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Mourning Auks: Creative Expressions of Extinction in an Era of Ecological Loss

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Milo Newman, PhD candidate in human geography, introduces his project on creativity and extinction. Milo’s research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Looking at your hearts, suspended in their jar, I try and imagine the two of you still alive. I know that if you were anything like your closest living kin, you would have bonded for life. You lived a long time, and it would have been a relationship that had gathered and deepened over years. By the time you came together this final time, the congregations that were so important to your kind were already a thing of the past. Perhaps you were aware of how empty your world had become. Although you were alone on that low rock, it could be that you were accompanied by the memory of the multitude that had once been. By this point it was already too late. There were too few of you to recover what had been lost. Even so, maybe you would have nodded to each other and tried to make the best of it. Maybe you would have started showing off, just as those before you had always done; turning your heads from side to side so the bright white around your eye would have caught the light. Maybe then, with an exuberance tinged with grief, you would have thrown your heads back and let out an ecstatic cry; the vivid yellow inside your mouths shining like a beacon, mimicking the sun.

Catastrophic anthropogenically-driven biodiversity loss is a defining problem of our time, with hundreds of extinctions observed every year, and many more occurring unnoticed. Reacting to the scale of this issue, extinction studies researchers have called for new interdisciplinary responses interrogating what extinction means, why it matters, and how it is narrated.

‘Mourning Auks’ is an innovative practice-led project examining how artful geographic methods and outcomes can contribute to these vital questions. Over the next four years I plan to explore what novel and affective modes of engaging with anthropogenically-driven species loss can be generated through creative articulations of the emotional dimensions of extinction, and how these can be communicated in public artistic and museum contexts.

In extinction studies, extinction is understood not as a singular, generic concept, but as something that exists through multiple specificities relatable to the diversity of lifeworlds being lost. This is generally explored via case studies, which employ critically-driven creative-academic storytelling to express the biological, cultural and temporal particularities of species, their unique phenomenal worlds, and the significance of extinction within multispecies entanglements. This narrative-based approach provides a form of witnessing that is attentive to others in the face of irreparable loss, that counters human exceptionalism, and creates new ethical and cultural modes that help to resist the destructive legacies of anthropogenically-driven extinction more broadly.

Unexplored potential exists for artistic methods to undertake and communicate these extinction-orientated case studies. Through a case study on the now extinct great auk, my practice-led project will explore and analyse ways of engaging broader audiences with this field. It aims to expand the affective reach of these essential attempts to re-articulate contemporary species loss, and its ethical and socio-cultural imperative.

Fig. 1 Alca Impennis by John Gould, from The Birds of Great Britain, Vol. 5 (1873). John Gould/Public Domain

The great auk was a flightless seabird that was once found in the cold coastal waters of the North Atlantic. These birds nested in huge social colonies on isolated islands, which they returned to every year. These remote skerries provided protection from terrestrial predators. However, they became increasingly vulnerable after technological advances in ocean-going vessels brought European sailors into close proximity to these breeding colonies, which they ruthlessly exploited for food on trans-Atlantic voyages.

My research will begin with analysis of the ‘Garefowl books’, a substantial, underexploited resource held in the Cambridge University Library collections. These manuscript diaries, kept by the Victorian ornithologist and egg collector John Wolley, record interviews with witnesses who were amongst the last to see the auks alive, and who took part in the final hunting parties to their breeding places. Close reading of this material will inform studio-based experimentation utilising artistic methods drawn from archival impulses in contemporary art (see the works of John Akomfrah and Tacita Dean, amongst many others). Following on from Brian Massumi’s 2014 book What Animals Teach us About Politics such ‘playful’ creative practices can be seen as animal in origin, and provide a continuum with animal life (see Merle Patchett’s Archiving). In this context, these textual encounters with the auk’s disappearance offer the means of both interrogating the socio-cultural practices that drove their extinction, and of generating sympathetic multispecies re-alignments.

I also plan to draw the narratives surrounding the auks’ disappearance into emotional geographic frames. These examine spatialisations of emotion in relation to landscape, including those relating to death, such as mourning and grief. Study here is mostly restricted to human contexts, and my project aims to develop this to explore the affective geographies of sites of extinction-driven absence.

