Epilogue: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration

To bridge the gaps between restoration as a science and as a practice, restoration ecology has to broaden its scope toward transdisciplinarity in close cooperation with landscape ecologists and other holistic environmentally oriented scientists, professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders. For restoration, the ongoing transdisciplinary scientific revolution has opened new insights to cope with the complex bio‐hydro‐ and human‐ecological network relations. The Total Human Ecosystem (THE), integrating humans with all other organisms and their total environment at the highest level of the global hierarchy, should become the unifying holistic paradigm for all synthetic “eco‐disciplines.” These should link ecological knowledge, wisdom, and ethics with their scientific and professional expertise from the natural and social sciences and the humanities. As the tangible matrix for all organisms, including humans, our industrial Total Human Landscape is the concrete spatial and functional system of the THE. It forms a closely interlaced network of solar energy–powered natural and seminatural biosphere landscapes and fossil energy–powered urban and agro‐industrial technosphere landscapes. The self‐organizing and self‐creative restoration capacities of biosphere landscapes are driven by mutually amplifying auto‐ and cross‐catalytic feedback loops, but the rapidly expanding technosphere landscapes are driven by destabilizing “run‐away” feedback loops. To prevent a global breakdown and to ensure the sustainable future for both humankind and nature, these positive feedbacks have to be counteracted by restraining, cultural feedbacks of environmental planning and management, conservation, and restoration. As the theme of this special issue alludes to, this template should become an integral part of an urgently needed sustainability revolution, to which the transdisciplinary landscape restoration could contribute its important share.     

Breaking Through Disciplinary Barriers: Human–Wildlife Interactions and Multispecies Ethnography

One of the main challenges when integrating biological and social perspectives in primatology is overcoming interdisciplinary barriers. Unfamiliarity with subject-specific theory and language, distinct disciplinary-bound approaches to research, and academic boundaries aimed at “preserving the integrity” of subject disciplines can hinder developments in interdisciplinary research. With growing interest in how humans and other primates share landscapes, and recognition of the importance of combining biological and social information to do this effectively, the disparate use of terminology is becoming more evident. To tackle this problem, we dissect the meaning of what the biological sciences term studies in “human–wildlife conflict” or more recently “human–wildlife interactions” and compare it to what anthropology terms “multispecies ethnography.” In the biological sciences, human–wildlife interactions are the actions resulting from people and wild animals sharing landscapes and resources, with outcomes ranging from being beneficial or harmful to one or both species. In the social sciences, human–nonhuman relationships have been explored on a philosophical, analytical, and empirical level. Building on previous work, we advocate viewing landscapes through an interdisciplinary “multispecies lens” in which humans are observed as one of multiple organisms that interact with other species to shape and create environments. To illustrate these interconnections we use the case study of coexistence between people of the Nalu ethnic group and Critically Endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau, to demonstrate how biological and social research approaches can be complementary and can inform conservation initiatives at the human–primate interface. Finally, we discuss how combining perspectives from ethnoprimatology with those from multispecies ethnography can advance the study of ethnoprimatology to aid productive discourse and enhance future interdisciplinary research.     

Biosocial Conservation: Integrating Biological and Ethnographic Methods to Study Human–Primate Interactions

Biodiversity conservation is one of the grand challenges facing society. Many people interested in biodiversity conservation have a background in wildlife biology. However, the diverse social, cultural, political, and historical factors that influence the lives of people and wildlife can be investigated fully only by incorporating social science methods, ideally within an interdisciplinary framework. Cultural hierarchies of knowledge and the hegemony of the natural sciences create a barrier to interdisciplinary understandings. Here, we review three different projects that confront this difficulty, integrating biological and ethnographic methods to study conservation problems. The first project involved wildlife foraging on crops around a newly established national park in Gabon. Biological methods revealed the extent of crop loss, the species responsible, and an effect of field isolation, while ethnography revealed institutional and social vulnerability to foraging wildlife. The second project concerned great ape tourism in the Central African Republic. Biological methods revealed that gorilla tourism poses risks to gorillas, while ethnography revealed why people seek close proximity to gorillas. The third project focused on humans and other primates living alongside one another in Morocco. Incorporating shepherds in the coproduction of ecological knowledge about primates built trust and altered attitudes to the primates. These three case studies demonstrate how the integration of biological and social methods can help us to understand the sustainability of human–wildlife interactions, and thus promote coexistence. In each case, an integrated biosocial approach incorporating ethnographic data produced results that would not otherwise have come to light. Research that transcends conventional academic boundaries requires the openness and flexibility to move beyond one’s comfort zone to understand and acknowledge the legitimacy of “other” kinds of knowledge. It is challenging but crucial if we are to address conservation problems effectively.     

