Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LiVE (Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction: An Ethnographic Study of Avian Conservation in Changing European Landscapes)
Período documentado: 2020-08-01 hasta 2023-07-31
The project Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction investigated how the global phenomena of accelerating species loss and corresponding wildlife management unfold within specific historical and cultural contexts. This study of vulture conservation takes place in a time of rapid global vulture decline. In India, a country where the carrion eating birds were once abundant, 95% of vulture populations have vanished in the past decades and similar catastrophic trends are visible across their South-East Asian and African distribution ranges. In this context Europe has become the last stronghold of these large scavengers that have come to depend on ongoing conservation initiatives, using management techniques such as captive breeding, reintroduction, translocation, monitoring, rehabilitation and strategically placed feeding stations to avoid deaths through direct or indirect poisoning. These conservation initiatives, in turn, depend on collaboration with local rural communities, especially farmers, herders and hunters, who are directly affected by – and at times in opposition to – vulture management and release. Using participatory and qualitative methods the project involved conversations and collaborations with conservation practitioners and local stakeholders in the field, to explore the challenges and possibilities of human-vulture coexistence. The project’s overall objective was to provide the first historically informed ethnography on contemporary vulture conservation in changing European landscapes. Using an interdisciplinary, ethnographic approach, the project produced local perspectives allowing for comparative analysis of the dynamic interface of human-vulture coexistence. Integrating findings from conservation science and biology, analytical emphasis has been placed on highlighting the co-constitution of social and biological processes, rather than their separation into distinctive domains. The project was guided by four sub-objectives: 1) To trace the trajectories of human-vulture coexistence in Europe, including recent histories of vulture extinctions/reintroductions and related changes in agro-environmental policies, rural livelihoods and conservation science. 2) To investigate and compare contemporary vulture conservation practices including captive breeding, reintroduction and monitoring in Europe, 3) To develop and experiment with more-than-human ethnography, exploring how the ‘biosocial’ agency of nonhuman beings maybe better addressed and represented in social science and humanist analysis. 4) To explore how an interdisciplinary framework grounded in social and cultural analysis can be made productive for actively contributing to sustainable wildlife management through engaging and collaborating with conservation scientists and practitioners in the field. Investigating the challenges and possibilities of vulture conservation from a social and cultural perspective, helps to understand one of the most fundamental challenges our society is facing, namely how to coexist with wildlife in multi-use landscapes that are increasingly dominated, and fractured by human projects (such as green energy infrastructures, tourism and recreational interest, and industrial agriculture).
The work performed for the project can be broken down in 1) ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, 2) document analysis and literature review, 3) analysis and integration, and 4) writing up and dissemination. Fieldwork and interviews were mainly conducted with conservation practitioners in Spain, a country that holds over 90% of the European vulture population, but also included conversation with practitioners based in France, Italy, Germany and Austria. Document analysis and literature review were primarily based on library research, but also include sources found through digital ethnography, museum exhibits, as well as access to small personal archives. The analysis and integration of ideas and insights from different practitioners and literatures (i.e. across anthropology and vulture ecology, conservation biology) has been conducted in a way that allows for feedback from research participants and has been supported by peer-to-peer discussion through participation in various academic workshops, seminars and conferences on topics of conservation, multi-species landscapes and environmental infrastructures. The writing up of project results is in progress and all publications will be made openly accessible to the public. Dissemination activities (and other relevant activities) of the project included several talks at academic conferences and departmental seminars, the organisation of panels at international conferences, a public lecture series and symposium, the development of a successful ERC starting grant application, as well as active academic and field-based networks. Despite the severe impact of the pandemic on the project, all research objectives associated with the project have been achieved.
The research conducted through LiVE allows us insight into the historical, social and cultural dimensions of human-vulture coexistence in Europe and the political nexus in which vulture conservation initiatives navigate. It also shows that to understand the complex intertwining of human projects and the life ways of other living beings, it is necessary to develop an approach that integrates knowledge from natural science disciplines into cultural analysis (an vice versa). The project’s results, currently prepared for open access publication, make three main contributions: 1) They investigate how the life and wellbeing of vultures is interconnected with historical and social developments in European landscapes, such as infrastructure building and industrial agriculture. 3) They narrate the historical trajectories of vulture extinction in Europe and the emergence of vulture conservation and reintroductions. 2) They make a case for interdisciplinary collaboration in finding solutions for understanding and attempting to manage human-wildlife coexistence in increasingly strained human-dominated ecosystems. 3) They problematise dominant managerial understandings of wildlife conservation, by paying attention to knowledges and practices of care that are essential to but not always centred in conventional conservation approaches. By addressing critical questions of human-wildlife coexistence in landscapes shaped by fragmentation, intensification and increasing infrastructure building to provide ‘green’ energy to European nations, the project is one of the fundamental challenges of our society today. LiVE’s dissemination, during the project, impacted both academic cross-disciplinary audiences and debates beyond academia. Through ongoing dissemination plans, upcoming publications, and the strong networks build through the project, will guarantee the further development and distribution of results stemming from this project.