Fig. 2 An eighteenth-century sketch of Geirfuglasker by Guðni Sigurðsson. Geirfuglasker, a now submerged volcanic island off the south coast of Iceland, was one of the great auk’s breeding colonies. National Museum of Iceland/Public Domain

In recent re-interpretations, avian philopatry has been re-conceptualised as other-than-human ‘storying-of-place’ (see Thom van Dooren’s excellent book Flight Ways). Hypothesising this for great auks gives their breeding sites potency as places, not just because they were invested with history and meaning for the auks, but because these became the traumatic sites of their extinction. In this context, I plan to undertake fieldwork at some of the auks’ historical breeding colonies, and at those of their closest living relatives. Here, imaginative curiosity towards these species’ remote, liminal, and aquatic geographies will inform a creative enlivening of the great auks’ historical lifeworld, providing the basis for further artistic experimentation centred on site-specific place-making exercises. These will attend to how landscapes are matters ‘of [other-than-human] biographies, attachments and exiles’ in which ‘absence, loss and haunting’ abound (Wylie, 2007: 10), and will survey the more-than-representational emotional aspects of extinction.

You can follow Milo on twitter @_milonewman and see more of his work at www.milonewman.com

On decolonising the Anthropocene

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by Mark Jackson 

What follows is an overview of my paper, ‘On Decolonising the Anthropocene: disobedience via plural constitutions’ recently published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers (doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645).

 A decolonial critique, the paper argues against how the Anthropocene overdetermines environmental politics. In place of increasingly assumed global environmental governance imaginaries, which mobilise under the aegis of emergency, but which also reproduce a status quo coloniality, the paper presents two pluriversal imaginaries, one from Afro-Caribbean historical geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal philosophy. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising narratives too often invoked by the Anthropocene.

[image] Jackson - On decolonising the Anthropocene blog post

[Left] Detail from ‘Emergence’ (c. 1999) by Haitian artist Frankétienne. [Centre] Earth Systems Governance research network. [Right] Detail from Children with the Tree of Life (c. 1980-1985) by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau.

On decolonising the Anthropocene

Names are more than nouns. They are also verbs. Names build and summon relationships—familial, historical, cultural, axiological. Names tell stories. They are ways of remembering and valuing. Names, then, are narratives. And narratives matter.

Few narratives have swept across academic and popular imaginations with the speed and tenacity as ‘The Anthropocene’. From its storied nomination as a gruff rejoinder during a scientific meeting in Mexico in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, to its near ubiquity two decades later, the Anthropocene has quickly amassed an enormous body of scholarship and influence. This scholarship, now legion, and upon which careers, journals, research programs, and government policies depend, attends both to what ‘the Anthropocene’ names—geologically detectable, human induced, geo-physical change on a planetary scale—and how it names modern ‘ecocide’, the systematic killing of the life giving systems that sustain life.

Disagreements about the Anthropocene have, from the off, also been legion. These disputes have not been about ‘ecocide’ per se—only the most irrational and narcissistic of denialists contest that—but about when human induced harmful environmental change started, and who or what’s to blame. Questions debated are things like: has “…every human being, past and present…contributed to the present cycle of climate change” (p. 115), as the critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues in his book The Great Derangement (2016)? Or, are specific historical and geographical political and economic structures culpable, structures like capitalism and its social and environmental practices, and so humans as species, sui generis, are not at fault?

Many scholars have argued convincingly that, of course, not all humans are responsible for the ecocide that marks the planetary present. To suggest otherwise actually masks human difference behind a reductionist, naturalising veil that privileges a certain image of the human—white, male, North Atlantic, propertied, ‘developed’—as representative of species being. In fact, numerous human societies today, and in the past, extol forms of environmental responsibility that not only do not destroy their environments but enable complex interdependencies of managed flourishing and reciprocity. Most, indeed, don’t privilege the human as somehow separate from nature at all.

Considered closely, the Anthropocene is deeply colonial narrative. Generalising the cause of planetary ecocide as ‘Anthropos’ is racial, and, further, it blinkers the ability to see, learn from, and enact horizons of living differently constituted by other human lifeways.