Seeking consilience: Traditional ecological knowledge and Western social science contributions to orca conservation knowledge

Consilience is the integration of disciplinary knowledges in search of a more complete truth. In the complex context of conservation, where human activities are increasingly impacting the population status of many species, this endeavor is particularly important. Yet, to date, we have had limited attempts at unifying diverse sources of knowledge around a conservation issue. Focusing on orca conservation specifically, we share the perspectives of five scholars from five disciplines to demonstrate how Indigenous Knowledges and Social Sciences can inform the conservation of Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs). We see Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as an original consilient knowledge and Western social sciences as the fields that can best identify and describe the norms and patterns of how to engage conservation. The integration of these broader knowledge systems, driven by individuals trained in their respective fields, with the already existing biophysical data around SRKWs, can help us make better decisions for SRKW conservation.     

Reconciling Wildlife Management's Conflicted Purpose With a Land Community Worldview

ABSTRACT To reach its potential wildlife management needs a coherent purpose. Traditional divisions between science, society, and nature, however, create conflicts between responsibility to science, the public, and nature. These divisions emerged as early as Plato's (400 BC) allegory of the cave. In Plato's allegory human society existed inside a cave formed by its own delusions, and a philosopher or scientist could leave the cave and apprehend reality in nature. Wildlife management's simultaneous responsibility to public preferences, objective truth, and biotic integrity provides the foundation for a conservation worldview capable of transcending the divisions embodied in Plato's allegory. In this paper we deconstruct the conflicted worldview standing on that foundation and describe a land community-based worldview for wildlife management that could replace it. The transition from traditional views of science, society, and nature to a land community worldview requires 1) changing scientific stewardship from seeking objective truth to seeking credible truth, 2) changing political stewardship from following societal dictates to representing wildlife within the land community, and 3) changing ethical stewardship from protecting biotic integrity to fighting permanent closure of land community boundaries. Adopting a land community worldview for wildlife management requires relinquishing the illusion of absolute objectivity and a fall from status as neutral arbiters of knowledge but provides a means for honorably seeking reliable knowledge, serving the public and respecting the land community.     

树商陆：潮湿的潘帕斯大草原景观的实践与表达

学名为Phytolacca dioica的树种将会贯穿全文。此树种在乌拉圭的通用名叫做树商陆，是本研究缘起的核心。它是潘帕斯大草原的标志性物种，也是乌拉圭景观特质的基础。树商陆在研究和教育工作领域的目标和意义在于将艺术、人类、社会和自然科学联系起来。对树商陆在潘帕斯大草原湿润气候下所表现出的景观价值进行研究。提高了公众对自然元素同景观价值、地方故事间关系的认知度和敏感度。这加强了对遗产以及领土和文化融合的集体责任感。理论往往需要适用于方法论，并协作实践性的工作。例如现场活动与ICT（门户网站http://www.ombues.edu.uy）的相互关联，这便如不断往返于科学文化的普及与流行文化的智慧， 用跨学科的方式建构知识。     

Impact of war on conservation: Rwandan environment and wildlife in agony

Among the crucial problems that affect conservation in less developed countries are the high human pressure on natural habitats, poverty, low conservation education and lack of integration of local population. However, political and ethnic conflicts, which occur around the world and particularly in African countries, significantly affect all sectors of human society, the environment and wildlife. In this paper, we discuss the consequences of the Rwandan civil war of 1990–1994, recognized as one of the major tragedies of the 20th century, with a particular focus on protected areas and conservation bodies in the country.     

