Please join us as Meredith Root-Bernstein will give this joint AIAS/CEH Talk. Meredith is a researcher at CNRS (Center for Ecology and Conservation Sciences; Museum of Natural History) in Paris, France, as well as an affiliated researcher at the Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability, Santiago, Chile. She is an ethnobiologist, ecologist, translational ecologist, and conservationist, with an interest in the ecology of degradation and restoration, the ethnography of human-environment relations, governance, and environmental policies. She focuses on anthropogenic and marginal habitats, the Mediterranean climate, and semi-arid zones.

The event is free and open for all to attend.

Please read more about Meredith here, and see AIAS' website for the event here. 

Abstract

Nonhuman animal agency refers to the capacity of animals to create, set in motion, and cause or influence things to happen through their relations with humans and/or other nonhumans. Ecology has long recognised that animal species are active components of ecosystems and have important ecological functions, yet much of wildlife management treats other species as objects that are (or should be) passive and controllable. I argue that explicit recognition of nonhuman agency can reduce human-wildlife conflict, enhance the capacity for coexistence, and create better outcomes of conservation and other human projects. Rather than trying to control species, the emerging more-than-human perspective suggests that a better target of management is place-based relationships, where humans and a variety of nonhumans are active participants in shaping landscape structures and lived experiences. To do so in practice, there are two approaches: cosmopolitan polyglossia, in which, as other species do, humans communicate across species boundaries by speaking human language and understanding other species' communications. However, most humans have lost the capacity to understand other animals, and there are limits to what language-based interaction models can achieve. The alternative is to focus on object-mediated interactions. Here, objects can be rendered interactive agency-facilitating media through design. Design with nonhuman species is a pragmatic approach which draws on and may combine elements of contemporary design methods, coexistence approaches, rewilding perspectives, adaptive management, and traditional land management practices. The uniqueness of the design with approach is a focus that responds to both humans’ and nonhumans’ agencies, and that enables interactive problem-solving mediated by materials, objects, structures, spaces, and spatiotemporal patterns. Design with seeks to realize and embody desires and concepts, which we may understand as being held by both humans and nonhumans.