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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

CATTLEFRONTIERS @cattlefrontiers.bsky.social · 8d

We are very happy to announce our new online lecture series 'Livestock Histories: Regional and Global Perspectives'. The first lecture will be next week, where Steven Van Wolputte will be talking about cattle, microbes and veterinarians as entangled life forms in the history of Northern Namibia.

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 13d

You really need to thoroughly check your text after they return it to you. Just now I discovered that they introduced an error in the concluding sentence of our paper…

Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 13d

One thing that has surprised me (in a bad way) as someone new to publishing is how terrible the copy-editing service of scientific journals is. Without tracking the changes they just modify your text, and instead of improving it they introduce errors. You’d think proper copy-editing is the minimum

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 25d

In some cases cattle farming is a key vehicle of colonization and conservation can become complicit by greenwashing it. In other cases anti-cattle sentiment has been exactly what has made conservation colonial. Regional histories are crucial to consider

Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 25d

I think we should be careful in examining how these discourses are mobilized. There is a big difference between supporting the livelihoods of transhumant pastoralists in Eastern Africa and greenwashing the activities of large-scale settler ranchers in the Midwest

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 25d

The interest in regenerative grazings seems to draw on varied discourses, incl. neoliberal conservation (conservation should be profitable), community-based conservation (should be done by landowners) and rewilding (should be done through grazing)

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · 25d

Although it has a bad headline, this article covers a very interesting issue: the controversial promotion of regenerative grazing by international conservation organizations

news.mongabay.com/2025/08/will...

Will we still eat beef in 50 years?

When drought became a perennial visitor to the Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado in the late 1990s, Steve Wooten remembers telling his family, “We got to do something different.” Between 1997 and 2003, ...

news.mongabay.com

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Sep 6

A huge environmental disaster has taken place (perhaps the biggest tailings dam catastrophe ever?) and we are not supposed to know about it www.pbs.org/newshour/wor...

A Chinese mining company is accused of covering up the extent of a major toxic spill in Zambia

The spill happened in February when part of a dam that held waste from the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia copper mine collapsed.

www.pbs.org

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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

Dr Simon Goodman @phoca-sapiens.bsky.social · Jul 17

As someone whose research touches on pinniped health, this is really concerning...

The Ecologist @theecologist.org · Jul 17

Until recently, rabies had never been seen in marine mammals.

Rabies at sea

Scientists are trying to determine whether rabies is now established in South Africa’s Cape fur seals.

theecologist.org

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Jul 14

“both the human and slime mould cases illustrate how memory can become decoupled from individual learning, instead becoming accessible to others through environmental structures.”

Interesting essay on what might be called ‘more-than-human mnemonic infrastructures’

Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda @alejandrofabregastejeda.com · Jul 11

What can slime moulds teach us about biological memory? Quite a bit, it turns out. Matthew Sims (@philosobio.bsky.social) dives into this question in a wonderfully engaging piece for @aeon.co. Give it a read—before it slips your mind! 👇 aeon.co/essays/what-... #HPS #philsky #HPbio #evobio #neurosky

What can slime mould teach us about biological memory? | Aeon Essays

Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

aeon.co

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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

Josh Milburn @joshmilburn.bsky.social · Jun 12

'Transforming governance through non-human animal representation': an extremely interesting PhD position at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

PhD Position: Transforming Governance through Non-Human Animal Representation | Radboud University

Do you want to work as a PhD Position: Transforming Governance through Non-Human Animal Representation at the Nijmegen School of Management? Check our vacancy!

www.ru.nl

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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

RGS Animal Geographies @rgs-agwg.bsky.social · Jun 2

We're on a roll and have another research seminar coming up in a couple of days - Larissa Fleischmann will share her research on the 'Postcolonial Borders of Animal Health: Veterinary Fencing in Germany and Namibia'. Register below :)

