| 1. |
- Redmalm, David, Docent, 1981-, et al.
(author)
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Bureaucrats vs. Bunnies : The dilemmas of urban wildlife management
- 2023
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Municipal hunters and wildlife managers are entrusted with the task of keeping the urban fauna in balance through preemptive measures, and by culling animals. Based on interviews with hunters, municipal officials, and wildlife rescuers in ten municipalities in Sweden, as well as participant observations during hunts, this study identifies the dilemmas that people face as they engage in wildlife management. In conversations about birds, cats, deer, moose, and lots and lots of rabbits, the interviewees paint a picture of a tension-filled task of managing animals that are not quite wild, but definitely not tame. First, there needs to be a balance between invisibility, to carry through smooth culls, and transparency, to maintain the trust of the community. Second, there is sometimes a clash between efficiency and social acceptability, which means that best practices must sometimes be set aside in favor of more aesthetically appealing methods. Last, knowing when to hold your fire is just as central to urban wildlife management as knowing when to shoot—if not even more so. Therefore, to cull or not to cull is the third dilemma of urban wildlife management.
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| 2. |
- Redmalm, David, Docent, 1981-, et al.
(author)
-
Lockdown Fauna : The Beastly Topology of the COVID-19 Pandemic
- 2022
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, photos and news articles began circulating in social media about animals making unexpected appearances in urban areas. Photos were published in news media of dolphins in the canals of Venice, a record number of flamingos in Mumbai, wild boards in Barcelona, and undaunted urban foxes in central London. While some of these stories were proven to be false, such as the Venice dolphins, other stories turned out to be misleading. The animals who allegedly showed up in, returned to or overcrowded certain areas were in fact there all along, but had not gained wider attention until now. Although several of these stories are lacking in credibility, they can be seen as indications of humans’ understanding of themselves and their relations to nature and other animals. As such, they differ from typical romanticizations of a pristine nature untouched by human hand, as the depicted sceneries are human-built environments. Rather than a dream of a pure nature in a distant past, but a future in which humans picture their own downfall. We suggest that lockdown fauna imageries express a happy misanthropy and an optimistic apocalypticism that capture human self-understanding in a society characterized by pandemic and environmental crises.
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| 3. |
- Redmalm, David, Docent, 1981-, et al.
(author)
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Our Lives Without Us : Urban Animals in News Reports and Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- 2022
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, photos and reports of animals making unexpected appearances in urban areas began to appear in social media and news outlets. These images and stories—from which humans were largely absent—included dolphins in the canals of Venice, a record number of flamingos in Mumbai, drunken elephants in the Yunnan province in China, wild boards in Barcelona, and undaunted urban foxes in central London. In the Nordic countries, the boundary between the urban and the rural was blurred by sightings of wild animals in city centers, challenging the myth of a wild Nordic nature, untouched by human hand. Many of the stories were proven to be either false or misleading, such as the Venice dolphins and the drunken elephants. The animals who allegedly showed up in, returned to, or overcrowded certain areas were in fact there all along, but had not gained attention until now. Although several of the stories are lacking in credibility, they can be seen as indications of humans’ understanding of themselves and their relations to nature and other animals. As such, they differ from typical romanticizations of a pristine nature untouched by human hand, as the depicted sceneries are human-built environments. Rather than a dream of a pure nature in a distant past, the images and reports imagine a future without humans. We suggest that lockdown fauna imageries express a happy misanthropy and an optimistic apocalypticism that capture human self-understanding in a society characterized by pandemic and environmental crises. However, these seemingly misanthropic imaginaries also contain fantasies of a future where humans coexist peacefully with other animals, and where the discomforts and inequalities of urban life have been eradicated.
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| 4. |
- Tickle, Lara, et al.
(author)
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Fresh meat : Women's motivations to hunt and how they challenge hunting structures
- 2024
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In: Environment and Planning E. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Hunting has a unique status as a sport and leisure activity alongside its practices having high stakes for society related to ecology, biosecurity, animal welfare and public safety. As such, hunting must increasingly legitimate itself before the public both in terms of ethically justifiable motivations for why to hunt and ethical standards for how to hunt. One way in which public acceptance has been sought in recent years has been to frontline 'women hunters' as the hunting community's indirect ambassadors. An effort to recruit more women is also seen as imperative to the survival of hunting in a practical, demographic sense. When women enter hunting, they enter an arena that is opaque and difficult to navigate along with heavy baggage from gender roles, expectations about proximity to wildlife and nature, and masculine norms on behaviour. In this study, we demonstrate through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and auto-ethnography of a hunting license education in Sweden, how women navigate spaces carved out for men. The findings show traps of emphasised femininity, expectations of women as 'softening influences' on male hunters to rein in their potentially unethical behaviour, and as differentially positioned in the learning process of hunting. However, using Bourdieu's social capital, findings also reveal that women negotiate and trade attributes in creative ways - such as landownership, meat handling skills and knowledge - to gain an advantage, status or level the playing field. We argue that regardless of gender, being in a position of sufficient capital to be able to call out unethical behaviour in the hunting team is crucial insofar as it serves the hunting community's ultimate interest.
