Vivid natures: disrupting the human/Nature divide in adaptive management for protected areas
Creators: name: Gelves-Gomez, Francisco Felipe
Publisher: name: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Year: 2022
Subjects: Adaptive management
biodiversity conservation
more-than-human
protected areas
Human geography
Environmental management

description: Protected areas as designated and named spaces, in the Anthropocene, frequently emphasize the distancing of people from Nature. They show how we (some) humans have decided to protect a nonhuman world, making the nonhuman fit to our human expectations and aspirations. Further, to achieve this, our human knowledge and actions tend to be complicit with the real or imagined silencing of the nonhuman as other. This thesis is an examination of everyday protected areas adaptive management, thinking through — and about — the elements, features and drivers that characterize adaptive management practice as a series of actions that affirm the separation of humans from Nature. This is the result of meta-narratives and drivers about Nature such as economics, politics, and societal expectations, as well as more local forces, for instance, how the practice of learning-by-doing is subject to distant scientific dogmas that reduce complexity and human-Nature connectivity, effectively hindering learning from local experience. The thesis draws on, and consequently contributes to, the theoretical tools of radical relationality present in the scholarly projects of more-than-human geographies, political ecology, environmental social sciences, and centres in the ideas surrounding conservation biology and protected areas management. Taking the Whitsunday Islands National Park and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as part of a dynamic, lively, vivid world, and as empirical focus, this thesis is immersed in human-Nature encounters and relationships occurring in land and sea. Through immersion and embeddedness in the study area, I consider protected areas management practices and these lead to re-imagine Nature-human relationships acknowledging nonhuman agency, the tight connections between humans and nonhumans, and the messiness inherent in everyday protected area management practice. Building on this empirical ethnography and the theoretical ideas described above, I show how adaptive management deliberately maintains a particular set of material elements and ecologies that respond to an idealised Nature captured by economic, political, and scientific forces in what I have metaphorically called ‘the postcard Nature’. I therefore argue for the importance of re-thinking protected areas and their management from relational, embodied, emergent, and affective perspectives. Specifically, my argument is that protected areas management, in discourse and practice, can cultivate a sensibility that exposes its own limitations, while attentive to the creative forces of nonhumans. As an exemplar, I incorporate ‘sentipensar’ (feeling-thinking) as a theoretical concept as well as a practical epistemological stance that provides pause, to reposition these relationships. This feeling and thinking, I assert, creates a heightened awareness of self (and others)
description: in the world as an affected/affecting being, contributing to a critical understanding of our ways of acting, being and thinking. Taking these arguments and ideas together, I argue that such novel and nuanced understandings can contribute to shifting protected areas management and conservation paradigms.