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From tongue-in-cheek sonnets to lyrical free verse, Susan Blackaby's poems explore the many kinds of homes animals make for themselves.

Many migratory fish populations are declining, threatened by human‐induced pressures such as habitat loss and fragmentation caused by dams, roads, land use change, climate change and pollution. However, public awareness of fish migration and associated human pressures remains limited. It is important to communicate about hard‐to‐see and complex environmental topics and issues, such as fish migration, with young people, who stand to be the most affected by ongoing global changes. Young people are also at a critical stage in their attitude formation and may be particularly receptive to learning enrichment and engagement for behaviour change about environmental issues. Arts‐based methods can be particularly effective in fostering broad personal connections with nature, especially for complex topics like fish migration. The collaborative and creative processes involved in developing such media often lack critique, which limits learning from previous experiences. In this article, we reflect on the co‐creation of the Shout Trout Workout (STW), a lyric poem, comic and music video for 8‐ to 14‐year‐olds, designed to entertain, engage and enrich learning about migratory fishes and aquatic environments. We chart the process of creation, including conception of ideas, writing the poem, fact‐checking and developing the storyline with scientists and creating a comic and music video with visual artists and musicians. We explore some of the challenges and merits of collaborative working, consider the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the creative and initial engagement process and share what we learned about creative input, communication and respect. We also discuss how the experience shaped our thoughts about the nature of co‐creation itself, and how in creating STW, collaborators contributed to the process in multiple, nuanced and unanticipated ways (e.g. artistic input, ideas, science, dissemination), representing a spectrum of co‐creative practice. We hope that sharing our experiences and reflections is useful and inspiring for other cross‐disciplinary collaborations, and for those who aim to create learning enrichment and engagement material about ecological processes and environmental issues for young people. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. Crynodeb Mae niferoedd llawer o boblogaethau pysgod mudol yn gostwng, dan fygythiad pwysau sy'n deillio o weithgarwch dynol, megis colli cynefinoedd ac effaith rhwystrau megis argaeau, ffyrdd, newid defnydd tir, newid yn yr hinsawdd a llygredd ar eu cynefinoedd. Fodd bynnag, mae ymwybyddiaeth y cyhoedd o batrymau mudo pysgod a'r pwysau dynol cysylltiedig yn brin o hyd. Mae'n bwysig cyfathrebu â phobl ifanc am bynciau a materion amgylcheddol cymhleth nad ydynt yn amlwg, megis mudo pysgod, oherwydd arnyn nhw y bydd newidiadau byd‐eang yn effeithio fwyaf. Hefyd, mae pobl ifanc mewn cyfnod allweddol o ran datblygu agweddau, a gallant fod yn hynod agored i gyfleoedd cyfoethogi dysgu ac ymgysylltu â'r nod o newid ymddygiad ynghylch materion amgylcheddol. Gall dulliau ar sail y celfyddydau fod yn arbennig o effeithiol wrth feithrin cysylltiadau personol eang â byd natur, yn enwedig wrth sôn am bynciau cymhleth megis mudo pysgod. Yn aml, nid yw'r prosesau cydweithredol a chreadigol sy'n rhan o ddatblygu cyfryngau o'r fath yn cael eu gwerthuso, sy'n golygu bod cyfleoedd i ddysgu o brofiadau blaenorol yn gyfyngedig. Yn yr erthygl hon, rydym yn myfyrio ar y broses o gydweithio i greu'r Shout Trout Workout (STW), cerdd delynegol, comig a fideo cerddorol ar gyfer pobl ifanc rhwng 8 ac 14 oed, â'r nod o ddifyrru, ennyn diddordeb, cyfoethogi dysgu am bysgod mudol ac amgylcheddau dyfrol. Rydym yn olrhain y broses greadigol, gan gynnwys llunio syniadau, ysgrifennu'r gerdd, gwirio ffeithiau a datblygu'r stori gyda gwyddonwyr, a chreu comig a fideo cerddorol gydag artistiaid gweledol a cherddorion. Rydym yn archwilio rhai o'r heriau a'r manteision sydd ynghlwm wrth waith cydweithredol, yn ystyried effeithiau pandemig COVID‐19 ar y broses greadigol a'r gwaith ymgysylltu cychwynnol, ac yn rhannu'r hyn rydym wedi'i ddysgu am fewnbwn creadigol, cyfathrebu a pharch. Rydym hefyd yn trafod effaith y profiad ar ein syniadau am natur cyd‐greu ei hun a sut, wrth greu'r STW, y cyfrannodd y cydweithredwyr at y broses mewn ffyrdd amrywiol, cynnil ac annisgwyl (e.e. mewnbwn artistig, syniadau, gwyddoniaeth, lledaenu), gan gynrychioli sbectrwm o ymarfer cyd‐greadigol. Gobeithiwn y bydd rhannu ein profiadau a'n myfyrdodau yn ddefnyddiol, gan ysbrydoli cydweithrediadau trawsddisgyblaethol eraill, ac o gymorth i'r rhai sy'n gobeithio creu deunydd cyfoethogi dysgu ac ymgysylltu am brosesau ecolegol a materion amgylcheddol ar gyfer pobl ifanc. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Did you know that half of the planets animals and plants can be found in the rainforest? Meet gorillas, boa constrictors, and more in the pages of My Home in the Rainforest.

