108 research outputs found
Worlding and weirding with beaver: A moreâthanâhuman political ecology of ecosystem engineering
Scientists and policyâmakers promote 'Natureâbased Solutions' to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetaryâscale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper critically examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12,000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies worldâmaking projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beaver helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of Natureâbased Solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a new framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding
Young men who have sex with men's use of social and sexual media and sex-risk associations: cross-sectional, online survey across four countries
Objective There has been an increase in new HIV diagnoses among young men who have sex with men (YMSM) over the past decade in both UK and US contexts, with online sex-seeking implicated in driving this development. This study sought to examine YMSM's use of a variety of social and sexual networking websites and ⏠apps', and assess sexual risk behaviours. Design YMSM were recruited from across four countries in Britain and Ireland, via an online survey using convenience sampling. Data were collected from 2668 men, of whom 702 were aged 18-25 âŹ..years. Results Facebook use was almost ubiquitous and for largely social reasons; sexual media use was common with 52% using gay sexual networking (GSN) websites frequently and 44% using similar apps frequently. We found increased odds of high-risk condomless anal intercourse associated with the length of time users had been using GSN websites and lower levels of education. We found no significant differences across the four countries in sexual risk behaviours. Conclusions YMSM are a heterogeneous population with varied sexual health needs. For young men with digital literacy, individual-level online interventions, targeted and tailored, could be directed towards frequent users with lower levels of education. Variation in demographic characteristics of GSN websites and app users may affect who interventions are likely to reach, depending on where they are targeted. However, interventions, which may catch young men earlier, also provide a major opportunity for reducing sexual health inequalities
On disease configurations, black-grass blowback, and probiotic pest management
This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed âintegratedâ approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety. Pathogenesis, in this relational understanding, follows not from breaches of dangerous life into healthy space, but from ecological intra-actions that enable the proliferation of some life to compromise the multispecies livability of the body in question. The article contributes to the literature by detailing how this configurational approach works in the world. It traces the polymorphic spatial imaginaries required to map pests well; the process of knowledge intensification needed to reveal which configurations can resist pathogenesis; and the probiotic biopolitical interventions used to safeguard farmland productivity. The article uses black-grass to present a temporal metanarrative of intensive farming causing ecological blowback, leading to the development of approaches to pest management predicated on a pragmatic tolerance toward unwanted life
Elephants at work
Baker & Winkler (B&W) propose rewilding Asian elephants in a model in which they are rescued, rehabilitated and then given work with their mahouts in ecological restoration and ecotourism. In a sympathetic critique, we explore the status that B&Wâs analysis accords to work. Types of work and working conditions need to be differentiated. We caution against a model of conservation that would make the future of life conditional on participating in the workforce
Veganuary and the vegan sausage (t)rolls: conflict and commercial engagement in online climate-diet discourse
Social media platforms have become critical venues for a wide spectrum of influence campaigns, from activism to advertising. Sometimes these two ends overlap and it remains unknown how the latter might impact the former. Situated within contemporary scholarship on vegan activism, this work examines corporate involvement with the Veganuary 2019 campaign on Twitter, as well as the antagonistic backlash it received. We find that the activists and commercial entities engage mostly separate audiences, suggesting that commercial campaigns do little to drive interactions with Veganuary activism. We also discover strong threads of antagonism reflecting the âculture wars" surrounding discussions of veganism and climate-diet science. These findings inform our understanding of the challenges facing climate-diet discourses on social media and motivate further research into the role of commercial agents in online activism
Location, safety and (non) strangers in gay menâs narratives on âhook-upâ apps
Hook-up websites and apps are said to be transforming the sexual lives of gay men and have been linked with the apparent erosion of gay publics as the basis for identity politics and social action. This article examines these dynamics in the interview and focus-group talk of gay men living on the economic and geographical margins of metropolitan gay culture. It offers perspectives on the importance of location â class, generation and space â for the experience of digital media, the negotiation of safety, and the new codifications and elaborations on sex with the (non) stranger; a figure who is not alien, yet not familiar, in sexual sociality. Reflecting on these situated perspectives in connection with debates on the erosion of gay publics, this article argues against monolithic framings of gay menâs sexual lives after digital media
Animalsâ atmospheres
This article introduces the concept of animalsâ atmospheres, as a contribution to work in animal and atmospheric geographies. It defines the concept and identifies the key factors that shape an animalsâ atmosphere. These offer a framework for future comparative research. The second section focuses on methodological and epistemic challenges of knowing and representing animal atmospheres. The third section examines engineering of animalsâ atmospheres, in context of the biopolitics of managing animal life in the Anthropocene. In conclusion, the article highlights its contributions. Illustrations are drawn from the atmospheres of dogs and wolves
Farming for the patchy Anthropocene: the spatial imaginaries of regenerative agriculture
With its focus on the species level of the Anthropos, there is growing concern that the Anthropocene analytic lacks the conceptual nuance needed to grapple with the unevenly distributed harms and responsibilities tied up with issues of biodiversity loss, global warming, and land use change. Conceptual variants like the patchy Anthropocene have been proposed to better capture the justice implications of these socio-ecological crises, directing attention to their spatially ubiquitous yet context-specific character. The figure of the plantation has come to play an important role in this scholarship due to the contribution intensive agriculture had made to these interlinking crises. Through empirical study of the regenerative agricultural movement, this paper reflects on how regenerative farmers use different sites (fields, soils, livestock stomachs) to apprehend their agro-ethical responsibilities to more-than-human actors both near to and far from the landscapes they manage. Our aims here are two-fold. First, we provide a more affirmative account of agricultural management than is currently offered by plantation farming: a model of food production that is not just âinâ the Anthropocene, but âforâ it. Second, we contribute to ongoing discussions unfolding in the social sciences around the tools needed to conceptualise the interlinking spatial and justice aspects of the Anthropocene transition. By bringing the patchy analytic into conversation with more established geographic writing on scale, volume, and horizontal connections, we show the merit of juxtaposing multiple models of spatial relation as a way of gaining ethical and conceptual traction on complex socio-ecological issues. We argue that the âpolymorphicâ spatial imaginaries of regenerative agriculturalists can offer some guidance on the tools needed to attend to the specificity of local Anthropocene outcomes in relation to socio-ecological forces actuating the world at much greater spatio-temporal scales
Immaterial animals and financialized forests: Asset manager capitalism, ESG integration and the politics of livestock
This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to which institutional equity investors, and specifically âuniversal ownersâ with highly diversified shareholdings, engage with public issues associated with livestock agriculture. As share ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, and the market for Environmental, Social and Governance investment products grows, these investors are increasingly involved in governing the activities of publicly traded corporations (including leading agribusinesses). This paper brings together political economy and marketization studies research to explore how universal owners become concerned about particular environmental and ethical problems, why they overlook other public concerns, and in what ways their selective engagement with ethico-political issues might be altering the content of food politics. Comparing universal ownersâ engagements with farm animal welfare issues and with tropical deforestation within animal feed supply chains, we argue that these institutions engage with tropical deforestation because it presents a financially material risk to firms across multiple industries. By contrast, the specificity of farm animal welfare issues to agribusinesses means that they do not pose a material risk to the overall performance of universal ownersâ highly diversified asset portfolios. Efforts to concern universal owners about livestock agriculture's social, environmental and health impacts thus generate a food politics which focuses primarily on risks to global economic systems and renders animals themselves distinctly immaterial
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