Attending to pluriversal lifeways matters because the Anthropocene narrative currently overdetermines ecological imaginaries and environmental politics. It is offered first as a scientific truth claim, and, increasingly, it is also mobilised, politically, under the auspices of emergency. ‘We don’t have time to quibble about names and concepts!’, decry some. ‘We need to do something! We need immediate action at a global scale, led by global actors: nations, corporations, inter-governmental and transnational agencies. We need global earth systems governance!’ A decade ago, Paul Crutzen and colleague Christian Schwägerl wrote that the Anthropocene demands a new ‘global ethos’ of mastery. ‘We [i.e. humans] decide’, they wrote, ‘…what nature is and what it will be. To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.”

To me, this hubris is worrying. I’m certainly not alone. Many critics contest the coloniality of the Anthropocene. We don’t need institutionalised mastery at a global scale. That’s the last thing we need. Similar hubris has led already to the present’s ecocidal conditions.

Many will scoff and patronise such criticisms with claims of naïveté and irrelevance. Undoubtedly, modern environmental harm does require immediate attention, but one of the great dangers in any response to a declared emergency is a certain unreflexive obedience, an obedience that takes the terms of engagement—the names and narratives—as given, which assumes they are natural, which doesn’t enquire about the relationships they seek to uphold and what work they do. Much harm has been done in the name of urgency, utility, and efficiency. Witness slavery, walls, holocausts, and pandemic power grabs.

What we need instead is more humility, humility to the ecological constitutions within which we have always already been a part. And, we also need to attend closely to the relationships between oppression and knowledge production.

Alternatives to what the Anthropocene over-determinines come from numerous worlds. As the famed development scholar, Arturo Escobar, writes in his new book Pluriversal Politics, ‘another possible is possible’ (2020, ix). The paper presents two possibles as ways of thinking ecological response to what the Anthropocene conditions.

The first is the example of plots. Plots were small gardens outside the global enclosures of plantations with which enslaved peoples grew food to sustain themselves. Plots, writes the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, were soils where once peasants “transplanted all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess” (1971, 100), which fed and sustained, and to whose constitution people returned in death. They were, literally, the marginal spaces that rooted time (ancestrality) and space (African homeland) through food and cultivation, and upon which the colonial architectures of oppression depended. As Wynter writes, they were affirmative ‘roots of culture’ (101).

Rootedness also articulates affirmative reciprocity within Indigenous legal constitutions, the second example suggested. Indigenous legal scholar, John Borrows, writes that the Anishinaabe word akinoomaagewin communicates an ‘earthbound’ sensibility of learning (2018: 66). From aki meaning ‘earth’ and noomaage meaning ‘to point towards and take direction from’, ‘…teaching and learning literally means the lessons we learn from looking to the earth…. The earth has a culture and we can learn from it.’ Grounding ‘earthway’ relations as the source of just living is referred to in the Anishinaabeg legal tradition as minobimaatisiwin. Minobimaatisiwin refers to the idea and virtue of living a good life. Minobimaatisiwin is an embodied relation of, as the Anishinaabe legal scholar and geographer Deborah McGregor writes, “reciprocal responsibilities and obligations that are to be met in order to ensure harmonious relations” (2018: 15). The ground of conceptual reflexivity here is a lived attention to earthbound care rather than an institutionalised governance that begins in epistemic politics which necessitate technicity or mastery. Fundamentally, care comes from the Earth and listening to it, rather than the assumed humanist (and Abrahamic) hubris that the Earth is mute and humans tend care to it. Nope. Flip it and now build your politics.

Indigenous and dispossessed peoples have been living with what the Anthropocene seeks to name for a very long time. Their struggles and survivals have depended on responding in affirmative and grounded ways to rooting relations. In most cases, they’ve listened to the Earth. Listening to how the Earth precedes and therefore anticipates the present planetary struggle might enable modern subjects to appreciate political possibilities other than globalised mastery.

Moderns don’t have to take the Anthropocene narrative for granted, as science or as politics. There are other narratives, and they also name other, life-affirming worlds of possibility.

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk   

Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present

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Dr Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture, writes about his new AHRC Leadership fellowship.

Coastal communities around the world are facing significant challenges, both ecological (such as rising sea temperatures) and as a consequence of human activity (for instance through flows of migration). Chile and Peru have been identified as two of the countries likely to be most affected by climate change, with their fishing industries vulnerable to rising sea temperatures, and their coastal regions vulnerable to the El Niño phenomenon, which is intensified by climate change. This project asks how visual and audiovisual creative responses to these and other issues from Chile and Peru can help us to live well in changing coastal environments across the world.