Flagships are one conservation education tool. We present a proposed flagship species fleet for environmental education in central Chile. Our methods followed recent flagship guidelines. We present our selection process and a detailed justification for the fleet of flagship species that we selected. Our results are a list of eight flagship species forming a flagship fleet, including two small- and medium-sized mammals, the degu (Octodon degus) and the culpeo fox (Lycalopex culpeaus), two birds, the turca (Pteroptochos megapoidius) and the burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia), the Chilean iguana (Calopistes palluma), the tarantula (Grammostola mollicoma), and two trees, the litre (Lithrea caustica) and the espino (Acacia caven). We then describe how these flagships can be deployed most effectively, describing their audience, effective narrative frames, and modes of presentation. We conclude that general selection rules paired with social science background data allow for an efficient selection process.

Following the path of Raymond Williams, Edward Said re-situated the novel within the contours of its political and physical world, the actual geographical nexus from which [its] narrative trajectory emerges to interpret the text as a heightened form of historical experience.5 And William Cronon found a place for stories when making sense of long term social-environmental processes, with non-human agencies and determinations, while focussing on the way different historical plots, of progress and decline, reshape valuations of one region, evident in its various place names, Great Plains, Wheat Belt, Dust Bowl, the Land Where the Sky Begins.6 The focus on matters of cultural heritage, in the meaning and marketing of places, has raised geographical questions of how sites and landscapes are a narrative medium, officially so, in pictures, on the ground or the many designed spaces such as museums, galleries, monuments, and archives, and how counter-narratives might be told in new forms of interpretation and display.7 To show and tell contemporary artists focus on passing time in landscape matters, like photographer Jem Southams documentation of soil creep as well as social transformation in his book Landscape Stories.8 Landscape designers narrativize their practice, as a way of moving beyond a narrow professional expertise, and reaching out to a wider world of natural and social processes, and ways of making sense of them.9 While narrative has been extended one way beyond written human history, even human presence itself, to matters of deep time, so it has been focussed within human individuals too, in a new, consciously creative conjunction of personal biography and natural history, often conducted as a place based form of writing, in fact a renewed relationship that demands some critical reflection on its own history as a literary genre. With both a popular readership and gathering academic attention, new nature writing reworks a centuries-old literary tradition of natural description and natural history publishing.10 Regional and topographical in orientation, the signature feature of this narrative-driven genre is a deeply personalized quality of expression, articulating anxieties about irreversible local change, nowadays in a context of resource depletion, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and atmospheric warming on a global scale. The retroactive force of these resources might be brought to bear not only on a given present but on conformist versions of the past as the way it really was, once upon a time, to seize hold of a memoryan imageas it flashes up.15 It is not surprising that cultural anthropology has paved a way for wider scholarly recognition of storytelling, as a sophisticated mode for communicating both experience and imagination, and as a form of practice, involving verbal and non-verbal ways of telling, well beyond the original field research.16 The work of Kathleen Stewart, in narrativising a local cultural real in coal mining communities in West Virginia, and Tim Ingolds reports of wayfinding as storytelling in hunter-gather cultures have influenced recent cultural geographic work on places in Britain.17 For Ingold, stories are a propulsive force, usefully bearing the weight of direct comparison to walking and to weaving, as organic activities formed from a meshwork of movement and habitation, and producing a more satisfactory ecology of life.18 A recent book on landscape design cites anthropologist David Gusss search to record the creation epic of the Kekua in the Venezuelan rainforest. While the doing may involve various ways of telling in dramaturgical practice, so performance survives as a cluster of narratives, those of the watchers and the watched, and all those who facilitate their interaction.20 In Mike Pearsons work questions of site, landscape and environment, in their various forms, studio, parish, field, disused factory, military training ground, are frameworks for overlapping forms of storytelling, antiquarian, chorographical, biographical, acted out in situ, recollected on the page.21 Beyond the academy, the work of John Berger, a cultural critic and creative writer centrally concerned with ways of telling as well as ways of seeing the material world, has been surprisingly neglected in geography.22 Decisively influenced by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Bergers oeuvre ranges across a repertoire of forms and genres (photo-essay, travelogue, memoir, letters, poetry, diary dispatches and fiction) his narratives turning on highly personal, deeply physical experiences caught up in the greater churn of social and environmental change.23 Here are stories of exile and migration, displacements and disruptions, landscapes and livelihoods, largely in overlooked, peripheral regions of Europe, or its edges, on a compass dial that takes in stories from Palestine, Anatolia and Lisbon.

