Draft:Conservation Humanities

Conservation Humanities is an interdisciplinary research field that draws on humanities disciplines such as environmental history, ecocriticism, and anthropology to address questions about nature conservation practices, issues, and challenges. It specifically advocates the necessity of involving the humanities in the effort to conserve biodiversity and halt species loss. What distinguishes the approaches of Conservation Humanities beyond its thematic interest in nature protection is its close involvement with conservation practice and its commitment to make humanities scholarship and conservation on the ground speak to each other and profit from each other’s perspectives.

Conservation Humanities sees itself as a part of the recent environmental turn across disciplines. As such, it is closely related to the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary set of approaches that embed humanities scholarship in the context of concern about climate change and environmental degradation.

Emergence and mission of Conservation Humanities

Conservation Humanities is an emerging field of inquiry. The term was first institutionalised by the interdisciplinary project Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks, which was based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU München and the University of Leeds between 2020 and 2023. Since 2024, the European Conservation Humanities Network, based at the Collegium Carolinum in Munich, has provided a forum for collaboration and exchange between European humanities scholars working on issues of conservation.

Conservation Humanities builds on a growing body of scholarship focusing on nature protection from a humanities perspective. Environmental historians have produced important studies of the development of national parks and the history of the conservation movement. Scholars from literary and cultural studies have provided analyses of the cultural and imaginative basis for conservation, starting from the premise that the protection of nature is born of a system of human values that have been negotiated and expressed through art, poetry, and fiction over time. Anthropologists and philosophers have supplied important insights into multispecies relations, rewilding, and species extinction in the Anthropocene. Geographers have grappled with questions of territoriality in conservation, the social dimension, geographies and politics of conservation, and the motivations for conserving nature.

Further Reading

Benson, Etienne. Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Carruthers-Jones, Jonathan, Andrew Gregory, and Adrien Guetté. “Cores and Corridors: Natural Landscape Linkages to Rewild Protected Areas and Wildlife Refuges.” In Routledge Handbook of Rewilding, edited by Sally Hawkins, Ian Convery, Steve Carver, and Rene Beyers, 81-91. London: Routledge, 2023.

Eckert, Astrid M., and Pavla Šimková. “Transcending the Cold War: Borders, Nature, and the European Green Belt Conservation Project along the Former Iron Curtain.” In Greening Europe: Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century – A Handbook, edited by Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse, 129-153. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.

Fall, Juliet. Drawing the Line: Nature, Hybridity and Politics in Transboundary Spaces. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

Felcht, Frederike. “Biodiversität und Naturschutz in Nils Holgerssons wunderbare Reise durch Schweden (1906/1907).” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung (2022): 63-76. https://doi.org/10.21248/gkjf-jb.89

Gissibl, Bernhard, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (eds.). Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. New York: Berghahn, 2012.

Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von. A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919-1949. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

Heurich, Marco, and Christof Mauch (eds.). Urwald der Bayern. Geschichte, Politik und Natur im Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020.

Holm, Poul, Joni Adamson, Hsinya Huang, Lars Kirdan, Sally Kitch, Iain McCalman, James Ogude, Marisa Ronan, Dominic Scott, Kirill Ole Thompson, Charles Travis, and Kirsten Wehner. “Humanities for the Environment: A Manifesto for Research and Action.” Humanities 4 (2015): 977-992. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040977

Holmes, George et al. “Understanding Conservationists’ Perspectives on the New Conservation Debate.” Conservation Biology 31,2 (2017): 353-365. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12811

Holmes, George et al. “Mainstreaming the Humanities in Conservation.” Conservation Biology 36,3 (2021): 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13824

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge, 2010.

Huggan, Graham. Nature’s Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age. London: Routledge, 2013.

Huggan, Graham, and George Holmes. “What Are Conservation Humanities? Preliminary Reflections on an Emerging Paradigm.” Humanities 14, no. 5 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3390/h14050094

Jørgensen, Dolly. “Rethinking Rewilding.” Geoforum 65 (2015), 482-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.016

Kupper, Patrick. Wildnis schaffen. Eine transnationale Geschichte des Schweizerischen Nationalparks. Bern: Haupt, 2012.

Kupper, Patrick, and Anna-Katharina Wöbse, eds. Greening Europe: Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century – A Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.

Lorimer, Jamie. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015.

Münster, Ursula, Thom van Dooren, and Eben Kirksey. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 2 (2016): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695

Piňosová, Jana. Inspiration Natur. Naturschutz in den böhmischen Ländern bis 1933. Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2017.

Ritson, Katie, and Eveline R. de Smalen. “Imagining the Anthropocene in the Wadden Sea.” Maritime Studies 20 (2021): 293-303. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40152-021-00230-5

Ritson, Katie et al. “Creating Corridors for Nature Protection: Conservation Humanities as an Intervention in Contemporary European Biodiversity Strategies.” Environmental Humanities 16, no. 1 (2024) 183-200. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10943153

Šimková, Pavla. “Grenzenlos wild? Der Naturschutz und die Grenze im Bayerischen Wald und Šumava.” Copernico. Geschichte und kulturelles Erbe im östlichen Europa, 21.7.2023, https://www.copernico.eu/de/link/6426ecdeabfb13.83429804.

Smalen, Eveline de. “Sandpipers and the Art of Letting Go: Narratives of Conservation in the Wadden Sea.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia 9 (Spring 2021). https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/9241

Trudgill, Stephen. Why Conserve Nature? Perspectives on Meanings and Motivations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Vasile, Monica. “The Vulnerable Bison: Practices and Meanings of Rewilding in Romanian Carpathians.” Conservation & Society 16, no. 3 (2018): 217-231. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26500636

References

Category:Humanities Category:Interdisciplinary subfields Category:Research