Scholars working in the environmental humanities and the emerging field of oceanic studies have argued that in order to develop a more sustainable relationship to the world’s oceans, we must understand the history and present of our responses to them. This project fills an important gap in this field of enquiry, which has to date paid little attention to the Pacific coast of South America and has remained focused on European and North American contexts. The project’s exploration of creative responses to ports as places of transnational encounter and exchange moreover responds to global concerns over how to adapt to increasing flows of migration. Coasts have long been viewed as spaces of exhibition and performance, where social change is particularly apparent, and while the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America has long been recognised as a hive of counter-culture and creativity, the diverse political traditions and cultures of Pacific ports such as Valparaíso and Callao have received far less attention.

Callao
The Port of Callao, Peru. Credit: Paul Merchant

Beginning in 1960, the date of a major earthquake and tsunami on the Chilean coast, this project asks how visual and audiovisual responses to the Pacific Ocean from Chile and Peru can shape a new critical understanding of how coastal communities respond to social and environmental pressures. The project analyses the production, reception and circulation of feature films (Patricio Guzmán, Javier Fuentes-León), video art (Cecilia Vicuña) and installations (Claudia Müller, Ana Teresa Barboza), among other forms of cultural production. It asks what changes are visible across the time period studied (1960 to the present), and shows how coastal cultural production brings to the surface lesser-known local, national and transnational histories.

How can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues?

The project also asks a methodological question: how can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues? This question is particularly important given the vital role that audiovisual media have played in recent years, whether in the form of television series or online video clips, in furthering public understanding of contemporary ecological challenges. One need only think of the influence of the BBC’s Blue Planet II series on debates around plastic use in the UK.

The project’s findings will be disseminated through several major scholarly publications, including a monograph with a leading university press and a methodological article in a leading peer-reviewed environmental humanities journal. A Post-Doctoral Research Assistant will be recruited, and they will publish an article in a major peer-reviewed Latin American studies journal.

In addition to these academic outputs, I will hold stakeholder workshops with local arts organisations and representatives of environmental NGOs in Chile and Peru. I will work with the Project Partner, the Centre for Cinema and Creation in Santiago de Chile, to develop the format of these workshops and to disseminate outcomes. Discussions at these events, along with a symposium on ecomedia and audiovisual research methods to be held in Bristol, will inform the design of a project website on which to disseminate examples of the material studied, and critical responses to it.

 

PM AHRC postDr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.

Dark-dwellers as more-than-human misfits: a new synthesis of disability studies, environmental history and histories of human-animal relations

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Dr Andy Flack, lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies, writes about his new AHRC Leadership Fellowship project.

There are at least a billion people on this planet today who are directly affected by disability, and many more besides when their families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability – and the structures that create it – really matters. It may be marginalized, but it is hardly a minority experience. As disability studies scholars have compellingly illustrated, the concept of disability is underpinned by a range of assumptions about the form and function of bodies – the ‘normal’, ‘able’, and their opposites – and the world these ‘misfitting’ bodies inhabit. Such assumptions are always a matter of perspective and they have histories of their own. They reflect value systems which, historically, have had profound material effects, generating and entrenching maginalisation.

This project investigates whether these historically contingent value systems transcend the human world and proposes that historians need to pay attention to the broadest application of concepts relating to disability such as ‘ability’, ‘normativity’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptation’ and to the material impacts of such classifications on bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. They need to understand how dominant groups – in this case human beings – imagined and dealt with all kinds of ‘differently-abled’, bodies that appeared to inhabit the world in strange and incongruous ways. In sum, they need to ask new questions of the past in order to better understand the discursive foundations of disability as an imposed identity and the allied impacts of those systems on living beings.

Through this leadership fellowship I will develop an agenda for future interrogations of disability’s intersection with environmental history and histories of human-animal relations. To do this, this project focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and North American natural history discourses relating to animals adapted to living and seeing in the dark. These are the creatures who spend most of their lives beyond our sight and living in ways that we struggle to comprehend. The period 1840-2000 captures key moments in the emergence and development of natural historical knowledge relating to these kinds of animals. Indeed, over its course, there have been far-reaching transformations, not only in the imagination and classification of diverse bodies but also in terms of human impacts on their shrouded worlds. Their strange, perplexing, non-normative bodies were frequently branded as ‘broken’, ‘degenerate’, or, indeed, ‘super’; attitudes that reveal changing norms and transforming valuations of ability and judgements about what it means to be ‘normal’.

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Image: Adam Bixby via unsplash

 

Animals living in the world’s darkest environments, from deep underground to the oceanic abyss, were imagined in the British and North American contexts – and across both scientific and popular contexts – as extreme others, inhabiting the margins of the world and knowing it in ways which rendered them ‘non-normative’, often ‘extraordinary’, beings whose otherness made them enchanting, even seemingly other-worldly. Such ‘differently-abled’ others were subjected to an array of assumptions and, later, wide ranging studies aimed at understanding how their bodies worked and how they survived and flourished in their dark worlds.

Conceptualizations of echolocating bats are an illustrative case in point. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, natural philosophers sought to understand the ‘otherworldly’ nighttime navigations of these creatures via gruesome laboratory experiments on their perplexing bodies. Torturing many hundreds of bats, eyes were gouged out with red hot needles and ears blocked with starch before their capacity to navigate in the dark was put to the test to identify and understand their ‘special’ sensory abilities. Such an interrogation of bat sensory capacity broke with an historical tradition of dismissing the creatures as quite literally blind, even ‘broken’; Natural history writer Thomas Bewick’s view at the end of the eighteenth century was that bats were, in consequence, ‘imperfect’ animals.

[image2] AF AHRC post
from Thomas Bewick’s A general history of quadrupeds (1824) via Biodiversity Heritage Library

Narratives of deficiency and exceptionalism characterise historical British and North American comprehensions, not only of echolocating bats, but also of many dark-dwelling species. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the senses required for life in the dark had become better understood – including Donald Griffin’s detection of bat echolocation in 1938 – dark-dwellers had been drawn from the margins towards the mainstream of British and North American comprehensions of nature’s diversity. At the same time, however, and perhaps ironically, writers across scientific and popular publications began noting that many of these creatures were becoming increasingly marginalised by the anthropogenic environmental transformations of modernity, including the illumination of darkness, the construction of transport infrastructures and, most recently, the cascading effects of climate change. Consequently, the imagination of these animals transformed: they came to be construed not only as ‘differently-abled’, but also as ‘vulnerable’, ‘adaptable’, and ‘resilient’. Such adjectives are profoundly familiar to people living with disability in the world today.

In building a history of difference through a case study that transcends an exclusively human world, this highly innovative research project places the nonhuman world at the heart of an analytical framework and historical methodology that excavates familiar source materials for the wide-ranging discursive structures that underpin the modern concept of disability:  ability, normalcy, vulnerability and adaptation.

The resulting ‘beyond-the-human’ reconceptualization of the meaning of these categories widens historical appreciation of the discourses that generate and perpetuate disability. In the process, I will produce a suite of publications that enable me to set a stimulating agenda for further research. Crucially, I will also ask challenging questions about how this research might apply to diverse communities beyond the academy. Through the development of innovative impact activities focused on key stakeholders – Key Stage 2 children, teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians – I seek to transform understandings of diversity, ability, and disability in important and radical ways.

 

[image1] AF AHRC postDr Andy Flack is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol. He is an animal and environmental historian, working primarily on human engagements with the non-human animal world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, The Wild Within: Histories of a Landmark British Zoo was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018.

 

Header image: Clément Falize via unsplash

An Unusual Bee Hotel: Cultivating Care in a time of Ecological Loss

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by Rosamund Portus

 

The door to my house is much more than it appears. It is, I think, a well-known hotel amongst the bee population of York.

Allow me to explain.

One hot June day, during the very first summer I was living in my house, I was rushing out the door when I had a surprise encounter. Turning round to push on the door, satisfying myself that it really was locked, I was shocked—and delighted—to see a reddish-brown bee flying directly into the old, unused keyhole situated near the bottom of the door. The keyhole, which has been neglected in favour of the shiny new Yale lock at the top of the door, was evidently a perfect nesting spot. As I stood there, captivated by the idea that a bee was inside my door, another small bee followed suit. Finding the hole occupied, this second bee shimmied back out and took flight in search of a different nest.

