Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe's National parks

欧洲的许多国家公园对保护工作构成了独特的挑战，因为它们不仅是历史上荒野和有争议的地方，也是最近地缘政治争端的发源地。了解这些公园在当地对地方、身份、物种流动和人类准入权利的认知中所起的作用，涉及到通过多种语言和文化折射出来的保护：简而言之，它需要以人文为基础的方法以及科学管理方法。该项目由六名研究人员组成，其中三人在利兹大学，三人在慕尼黑路德维希·马克西米利安大学(LMU)，该项目旨在应用从利兹开创的一个新领域--保护人文学--衍生的跨学科观点，该领域研究生物多样性丧失的人文方面。这些视角将被用来考虑四个欧洲最具标志性的国家公园的过去、现在和未来：瓦登海国家公园、比利牛斯国家公园和巴伐利亚森林和苏马瓦国家公园。两个关键概念是机动性和边界。所有四个公园要么毗邻，要么跨越国界；因此，它们依赖于跨界合作的谈判形式，这些形式表明了保护本身的跨国参数。这四个公园还提出了具有政治和哲学基础的机动性问题。在国家公园里受到保护的是谁的自由：生活在他们的边界内的人的自由，还是他们居住的野生动物的自由？当这些自由的理念发生冲突时会发生什么？谁或什么在国家公园内外移动，根据哪些保护原则，这些交叉的运动--人类、动物、景观、知识--既要实际管理，又要从理论上理解？不同的指定边界--地理上和政治上的，但也有概念上的，如物种边界--是促进还是阻碍这些运动，当这些边界被逾越时会发生什么？该项目富有想象力地结合了生态批评、动物研究、环境历史和保护社会科学的方法，将在三个相互关联的工作包中解决这些问题。每个物种都专注于单一的物种或家族(琵琶、棕熊、树皮甲虫)，但也采用了涉及多个人与动物的纠缠的“多物种”方法，并探索了这些纠缠引发的一些问题(物种减少、栖息地丧失、疾病、捕食)。第四个工作包将这些发现汇集在一起，并评估它们与欧洲国家公园当前和未来的保护政策的相关性。该项目的主要成果将是一本书、一部电影、七篇共同撰写的文章和四份政策简报，其中就欧洲国家公园作为国家机构和在生态受到威胁的世界的总体背景下的跨国空间的未来保护政策提出建议。

Many of Europe's national parks pose a unique challenge to conservation work, as they are not just historically wild and contested places, but are also sites of more recent geopolitical disputes. Understanding the role these parks play in local perceptions of place, identity, species movements, and human rights of access involves conservation as refracted through multiple languages and cultures: it requires, in short, a humanities-based as well as a scientific-managerial approach. Featuring a team of six researchers, three based at the University of Leeds and three at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, this project aims to apply interdisciplinary perspectives derived from a new field partly pioneered at Leeds, conservation humanities, which examines the humanistic aspects of biodiversity loss. These perspectives will be used to consider the past, present, and future of four of Europe's most iconic national parks: Wadden Sea National Park, Pyrenees National Park, and Bavarian Forest and Sumava National Parks. The two key concepts are mobility and boundaries. All four parks either abut or traverse national borders; they thus depend upon negotiated forms of transboundary cooperation that indicate the transnational parameters of conservation itself. All four parks also raise issues of mobility that have political and philosophical underpinnings. Whose freedom is it that is protected in national parks: that of the people who live within their boundaries or that of their resident wildlife? What happens when these ideas of freedom come into conflict? Who or what moves in, across, and beyond national parks, and according to which sets of conservation principles are these intersecting movements - of humans, animals, landscapes, knowledge - to be both practically managed and theoretically understood? Do different designated boundaries - geographical and political, but also notional, as in the species boundary - facilitate or impede these movements, and what happens when such boundaries are transgressed? Imaginatively combining methods drawn from ecocriticism, animal studies, environmental history, and conservation social science, the project will address these questions in three interrelated work packages. Each focuses on a single species or family (the sandpiper, the brown bear, the bark beetle) but also adopts a 'multispecies' approach involving multiple human-animal entanglements and explores some of the issues (species decline, habitat loss, disease, predation) that these entanglements raise. A fourth work package brings these findings together and assesses their relevance to current and future conservation policy in European national parks. The project's main outputs will be a book, a film, seven co-written articles, and four policy briefs that set out recommendations for future conservation policy with respect to European national parks, both as national institutions and transnational spaces within the overarching context of an ecologically threatened world.