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As invasive species management becomes more ambitious in scope and scale, projects are increasingly challenged by disputes and conflicts among people, which can produce undesirable environmental and social outcomes. Here, we examine when and how conflicts have arisen from invasive species management, and consider why some management approaches may be more prone to conflict than others. Insufficient appreciation of sociopolitical context, non-existent or perfunctory public and community engagement, and unidirectional communications can all foster \"destructive\" conflict. We propose that approaches to conflict in invasive species management might be transformed by anticipating disagreements, attending more carefully to the social-ecological contexts of management, adopting more inclusive engagement mechanisms, and fostering more open, responsive communication. Conflicts may be unavoidable, but they can be anticipated and need not be destructive.

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have, for some at least, become key challenges for contemporary global society. They threaten progress in global health, compromise food security and, along with climate change and global terrorism, seem to usher in a state of emergency and a radically uncertain future. The central claim of Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad based geographical scrutiny. The book marks an empirically and theoretically informed contribution to a world seemingly under constant microbiological threat, drawing together and extending empirically based geographical scholarship in human-environment relations, science and society, more than human geographies and spatial theory, to understand and evaluate efforts at making life more secure. The focus is on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease can reach pandemic proportions. The authors review current approaches to biosecurity on making life safe within those sectors, analyse underlying drivers and logics to existing programmes and ask whether the resulting solutions can succeed. They follow farmers, retailers and regulators, amongst others, asking how pathological lives can be successfully 'regulated' without making life more dangerous as a result.

Biosecurity, as a response to threats from zoonotic, food-borne and emerging infectious diseases, implies and is often understood in terms of a spatial segregation of forms of life, a struggle to separate healthy life from diseased bodies. While an ensuing will to closure in the name of biosecurity is evident at various sites, things are, in practice and in theory, more intricate than this model would suggest. There are transactions and transformations that defy easily segmented spaces. Using multi-species ethnographic work across a range of sites, from wildlife reserves to farms and food processing plants, we argue for a shift of focus in biosecurity away from defined borderlines towards that of borderlands. The latter involves the detachment of borders from geographic territory and highlights the continuous topological interplay and resulting tensions involved in making life live. We use this spatial imagination to call for a different kind of biopolitics and for a shift in what counts as a biosecurity emergency. As a means to re-frame the questions concerning biosecurity, we argue for a change of discourse and practice away from disease 'breach points' towards the 'tipping points' that can arise in the intense foldings that characterise pathological lives.

Widespread antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a threat to public and animal health, and has consequences for the structure and sustainability of food production. The problem is often framed as one of inappropriate antimicrobial use, which drives emergence and selection of resistant microbes. The answer to this framing of the problem is to lower disease incidence and transmission rates, regulate antimicrobial uses and to educate prescribers and users of medicines. In this paper we argue that this seemingly straightforward programme of action is beset by at least two difficulties. First, in many parts of the world, disease dynamics and antimicrobial uses are embedded within biosocially demanding settings. Second, antibiotic use is one among many possible drivers of resistance. We focus on the aquatic environment and aquacultural food production where resistance drivers may relate to a variety of processes. Using interviews, survey data, and participatory modelling exercises with competency groups in Bangladesh’s shrimp and prawn aquaculture sector, we demonstrate the need to understand economic and biological drivers of disease, farmer adaptations to disease risks and the potential paradox of pursuing pathogen-free food production as a means to reduce AMR risks. We argue that the AMR problem needs to be framed as an adaptive rather than technical challenge, and involves ownership, change and experimentation across a range of relevant sites.

1. Invasive species management aims to prevent or mitigate the impacts of introduced species but management interventions can themselves generate social impacts that must be understood and addressed. 2. Established approaches for addressing the social implications of invasive species management can be limited in effectiveness and democratic legitimacy. More deliberative, participatory approaches are emerging that allow integration of a broader range of socio-political considerations. Nevertheless, there is a need to ensure that these are rigorous applications of social science. 3. Social impact assessment offers a structured process of identifying, evaluating and addressing social costs and benefits. We highlight its potential value for enabling meaningful public participation in planning and as a key component of integrated assessments of management options. 4. Policy implications. As invasive species management grows in scope and scale, social impact assessment provides a rigorous process for recognising and responding to social concerns. It could therefore produce more democratic, less conflict-prone and more effective interventions.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. Food production and farming are a key if troubling component of that challenge. Livestock production accounts for well over half of annual global consumption of antimicrobials, though the contribution of the sector to drug resistance is less clear. As a result, there is an injunction to act in advance of incontrovertible evidence for change. In this paper we engage with the role of market actors in the precautionary regulation of farming practices and AMR threats. The paper takes the UK poultry sector as exemplary of an audit-led process that has, in recent years, achieved impressive reductions in antimicrobial use. Using qualitative interview data with farmers and veterinarians we chart the changing practices that have accompanied this reduction in treatments. We use this analysis to raise some cautions around audit-led systems of regulation. Audits can lock farms and animals into particular versions of farming and animal health; they can elevate harmful compensatory practices (including disinfectant uses); and they can reproduce an actuarial approach to an issue that does not fit the conventions of risk management. The paper presents the considerable successes that have been achieved over a short period of time in a livestock sector, while generating notes of caution concerning the audit-led management of livestock-related AMR threats.

The age in which people in the West have treated society and nature as essentially separate matters is at an end. Environmental change and degradation impinge on all our lives, and even our genes are increasingly seen by employers and insurers as commodities.The Natural and the Social draws on insights from across the social sciences to examine the changing character of these interrelations between society and nature. Individual chapters look in depth at genes, environments and human development, medical practices and health, and the management of environmental risk. Throughout students are encouraged to draw on their own experiences to understand the theoretical and practical problems of living in this new natural-and-social world.This exciting and original text will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more clearly the role and limitations of technological and scientific progress in contemporary society.

Increasingly, non-human geographies have unfastened nature from its foundational moorings. In a parallel development, the benefits of adhering to precautionary and participatory forms of decision-making have become common place in environmental geography and in government policy. And yet, on closer inspection, there is a danger in these latter approaches that old certainties regarding non-human natures remain unquestioned. The result can be a tendency to gravitate towards bureaucratic and technical solutions to, or closures on, what are, first and foremost, political and open-ended problems. This paper uses an empirical engagement with BSE-related scientific and policy practices, along with insights from non-human geographies, science studies and poststructuralism to suggest that such certainties and resolutions are misplaced.