Educational landscapes and the environmental entanglement of humans and non-humans through the starling murmuration

Recent years have seen a continued critical reflection on the “post” or “more‐than” representational landscape as well as a related critique of nature which centres on this concept as a deployment of meanings and their effects. In this paper, I want to explore the possibilities and challenges of widening access to these more entangled and performative understandings of nature and landscape through the example of winter roosting starlings and the spectacle of the starling mumuration. In doing so, the paper also explores the dominant educational constructions of nature as utilised in conservation work and informal educational television, the consideration of the latter taken up through my own work on a forthcoming BBC television series. The focus of this exploration is the RSPB Ham Wall nature reserve on the Somerset Levels, widely regarded as one of the prime locations in Britain for observing murmurations, and where the number of visitors coming specifically to view roosting starlings on a winter's evening can reach 1,000 people. While in many ways the reserve maintains conventional roles of warden‐led stewardship and observational education of nature “in its place,” I also want to suggest that the spectacle of the starling murmuration affords an opportunity to convey humans and non‐humans as embedded in a more performative understanding of conservation which challenges the predominant conventions of conservation practice. In this more reflexive educational context, the possibility exists to frame an accessible and illustrative understanding of the geographies of a more entangled human–non‐human nature

30 days wild: development and evaluation of a large-scale nature engagement campaign to improve well-being

There is a need to increase people’s engagement with and connection to nature, both for human well-being and the conservation of nature itself. In order to suggest ways for people to engage with nature and create a wider social context to normalise nature engagement, The Wildlife Trusts developed a mass engagement campaign, 30 Days Wild. The campaign asked people to engage with nature every day for a month. 12,400 people signed up for 30 Days Wild via an online sign-up with an estimated 18,500 taking part overall, resulting in an estimated 300,000 engagements with nature by participants. Samples of those taking part were found to have sustained increases in happiness, health, connection to nature and pro-nature behaviours. With the improvement in health being predicted by the improvement in happiness, this relationship was mediated by the change in connection to nature

Geologising urban political ecology (UPE): the urbanisation of sand in Accra, Ghana

This paper makes a call for an urban political ecology (UPE) which engages more extensively with Earth’s geological formations. As a material at the centre of global urbanisation process, sand is offered as a geological entry point. The paper presents an analysis of the urbanisation of sand, or the ways in which sand is brought into the urban realm, grounding this reading in Accra—a growing city on Ghana’s Atlantic coast. Drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper charts the socio-natural politics through which sand is first unearthed from the edges of the city—an extractive processes otherwise known as “sand winning” in Ghana. By examining the forms of power which govern uneven revenue flows to communities, the displacement of farming groups, the widespread loss of farmland and a contested regime of governance, the analysis exposes the socio-natural politics through which the city’s geological baseline is first unearthed

Teaching the history of geography:Current challenges and future directions

Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present – but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions

On the Peripheries of Planetary Urbanization: Globalizing Manaus and its Expanding Impact

In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move past limitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city's boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro's south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State's transformation from isolated borderland to bypassed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban—rural) conditions and functional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broaden the political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism

Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method

Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature