Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)

When Species Meet

Although conservation efforts have sometimes succeeded in meeting environmental goals at the expense of equity considerations, the changing context of conservation and a growing body of evidence increasingly suggest that equity considerations should be integrated into conservation planning and implementation. However, this approach is often perceived to be at odds with the prevailing focus on economic efficiency that characterizes many payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Drawing from examples across the literature, we show how the equity impacts of PES can create positive and negative feedbacks that influence ecological outcomes. We caution against equity-blind PES, which overlooks these relationships as a result of a primary and narrow focus on economic efficiency. We call for further analysis and better engagement between the social and ecological science communities to understand the relationships and trade-offs among efficiency, equity, and ecological outcomes.

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Social Equity Matters in Payments for Ecosystem Services

Human interactions with wildlife are a defining experience of human existence. These interactions can be positive or negative. People compete with wildlife for food and resources, and have eradicated dangerous species; co-opted and domesticated valuable species; and applied a wide range of social, behavioral, and technical approaches to reduce negative interactions with wildlife. This conflict has led to the extinction and reduction of numerous species and uncountable human deaths and economic losses. Recent advances in our understanding of conflict have led to a growing number of positive conservation and coexistence outcomes. I summarize and synthesize factors that contribute to conflict, approaches that mitigate conflict and encourage coexistence, and emerging trends and debates. Fertile areas for scholarship include scale and complexity, models and scenarios, understanding generalizable patterns, expanding boundaries of what is considered conflict, using new tools and technologies, information sharing...

Human–Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence

Humans, unlike any other multicellular species in Earth's history, have emerged as a global force that is transforming the ecology of an entire planet. It is no longer possible to understand, predict, or successfully manage ecological pattern, process, or change without understanding why and how humans reshape these over the long term. Here, a general causal theory is presented to explain why human societies gained the capacity to globally alter the patterns, processes, and dynamics of ecology and how these anthropogenic alterations unfold over time and space as societies themselves change over human generational time. Building on existing theories of ecosystem engineering, niche construction, inclusive inheritance, cultural evolution, ultrasociality, and social change, this theory of anthroecological change holds that sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on ecosystem engineering, social specialization, and non-kin exchange, or “sociocultural niche construction,” is the main cause of both the long-term upscaling of human societies and their unprecedented transformation of the biosphere. Human sociocultural niche construction can explain, where classic ecological theory cannot, the sustained transformative effects of human societies on biogeography, ecological succession, ecosystem processes, and the ecological patterns and processes of landscapes, biomes, and the biosphere. Anthroecology theory generates empirically testable hypotheses on the forms and trajectories of long-term anthropogenic ecological change that have significant theoretical and practical implications across the subdisciplines of ecology and conservation. Though still at an early stage of development, anthroecology theory aligns with and integrates established theoretical frameworks including social–ecological systems, social metabolism, countryside biogeography, novel ecosystems, and anthromes. The “fluxes of nature” are fast becoming “cultures of nature.” To investigate, understand, and address the ultimate causes of anthropogenic ecological change, not just the consequences, human sociocultural processes must become as much a part of ecological theory and practice as biological and geophysical processes are now. Strategies for achieving this goal and for advancing ecological science and conservation in an increasingly anthropogenic biosphere are presented.

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Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere

https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2014/nrs_2014_stanturf_002.pdf

Contemporary forest restoration: A review emphasizing function

Conservation conflicts are increasing and need to be managed to minimise negative impacts on biodiversity, human livelihoods, and human well-being. Here, we explore strategies and case studies that highlight the long-term, dynamic nature of conflicts and the challenges to their management. Conflict management requires parties to recognise problems as shared ones, and engage with clear goals, a transparent evidence base, and an awareness of trade-offs. We hypothesise that conservation outcomes will be less durable when conservationists assert their interests to the detriment of others. Effective conflict management and long-term conservation benefit will be enhanced by better integration of the underpinning social context with the material impacts and evaluation of the efficacy of alternative conflict management approaches.

Understanding and managing conservation conflicts

Ever since Rachel Carson predicted a "silent spring" environmentalists have been carefully and anxiously listening to birds. More recently the musician and scientist Bernie Krause has examined the effects of human activity on avian soundscapes throughout the world. He argues that human activities cause ecological and sonic disruptions that really are rendering the world silent or discordant, submerging the "animal orchestra" beneath noise. A healthy natural environment can be heard, according to Krause, in a rich and harmonious soundscape that has evolved over millions of years. The loss of wildness thus elicits a loss of harmony. I consider these Anthropocene interpretations of silence, noise and dissonance by comparing the environmentalist concerns of Krause with responses to the Listening to Birds project—an anthropological investigation of bird sounds. These responses emphasise the significance of bird sounds for people's sense of place, time and season and the longing that many have for their own lives to resonate with the birds around them. I argue that this has less to do with desires to hear harmony in pristine nature but with developing relations of companionship with birds living alongside humans. While listening to birds can still iconically and indexically ground people, signs of absence and change can precipitate anxieties that stem from the ambiguities implicit in the Anthropocene's formulation of human relations with other species. Using narratives and field recordings I explore the anxious semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn's recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold's understanding of the world as a meshwork.

Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World

This article explores seasonality through the lens of British relations with other beings. Drawing on discussions of temporality and seasonality by Ingold, Harris and Krause and extending them in t...

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Loudly sing cuckoo: More-than-human seasonalities in Britain:

In his 1993 essay ‘The temporality of the landscape’, Tim Ingold argued that landscape develops through processes of temporality, that is time as it emerges in the unfolding of life through action. This association between temporality and landscape was expressed by the term ‘taskscape’. In our introduction to this section, we return to the concept of taskscape to assess its usefulness in light of a number of developments in the understanding of human–environment relations. These include the changing conceptualisation of ‘landscape’ and the emergence of new approaches for understanding relations across species. We explain the ways that the three authors in this section use taskscape to think through political tensions and to explore how landscapes are achieved through inter‐relating actions of humans and other beings. We conclude by emphasising the heuristic value of taskscape as a means of thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene. Both taskscape and Anthropocene are concepts that draw together human history and the shaping of the world and, as such, the taskscape offers a novel means to explore and understand the dynamics of Anthropocene environmental relations.

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Exploring taskscapes: an introduction

This article is an investigation into contestations about the landscape of Loch Gruinart, a nature reserve managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) on the Scottish island of Islay. Farmers argued that the low-lying areas of the reserve should have been farmed more intensively to support higher numbers of geese, which farmers disliked because they caused damage to their own grass crops. Instead, the RSPB managed the land to support wetland species through less intensive agricultural practices and by flooding fields. The article takes a symbolic approach that focuses on the ambiguity of Loch Gruinart as both a farm and nature reserve. It is argued that this enables the reserve to be used as a metaphor of relations between conservation and farming. The article demonstrates how farmers used the reserve both to situate themselves and to claim that the reserve was not a real farm. In response, RSPB staff argued for the logic of their management and advocated education and community involvement as a means to help farmers understand their aims. Such controversies, it is argued, are a consequence of conservationists' attempts to bring non-humans into the political arena and can thus be seen as essential to the integration of conservation into Islay rather than inimical to it.

Andrew Whitehouse

Papers

Understanding and managing conservation conflicts

Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World

Loudly sing cuckoo: More-than-human seasonalities in Britain:

Exploring taskscapes: an introduction

'A disgrace to a farmer': Conservation and agriculture on a nature reserve in Islay, Scotland