Project
Connecting with What Nature? Exploring the influence of urban conservation initiatives on attitudes towards human-nonhuman relations
Over the past decades, we have experienced a massive decline in global biodiversity. Yet while biodiversity declines, support for nature conservation has not yielded the results to avert the expected severe consequences. This has partly been attributed to humans becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. In response, conservationists call for restoring people’s connection with natural spaces, through e.g. environmental education. However, with a rising trend of urbanisation, dominant approaches to conservation that separate humans and nature risk exacerbating the disconnection from nature they seek to overcome.
Several emergingconservation paradigms focus on integration and/ or conviviality to overcome this by focusing on how people and nature can comingle. However, there is limited understanding of how urbanconservation fits into these approaches or how associated urban conservation initiatives influence human-nonhuman relationships. The objectives of this project are thus to investigate: 1) participants in urban conservation initiatives’ perception of human-nonhuman relationships, 2) to what extent different urban conservation initiatives help move beyond human-nonhuman dichotomies; and 3) How participants in urban conservation initiatives’ experience and act in relation to nonhumans. Through ethnographic fieldwork in The Netherlands and Japan these objectives will be pursued. These cases are chosen to gain insights in human-nonhuman relationships in societies relating to nature in both complementary and contrasting ways, offering insights in communities with different historical, cultural and societal backgrounds, and yet comparable in economical and development visions.