Digging the rabbit hole,COVID-19 edition: anti-vaccine themes and the discourse around COVID-19

This article draws on a broadcast popular among the anti-vaccine community to map out six themes used by the broadcast to mislead viewers about COVID-19. The themes are the claim that “they” – government and pharma – are lying to you, claims that COVID-19 is an excuse to remove civil liberties, viewing everyone as an expert, claiming that science cannot save us, skewing the science, and a claim that “they” are out to harm the viewers. The article points out that similar themes are used to mislead followers with anti-vaccine information. It highlights the concern that these themes will not only mislead people who are already anti-vaccine about the pandemic, but may draw in people who are not anti-vaccine but are seeking information about COVID-19, and suggests some options for dealing with the misinformation. Scientists benefit from understanding these claims, as we are often tasked with providing rebuttals to this misinformation.     

保护生物学概要

保护生物学的形成是对生物危机的反应和生物科学迅速发展的结果。它是应用科学解决由于人类活动干扰或其它因素引起的物种、群落和生态系统出现的问题的新学科。其”目的是提供保护生物多样性的原理和工具“,其基础科学和应用科学的综合性交叉学科。系统学、生态学、生物地理学和种群生态学的原理和方法是保护生物学重要的理论和实践基础。     

Wild-ing the Ethnography of Conservation: Writing Nature’s Value and Agency In

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems both for anthropology and conservation science.     

什么是可持续性科学

可持续发展是我们时代的主题,也是人类面临的最大挑战.自20世纪70年代,尤其是近20年来,可持续发展的概念日益频繁地出现在学术文章、政府文件以及公益宣传和商业广告之中.然而,为可持续发展提供理论基础和实践指导的科学——可持续性科学——是在21世纪初才开始形成的.该科学在短短的十几年中迅速开拓、不断发展,正在形成其科学概念框架和研究体系.中国是世界大国,是可持续性科学的哲学思想——“天人合一”——的故乡,有必要承担起时代之重任,在追求“中国梦”的同时促进全球可持续发展,并积极参与进而引领可持续性科学的研究和实践.为了帮助实现这一宏伟而远大目标,本文拟对可持续性科学的基本概念、研究论题和发展前景作一概述.可持续性科学是研究人与环境之间动态关系——特别是耦合系统的脆弱性、抗扰性、弹性和稳定性——的整合型科学.它穿越自然科学和人文与社会科学,以环境、经济和社会的相互关系为核心,将基础性研究和应用研究融为一体.可持续发展的核心内容往往因时、因地、 因人而异.因此,可持续性科学必须注重多尺度研究,同时应特别关注 50到100年的时间尺度和景观以及区域的空间尺度. 景观和区域不但是最可操作的空间尺度,同时也是上通全球、下达局地的枢纽尺度.可持续性科学需要聚焦于生态系统服务和人类福祉的相互关系,进而探讨生物多样性和生态系统过程,以及气候变化、土地利用变化和其他社会经济驱动过程对这一关系的影响.我们认为,景观和可持续性是可持续性科学的核心研究内容,也将是可持续性科学在以后几十年的研究热点.     

Cheap and Nasty? The Potential Perils of Using Management Costs to Identify Global Conservation Priorities