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

Papers written by @requenamora.bsky.social @danbrockington.bsky.social @forrestf.bsky.social @christinahicks.bsky.social @gkallis.bsky.social @upascual.bsky.social @pettorelli.bsky.social @estherturnhout.bsky.social @juliegwen.bsky.social and their colleagues

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

This also comes forward in this study done in the USA. It shows that the prioritisation of environmental protection over economic growth is more pronounced in lower income groups than higher income groups, pointing to the possibility of a ‘degrowth from below’ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Eco-paradox USA: The relationships between economic growth and environmental concern generally, and by different income groups

Environmental values are commonly explained through three theories: post-materialism suggests affluence enables environmental concern, materialism arg…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

One of the ways forward, according to the paper, is to empower ILPCs and consider them leaders for environmental action

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

This study identifies the reasons behind this persistence and suggests ways to address them. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Unveiling pervasive assumptions: moving beyond the poverty-biodiversity loss association in conservation

This paper reflects on the continued persistence of the idea in conservation research and practice that poverty drives biodiversity loss (the poverty-…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

In the related context of biodiversity conservation, however, the idea persists that biodiversity loss is caused by cash poverty, not the production and consumption patterns of the world’s richest

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

First, this attribution modelling study finds that high-income groups do not just disproportionally contribute to GHG emissions but to actual global warming and extreme heat events. Among other findings, it attributes two-thirds of warming to the wealthiest 10% www.nature.com/articles/s41...

High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide - Nature Climate Change

While climate injustice is widely recognized, a quantification of how emissions inequality translates into unequal accountability is still lacking. Here researchers examine how affluent groups disprop...

www.nature.com

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · May 10

In case you missed these: some great papers appeared in the last few days that address the relation between monetary wealth and environmental degradation/protection 🧵👇

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Apr 5

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

This Hawaiian island's 'freakosystems' are a warning from the future

Ecosystems which have never been seen before are being accidentally created by humans. They offer a stark look into the nature of tomorrow.

www.bbc.com

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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Mar 31

New post on our Rewilding Blog! In this one, Pierre du Plessis and I explore Botswana and its foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) 'red zone' as two layers of a European shadow ecology:
rewilding.de/shadows-with...

Shadows within shadows: the environmental injustices of Botswana’s red zone - Rewilding the Anthropocene

By Wisse van Engelen and Pierre du Plessis

rewilding.de

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Mar 31

New post on our Rewilding Blog! In this one, Pierre du Plessis and I explore Botswana and its foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) 'red zone' as two layers of a European shadow ecology:
rewilding.de/shadows-with...

Shadows within shadows: the environmental injustices of Botswana’s red zone - Rewilding the Anthropocene

By Wisse van Engelen and Pierre du Plessis

rewilding.de

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Reposted by Wisse van Engelen

Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Mar 25

This one has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: my first academic paper as first author. @annetpauwelussen.bsky.social, @estherturnhout.bsky.social and I explore how conservation-tourism partnerships are neither win-win nor win-lose situations: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Practices of Coordination in a Conservation–Tourism Partnership in South Africa - Wisse Van Engelen, Annet Pauwelussen, Esther Turnhout, 2025

Conservation–tourism partnerships are often promoted as win–win solutions to the twin problems of underfunded conservation and unsustainable development. Critic...

journals.sagepub.com

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Luregn @luregn.bsky.social · Mar 27

New book! Bernard C. Moore & I explore how African farmers in Namibia navigated colonialism & apartheid to remain on their ancestral land. Now, they face new threats —from billionaires, conservationists & carbon financiers. Download free: brill.com/display/titl...! #envhist #conservation #envhum

Space is the Ultimate Luxury

"Space is the Ultimate Luxury" published on 24 Mar 2025 by Brill.

brill.com

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Wisse van Engelen @wissevanengelen.bsky.social · Mar 25

And finally, we reflect on the potential and need of combining our ontological multiplicity approach with a political ontology approach to make visible not just the power relations between relatively dominant natures but also suppressed ones such as those of the Black people living around the park