This encounter genuinely thrilled me. Despite my impending appointment I spent some minutes trying—and failing—to capture a photo of the bee. Even more delightfully, in the coming weeks I spotted the bee—which I later identified as a red mason bee—a number of times. Of course, as June moved into July this little bee disappeared. A quick internet search of a red mason bee life-cycle followed, and I figured the bee was probably no more.

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An Unusual Bee Hotel by Rosamund Portus (2020)

You can imagine the delight I felt when, around twelve months later, a bee flew out of the very same unused keyhole. This bee, which was a beautiful gold colour, similarly spent the next six weeks or so making the odd appearance before once again completely disappearing.

This year marks my third summer living in this house. It is also—wonderfully—the third summer I have seen a bee come and find shelter in my door. It seems that year after year this small opening in my door provides the perfect bee hotel.

Observing bees living inside my door is nothing but wonderful. For me, it is a reminder that even in an environment designed wholly for human activity other forms of life find a way of being and living. Yet, my utter joy at my door doubling as a bee hotel also reveals my internal bias in how I respond to the presence of nonhuman species. To elaborate, when a wasp enters my house I will go tense, carefully shutting it in a room with the window open and praying it finds its way out before I re-enter. Similarly, I remember feeling far from delighted when a flurry of mosquitos found their way into the room of a Spanish guesthouse I was due to spend a fortnight. And whenever I am confronted with an eight-legged, eight-eyed friend I will watch from a (very) safe distance whilst my partner uses paper and a glass to remove it from the house.

Over the course of my studies into human-animal relations, I have learnt to appreciate and respect those many other invertebrates and, of course, arthropods which find themselves unwitting guests in our homes. This is, however, a care which I have had to actively cultivate. Bees, on the other hand, have long been knitted into my imagination as fundamentally good. The reasons for my—and many others—association between bees and goodness are myriad: they are rooted in the pleasure of honey, the sweet smell of beeswax, the appeal of flowers, the knowledge of our reliance on pollinated crops, and our willingness to aesthetically appreciate their fluffy bodies. Our tangible entanglements with bees have further facilitated their presence in our stories, traditions, languages, and artworks (Maeterlinck, 1901; Ransome, 1937; Wilson, 2004; Hanson, 2018). Of course, whilst predominantly honeybees sting when threatened, many associate all bee species with the painful feeling of being stung. And yet, as bees become increasingly known as species haunted by the possibility of extinction, they have more and more become creatures of empathy in the public eye (Moore and Kosut, 2013).

Thinking through my response to the bees that have made nests in my front door, I came to consider how our everyday reactions to species have consequences that extend far beyond whether a creature might be squished, admired, or given a wide berth. In the current era of rapid biodiversity change and loss, the values and understandings associated with different species intertwine with wider processes of care, responsibility, and protection. As literature across the environmental humanities is increasingly unearthing, public perceptions of different forms of life become a matter of life and death (see van Dooren and Rose, 2011; van Dooren, 2011; O’Gorman, 2014; Clark, 2015). In the case of bees—a species that has become intertwined with fears of decline—our affection for them has ignited a global campaign for their survival. Bee species have become a focus for ecological care, responsibility, and action (Moore and Kosut, 2013).

However, the public perception of a species can also detract from possibilities for care and protection. Take, for example, the wasp. Wasps, the species from which bees evolved, are battling increasing stressors in the modern day (Heffernan, 2017). Yet, as Sumner et al. (2015) make clear, wasps are universally disliked: they are demonised as stinging, aggressive, and vicious creatures. This typical intolerance for wasps not only dampens support for conservational efforts towards protecting wasps, but it is also broadly accepted as the justification for the removal and eradication of wasp nests. Thus, our internal biases, fuelled by specific historical and cultural contexts, have implications which transcend beyond our interactions with individual life-forms, and influence wider conservational choices, actions, and possibilities.

In questioning and thinking through our internal biases, we are presented with opportunities to overcome them. This is not to say we need to seek out interactions with species we find intimidating in some way. I, for one, am under no illusion as to how much fear I still feel when a wasp comes close to me. Rather, it is to suggest that if we—by which I mean anyone who has the interest to—can work to positively shift narratives surrounding species which are typically unloved or undesired, we can open up new possibilities for the flourishing of lives that are too often easily eradicated or dismissed. For whilst we might hope for a future filled with bees, we also need a future that is alive with the many other species—wasps, spiders, slugs, worms, or rats—which are equally as valuable for both sustaining and nurturing new forms of biodiversity, and yet whose presence seldom brings the same easy delight as the presence of a bee.

