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The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.

Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these \"crimes\" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

\"A fine, fascinating book. John S. Sledge introduces us to four centuries worth of heroes and rogues on one incredible American river.\" —Winston Groom, New York Times–bestselling author of Forrest Gump The Mobile River presents the first-ever narrative history of this important American watercourse. Inspired by the venerable Rivers of America series, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic elements with personal experiences and more than sixty color and black-and-white images for a rich and rewarding read. Previous historians have paid copious attention to the other rivers that make up the Mobile's basin, but the namesake stream along with its majestic delta and beautiful bay have been strangely neglected. In an attempt to redress the imbalance, Sledge launches this book with a first-person river tour by \"haul-ass boat.\" Along the way he highlights the four diverse personalities of this short stream—upland hardwood forest, upper swamp, lower swamp, and harbor. In the historical saga that follows, readers learn about colonial forts, international treaties, bloody massacres, and thundering naval battles, as well as what the Mobile River's inhabitants ate and how they dressed through time. A barge load of colorful characters is introduced, including Native American warriors, French diplomats, British cartographers, Spanish tavern keepers, Creole women, steamboat captains, African slaves, Civil War generals and admirals, Apache prisoners, hydraulic engineers, stevedores, banana importers, Rosie Riveters, and even a few river rats subsisting off the grid—all of them actors in a uniquely American pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity along a river that gave a city its name. \"Sledge brilliantly explores the myriad ways human history has entwined with the Mobile River.\" —Gregory A. Waselkov, author of A Conquering Spirit

Winner of the 2024 Forest History Society Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award A contemporary map of New England, scaled to the township level, brings to light a dense pattern of protected areas ringing almost every town and city in the region. Big and small, rural and urban, these green spaces represent more than a century of preservation efforts on the part of philanthropic foundations, planning professionals, state agencies, and most importantly, community-based conservation organizations. Taken together, they highlight one of the most significant advances in land stewardship in US history. Democratic Spaces explains how these protected places came into being and what they represent for New Englanders and the nation at large. While early New Englanders worked to save local fish, timber, and game resources from outside exploitation, no land-stewardship organizations existed before the founding of the Trustees of Public Reservations in Boston in 1891. Across a century of dramatic change, New England preservationists through this and other, smaller community-based land trusts preserved open spaces for an ever-widening circle of citizens.

Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated-where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature? InWildlife in the Anthropocene,Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene-an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet- Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation.Wildlife in the Anthropoceneexamines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation. Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.

Internationally agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we conduct global meta‐analyses to assess how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature—known as human–nature connectedness (HNC)—can be used as a leverage point to reach sustainability. A meta‐analysis of 147 correlational studies shows that individuals with high HNC had more pronature behaviours and were significantly healthier than those with low HNC. A meta‐analysis of 59 experimental studies shows significant increases in HNC after manipulations involving contact with nature and mindfulness practices. Surprisingly, this same meta‐analysis finds no significant effect of environmental education on HNC. Thus, HNC is positively linked to mind‐sets that value sustainability and behaviours that enhance it. Further, we argue that HNC can be enhanced by targeted practices, and we identify those most likely to succeed. Our results suggest that enhancing HNC, via promotion of targeted practices, can improve sustainability and should be integrated into conservation policy.

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a \"scientific national park,\" thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.