The financial cost of biodiversity conservation varies widely around the world and such costs should be considered when identifying countries to best focus conservation investments. Previous global prioritizations have been based on global models for protected area management costs, but this metric may be related to other factors that negatively influence the effectiveness and social impacts of conservation. Here we investigate such relationships and first show that countries with low predicted costs are less politically stable. Local support and capacity can mitigate the impacts of such instability, but we also found that these countries have less civil society involvement in conservation. Therefore, externally funded projects in these countries must rely on government agencies for implementation. This can be problematic, as our analyses show that governments in countries with low predicted costs score poorly on indices of corruption, bureaucratic quality and human rights. Taken together, our results demonstrate that using national-level estimates for protected area management costs to set global conservation priorities is simplistic, as projects in apparently low-cost countries are less likely to succeed and more likely to have negative impacts on people. We identify the need for an improved approach to develop global conservation cost metrics that better capture the true costs of avoiding or overcoming such problems. Critically, conservation scientists must engage with practitioners to better understand and implement context-specific solutions. This approach assumes that measures of conservation costs, like measures of conservation value, are organization specific, and would bring a much-needed focus on reducing the negative impacts of conservation to develop projects that benefit people and biodiversity.     

Humanity at the Edge: The Moral Laboratory of Feeding Precarious Lives

At the heart of anthropology and the social sciences lies a notion of human existence according to which humans and animals share the basic need for food, but only humans have the capacity for morality. Based on fieldwork in a pig laboratory, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a dementia nursing home, we follow practices of feeding precarious lives lacking most markers of human personhood, including the exercise of moral judgment. Despite the absence of such markers, laboratory researchers and caregivers in these three sites do not abstain from engaging in questions about the moral status of the piglets, infants, and people with dementia in their care. They continually negotiate how their charges belong to the human collectivity and thereby challenge the notion of ‘the human’ that is foundational to anthropology. Combining analytical approaches that do not operate with a fixed boundary between human and animal value and agency with approaches that focus on human experience and virtue ethics, we argue that ‘the human’ at stake in the moral laboratory of feeding precarious lives puts ‘the human’ in anthropology at disposal for moral experimentation.     

The evolutionary roots of our environmental problems: toward a Darwinian ecology

It is widely acknowledged that we need to stabilize population growth and reduce our environmental impact; however, there is little consensus about how we might achieve these changes. Here I show how evolutionary analyses of human behavior provide important, though generally ignored, insights into our environmental problems. First, I review increasing evidence that Homo sapiens has a long history of causing ecological problems. This means that, contrary to popular belief, our species' capacity for ecological destruction is not simply due to "Western" culture. Second, I provide an overview of how evolutionary research can help to understand why humans are ecologically destructive, including the reasons why people often overpopulate, overconsume, exhaust common-pool resources, discount the future, and respond maladaptively to modern environmental hazards. Evolutionary approaches not only explain our darker sides, they also provide insights into why people cherish plants and animals and often support environmental and conservation efforts (e.g., Wilson's "biophilia hypothesis"). Third, I show how evolutionary analyses of human behavior offer practical implications for environmental policy, education, and activism. I suggest that education is necessary but insufficient because people also need incentives. Individual incentives are likely to be the most effective, but these include much more than narrow economic interests (e.g., they include one's reputation in society). Moralizing and other forms of social pressure used by environmentalists to bring about change appear to be effective, but this idea needs more research. Finally, I suggest that integrating evolutionary perspectives into the environmental sciences will help to break down the artificial barriers that continue to divide the biological and social sciences, which unfortunately obstruct our ability to understand ourselves and effectively address our environmental problems.     

Urban biodiversity, city-dwellers and conservation: how does an outdoor activity day affect the human-nature relationship?

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the influence of an urban conservation activity day on individual knowledge, awareness and actions towards biodiversity, in both the short and longer term.We organised three activity days in Paris (France), during which people were invited to participate in urban conservation efforts. Both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interviews) methods were employed to investigate the influence of this short urban nature experience on the relationships that city-dwellers develop with nearby biodiversity. We found a strong positive correlation between the levels of participation and an immediate interest towards local urban biodiversity. In the longer term, however, although participants claimed to have gained more knowledge, local awareness and interest for species in their daily environment, they did not seem to extend this interest to participating in other related activities. These results highlight the complexity of validating the effectiveness of this type of education program for achieving conservation goals. Although such a short activity may only have a limited environmental impact, it nevertheless seems to increase people's knowledge, awareness, interest and concern. We therefore believe that when repeated locally, these short conservation education programs could enhance people's experience with nature in cities and achieve conservation goals more fully.     