—

Clark, J.L. 2015. Uncharismatic Invasives. Environmental Humanities. 6(1), 29-52. DOI:10.1215/22011919-3615889.

Hanson, T. 2018. Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees. Basic Books.

Heffernan, O. 2017. Steep decline of wasps and other flying nasties is a bad sign. [Online]. New Scientist. Last updated: 19 October 2017. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2150977-steep-decline-of-wasps-and-other-flying-nasties-is-a-bad-sign/ [Accessed 20 July 2020].

Maeterlinck, M. 1901. The Life of the Bee. George Allen.

Moore, L.J. and M. Kosut. 2013. Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. New York UP.

O’Gorman, E. 2014. Belonging. Environmental Humanities. 5(1), 283–286. DOI: 10.1215/22011919-3615523.

Ransome, H.M. 1937. The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. George Allen & Unwin.

Sumner, S., G. Law, and A. Cini. 2018. Why we love bees and hate wasps. Ecological Entomology. 43(6), 836–845. DOI: 10.1111/een.12676.

van Dooren, T. 2011. Invasive species in penguin worlds: An ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation. Conservation & Society. 9(4), 286-298.

van Dooren, T. and D.B. Rose. 2011. Introduction. Australian Humanities Review. 50, 1-4.

Wilson, B. 2004. The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us. Thomas Dunne Book.

 

 

 

Report: a brief reflection on insect entanglements

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by Eline D. Tabak

The ‘Insect Entanglements’ workshop’s CFP was first shared online in the last week of February, when the effects of Covid-19 were still vaguely taking shape in the periphery of our academic community. Perhaps naively so, we—that is, my co-organiser Maia and I—spent some time thinking about how many participants we could host, whether or not we wanted to allow non-presenting attendees into the room, and where to get the best vegan lunch in Bristol. In the following weeks—after receiving cancellations, postponements, and some very reasonable updates saying “we simply don’t know yet”—we decided to move the workshop online. After all, insect entanglements had always been about inclusions and exclusions, and this way we hoped to include as many people as possible. In our online workshop, we had participants based in the States, Canada, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. While it’s definitely not the same as everybody meeting in the same room, we know the workshop would not have been open to so many people—not just academics in the field of environmental humanities—had it been hosted in Bristol. This, at the very least, was a good thing to come from moving the event online.

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Typical venue for academic events in 2020

To me, the workshop felt like a follow-up to two previous events: the first being the interdisciplinary symposium, ‘On Bees and Humans: A Love Affair Between Nature and Culture,’ organised by Dr Anja Buttstedt and Dr Solvejg Nitzke at the B CUBE Center for Molecular Bioengineering, TU Dresden. The second was ‘The Insectile’ workshop, organised Dr Fabienne Collignon and Jonas Neldner at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata at the Universität zu Köln. I was lucky enough to present some of my own research on insect entanglements during these events and was extremely happy to see some familiar faces with new ideas in the Insect Entanglements workshop. Granted, it’s to be expected that you get to know scholars in the field (or subfield of a subfield), but I’m always eager to meet new people, hear new ideas, and again and again realise that so many people are working on such exciting new research. (And it needs to be said: there was some really exciting new research presented at the workshop.)

Entanglements are rather fashionable right now, and when we first put out the CFP we received a question forcing us to reflect on what exactly such an entanglement entails. In true PhD fashion, we deflected the question and said that there’s no such thing as a single entanglement, but that we were sure we would figure it out during the workshop. The original CFP cited Eva Haifa Giraud, who, in her remarkable book What Comes After Entanglements? (2019), does not pull any punches and immediately forces us to recognise that with (any) politics of entanglement also comes a reality of exclusion. With that in mind, we wrote to all our presenters asking them to critically reflect on what their research (proposed or already conducted and written) could potentially mean for the same bugs they would later present on. This question does not always invite an obvious answer, especially when your research brings you to, say, early modern England or famous still life paintings of the Low Countries—even contemporary installation art.

