cross-border mobility, along with human factors, further contribute to the spread of ASF across the landscape. Under orders from veterinary authorities, enrolled actors on both sides of the territorial border between Germany and Poland seek to limit ASF’s spread. Ethnographic research methods combined with an analysis of narratives in official statements/ media sources reveal the countries’ incongruences in applying spatial confinement measures and enrolled actors’ relational understandings of ASF risk that differ in placing blame over these borderlines. As a result of a perceived knowledge gap, fences are not erected on the Polish side, along with other measures deemed necessary by the German authorities to control the disease spread among wild boars. In attempting to resolve this gap in the biosecurity apparatus over controlling the intraspecies boundary, territorial borders are reinstated, and a spatial gap is enlarged between it and that of pigs and wild boars. However, the insurance of sovereignty aimed at controlling one’s territory and over animal health populations in doing so remains influenced by economic and social differences in relation to domestic pig economies and wild boar populations that create rifts in possible cross-border and cross-group cooperation