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| 5. |
- von Essen, Erica, 1987-
(author)
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Combatting The Greatest Threat To Wolves In Europe : Illegal Killing
- 2021
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Dr. Erica von Essen, Associate Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (Sweden) also joined the panel debate, providing an overview of the social science research on illegal killing of wolves. Describing the various forms in which wolves can (theoretically) be harvested today, she questioned which format is preferable from a biological, ethical, social point of view, and what sort of relationship do these hunting forms establish with the wolf as a species?
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| 6. |
- von Essen, Erica, 1987-, et al.
(author)
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Digital Ecologies: : Materialities, Encounters, Governance
- 2024
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In: Progress in Environmental Geography. - : SAGE Publications. - 2753-9687.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans andnonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance,surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-thanhumanand digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as ananalytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human-nonhumanentanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis fromwhich to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diversesituated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digitaltechnologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, andwith what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically,and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? Andhow are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmentalgovernance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across threecore conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers:(i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitallymediatedmore-than-human connections and their socioenvironmentalimpacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequencesand convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; and (iii) governance,questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-thanhumangovernance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-thanhumanworlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressivecommunities, convivial human-nonhuman encounters, and just forms ofenvironmental governance, and as such note the urgency of theseconversations.
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| 7. |
- von Essen, Erica, 1987-, et al.
(author)
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How fences communicate interspecies codes of conduct in the landscape : toward bidirectional communication?
- 2023
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In: Wildlife Biology. - 0909-6396 .- 1903-220X.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The fence provides two functions in wildlife management. First, it physically blocks, deters or impedes wild animals from access to protected areas or resources. Second, the fence signals impassability, danger, pain or irritation to animals through both of these pathways: the actual blockade and the signal of no access both communicates to wild animals that they should stay away, producing area effects which constrain animal mobility. The mere presence of a fence, while imperfect and potentially passable, can come to establish an area effect of avoidance. In this regard, fences are part of an interspecies communication on the basis of mutually understood signals in the landscape. In this paper, we consider how fences, both physical, such as walls, and virtual, such as 'biofences' that use sensory deterrents, signal danger or no access to wildlife, and with what practical and conceptual limitations. Through a framework of ecosemiotics, the communication of signals between wildlife and humans, we discuss the communicative role fences play in human-wildlife interactions. First, we outline the way in which ecosemiotics may be leveraged to manage human-wildlife conflicts by utilizing fences as signals. Then we explain miscommunication, and how this impacts the success of fences. Finally, we discuss the normative problems of attempting to signal to wildlife how to behave and where to be, and raise the need for bidirectional communication across species, such that wild animals are also seen as participants in negotiating space and access around humans.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- von Essen, Erica, 1987-, et al.
(author)
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Natural born cullers? How hunters police the more-than-human right to the city
- 2023
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In: Environment and Planning E. - : SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a ‘problem’ animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they have from society in relation to managing problem wildlife in cities. Adding to the literature on the constitution of ‘problem’ animals in human environments, we show what happens to these animals in the practical sense, and what informs this decision. Our point of departure is to ask by what rationales hunters consider lethal interventions in urban nature to be legitimate, and which they find to be morally problematic. In a discussion, we reflect on what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence. Through interviews and go-along participant observation with 32 municipal hunters in Sweden, we show how municipal hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit, as facilitators of the natural order, as garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and as enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city. Based on this analysis, we discuss the relative standing of reparative, sacrificial, aesthetic, goodwill, practical, categorical and situational rationales for culling. This paints a picture of hunters as more conflicted about their control of urban nature, in challenge with the stereotypical idea of the professional hunter as a ‘natural born culler’. It also shows a city of parallel planes of multispecies coexistence, where some species and animals get a pass more than others.
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| 10. |
- von Essen, Erica, 1987-, et al.
(author)
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Social licence to cull : Examining scepticism toward lethal wildlife removal in cities
- 2023
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In: People and Nature. - : John Wiley and Sons Inc. - 2575-8314. ; 5:4, s. 1353-1363
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so.Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning resistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people responsible and methods used that undermine the legitimacy of the cull.We bring these together and use a social licence to operate (SLO) framework to demonstrate how support for wildlife culling in the context of biosecurity may be revoked. In the absence of SLO, resistance to wildlife culling can range from personal unease at seeing a cherished species or a neighbourhood fox being culled, to openly confronting the municipal hunter.By interviewing (n = 32) and following (n = 4) municipal hunter in Swedish cities who cull wildlife individuals or populations deemed to pose a threat to public health, safety or other societal interests, we uncover parameters by which culling wildlife are deemed to be problematic: who performs the culling, when the culling is done, how it is done and where it is done. This leads us to the concept of necroaesthetics: taboo ways of taking animal lives. In a unique perspective, we apprehend two forms of resistance: one that hunters attribute to the public and that of hunters' own unease at performing certain culling interventions. While the public and municipal hunters disagree, they also have similar criteria for opposing culls.We conclude by considering the future of the SLO of culling wildlife for biosecurity, including the subjective nature of its Revocation. This goes toward identifying parameters that make culls likely to produce controversy, hence granting some predictive value for managers in their planning.
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