human-wildlife conflict

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Flagships or Battleships: Deconstructing the Relationship between Social Conflict and Conservation Flagship Species”—comes from Volume 4 (2013). In their article, Leo R. Douglas and Diogo Veríssimo examine the multiple roles of flagships in conflicts including their part in human-wildlife conflicts and as symbols of broader sociopolitical disputes and show that the relationship between the co-occurrence of conflict and flagship species, while complex, illuminates important patterns and lessons that require further attention

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

You hear a lot about resilience these days—for good reason. Our planet is undergoing profound ecological and climatological change, and we are now unequivocally in a geochemically distinct epoch (Anthropocene) with its own unique signature of human-produced aluminum, concrete, and plastics—direct by-products of the “Great Acceleration of population growth, industrialization, and mineral and energy use” (Waters et al. 2016: 2622). The resilience of species—including human—to this Great Acceleration has received considerable attention of late by social scientists, although the concept as applied to ecological systems has been around for several decades. As originally conceived by Holling (1973), ecologists define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004: 5). However, it is not my goal to explore resilience per se; many superb reviews and analyses already exist (e.g., Jacka 2015). Instead, here I explore the irony of resilience from the perspective of human antipathy toward “pest” species.

Tag: human-wildlife conflict

Regeneration of Human-Modified Landscapes: The Irony of Antipathy to Resilient Animals