云南楚雄彝族植物崇拜的调查研究

本文对云南楚雄彝族传统的植物崇拜进行了广泛的调查,对被崇拜植物及其文化内涵进行了编目,着重植物崇拜文化对当地生物多样性保护的影响,讨论了楚雄彝族的植物文化在当地生物多样性保护和管理中的作用和意义,进一步探讨了在我国利用传统文化进行现代自然保护的必要性、可能性和可行性。     

Fieldwork: man in the system of nature and priority of natural laws in human life

Fieldwork is a branch of inseparable unity of natural and humanitarian sciences; it is aimed at the cultural origin of humanity on the maximum level of its variety. Practically all natural sciences have some space determined by ethnic conscience in nature cognition: ethnodemography, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, etc. Fieldwork guides the research of human culture from the laws of nature. This kind of knowledge is useful to balance human relations with nature and avoid conflicts. Peoples should exchange their wisdom in the dialogue with nature to be more safe. Fieldwork understood as traditional culture only, explaining the variety of ethnoses on our earth, is just the narrow and diachronic level of this branch of knowledge. The cosmological knowledge, where fantasy and not exhausted in its cognition understanding the world of nature are mixed, forms the source of fieldwork and in many respects explains the direction of knowledge: the man finds himself under the open sky, he is the child of nature. Then as time went on there appeared a gradual transition--first nature was creating the man, then by and by he began turning to answer nature by his activity. Nowadays the man is actively creating nature. There are two levels of fieldwork: the ancient one which deals with the origin of ethnoses and the modern one which explores how contemporary life is determined by ethnic specific traits. Fieldwork is the core of multidisciplinary situation in man's knowledge. It is related to such humanitarian sciences: semiotics, culturology, sociology, history, philosophy, literature, linguistics. In the cycle of natural sciences fieldwork stands close to anthropology, geography, biology, demography. Fieldwork as a science has the two main levels--the "sophy" level and the logos "level". The first one discovers wisdom of human life, the second one is aimed at logical structuring of knowledge, here proceed various classifications of peoples.     

Long-term retrospection on mangrove development using transdisciplinary approaches: A review

Large ecosystem processes often take place beyond the observation time of a researcher. Yet, through retrospective research scientists can approach and understand ecosystem changes. This contributes to the fundamental understanding of both human-induced and natural dynamics in ecosystems world-wide. This also holds for fast changing coastal areas with mangrove ecosystems, which are important for biodiversity, for coastal protection, and for the daily livelihood of millions of people in tropical coastal developing countries. In addition, retrospective research generates a basis for predictions that can be used early on to protect an ecosystem. In attempting to protect ecosystems from adverse human-induced change and destruction, and to manage them for sustainability, scientists are only beginning to investigate and understand natural ecosystem dynamics. It is important and advisable to gather, combine and analyse all possible data that allow a researcher to look back in time. This paper reviews the available retrospective methods, and highlights the transdisciplinary way (i.e. combination between basic and applied sciences on one hand, and social and human sciences on the other) in which retrospective research on a scale between months and centuries can be carried out, but it also includes methods on larger scales that may be marginally relevant. The paper particularly emphasizes the lack of transdisciplinary (not interdisciplinary) integration between sciences in retrospective research on mangrove forests in the past.     

Diamonds or Dragonflies? A Question of Reshaping Societal Values

I contend that our values are muddled and misplaced. As a society, Nature is grossly undervalued relative to other commodities and priorities despite its integral and central role in our psyche and culture. The increasing dissociation of humans from nature, physically, intellectually and culturally, threatens the conservation ethic and all our efforts at conserving Nature in the long term, for human benefit or for its own sake. We need to reverse the increasing human isolation from the natural environment by encouraging our children and the wider public to engage with Nature. The formative experiences thus gained might, with time, change societal priorities in favor of a renewed conservation ethic.