At winter's end in 1947, driven by the devastating loss of a son killed in World War II, naturalist Edwin Way Teale followed the dawning spring season northward in an amazing 17,000-mile odyssey from the Everglades to Maine. He wrote about the adventure in North with the Spring . Its sequel Wandering Through Winter won the Pulitzer Prize. Retracing Teale's route, writer John Harris reveals a vastly changed natural world. In Returning North with the Spring , he stops at the very places where Teale once stood, trekking through the Okefenokee wetland, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Great Dismal Swamp, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and Cape Cod. He is stunned to see how climate change, invasive species, and other factors have affected the landscapes and wildlife. Yet he also discovers that many of the sites Teale described have been newly rewilded or permanently protected by the government. Homage to the past, report on the present, glimpse into the future--this book honors what has been lost in the years since Teale's famous journey and finds hope in the small tenacities of nature.

How do we understand the boundaries of individual creatures? What are the systems of interdependency that bind all living creatures together? Plants were among the the first to colonize the planet. They created the soil and the atmosphere that made life possible for animals. They are some of the largest and oldest life forms on Earth. In spite of their primacy, Western cultures have traditionally regarded plants as the lowest life forms, lacking mobility, sensation, and communication. But recent research argues that plants move and respond to their environment, communicate with each other, and form partnerships with other species. Art, poetry, and essays by cultural anthropologists, experimental plant biologists, philosophers, botanists and foresters expose the complex interactions of the vibrant living world around us and give us a lens through which we can explore our intertwined histories.

I like epigraphs: they focus what follows and simultaneously upset it.¹ When you return to them minutes or months later, they seem to question the very propositions you thought were so stable. I begin with Sue Wheeler—you will recognize the poem from the course description on the department website—because it comes from a collection titled simply Habitat. And because while honoring the field guide(s) you will depend on in this course, it hints that other sources of information might be more important. Those sources, the ones not found in print, require us to be good listeners. To be

It is, of course, not at all surprising that one should see a blue jay in Amherst, Massachusetts, in either 2005 or 1865. Blue jays have inhabited the eastern woods of the North American continent for centuries. They are noisy, bold, and brightly colored, which helps to explain why blue jays were “one of the first North American birds to become well known to Europeans.”⁴ Illustrations of the bird date to John White’s watercolor in the sixteenth century; Mark Catesby painted and wrote about the blue jay in 1754.⁵ Blue jays thrived as forest was converted to farmland in the