Our first panel, ‘Bug Materialism’, was made up by researchers Rachel Hill (Strelka), Kay McCrann (University of Portsmouth), and Katharina Alsen (Hamburg University of Music and Theatre). This panel brought together a wide range of research that was distinctly material: the life and death of flies in space, line-drawing practices as a way of connecting with the natural history archives, and the aforementioned art installations focusing on not just the theoretical and philosophical aspects of these entanglements, but also their material lives. The second panel, ‘Ways of Looking’, found Anja Buttstedt (B CUBE) and Rosamund Portus (University of York) talking about different bee species and Fabienne Collignon (University of Sheffield) on the different forms of the gaze. The combined presentations really highlighted the importance of looking—and looking with care—when it comes to the more than human world around us. Our last panel, ‘Storied Entanglements’, was comprised by Sheng-mei Ma (Michigan State University), Marguerite Happe (Literature, UCLA) and Eric Stein (Trinity Western University). Covering a range of topics, from game studies to early modern literature to sinophone literatures in the twentieth century, these three presentations again brought to the forefront the joy and importance of telling a good story when thinking about and thinking through the insect (and worm-like) other.

At the end of the day (specifically after spending around eight hours in an office looking at two tiny laptop screens) we still didn’t have a definite answer to the question of what constitutes an insect entanglement. Reflecting on our workshop and the diverse presentations, I also know that between the storied, the material, and the different ways of looking at insects, there isn’t supposed to be a single answer. Insect entanglements are situated and unique things—not wholly surprising when there are over a million described species out there. As mentioned before, to me this felt like the third in a series of events on what I now dare to call cultural entomology, and I’m very much looking forward to more.

On a final note: when people signed up we asked them what their favourite insect was. Here are the results:

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A pie chart showing participants’ favourite insects

Insect Entanglements Online Workshop

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The Insect Entanglements workshop takes place this Friday 19 June. The workshop is organised by CEH members Eline Tabak and Maia Dixon, and will be hosted via Zoom. You can sign up to attend the workshop through the link in Eline’s tweet below.

 

https://twitter.com/elinetabak/status/1265260368458285056

 

The full conference programme is available to download here, and to whet your appetite we’ve reproduced the introduction from the CfP below.

Header image credit

Insect Entanglements

Insects are everywhere, our (human) lives entangled with them, and yet we know surprisingly little about them. In the introduction to Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles writes the following:

For as long as we’ve been here, they’ve been here too. Wherever we’ve travelled, they’ve been there too. And still, we don’t know them very well, not even the ones we’re closest to, the ones that eat our food and share our beds. Who are they, these beings so different from us and from each other? What do they do? What worlds do they make? What do we make of them? How do we live with them? How could we live with them differently? (3)

These critters have been around longer than we have. They come in so many configurations — different shapes, sizes, and ecological functions. We encounter insects as part of a collective, or as lone individuals. Yet, there is still much to learn about them and, considering their newly realised precarity, the ways in which we can live affirmatively with them.

In the words of Deborah Bird Rose (2013): ‘We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss, and we are called to respond.’ How does one respond to the insect—whether as a taxonomic rank, a certain species, a figure or story, or even the single individual that buzzes and keeps you up at night. What shapes do insect entanglements take in a time of significant biomass and diversity loss, dominated by several flagship species? After all, as Eva Haifa Giraud argues (2019), with (any) politics of entanglement also comes a reality of exclusion, asking us to pay careful attention to those ‘frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality.’ These are, of course, only suggestions for topics that are certainly not meant to limit presenters’ areas of research and creativity.

—

Giraud, E.H. 2019. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Duke University Press.
Raffles, H. 2011. Insectopedia. Random House.
Rose, D.B. 2013. In the shadow of all this death. In J. Johnston and F. Probyn-Rapsey, eds. Animal Death. Sydney University Press.

 

Three history lessons to help reduce damage from earthquakes

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Daniel Haines shares his blog post, first posted on the Cabot Institute blog.

Earthquakes don’t kill people,’ the saying goes. ‘Buildings do.’ There is truth in the adage: the majority of deaths during and just after earthquakes are due to the collapse of buildings. But the violence of great catastrophes is not confined to collapsed walls and falling roofs. Earthquakes also have broader effects on people, and the environments we live in.

Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.

Can history help?

Building against disaster

Buildings are a good, practical place to start.

Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.

NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.

Historic building with diagonal struts at Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.

Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.

An old (c. 400 years?) rammed-earth residential building near Paro, Bhutan. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.

But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.

Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.

Long-term health impacts

Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.

History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.

For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.

Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.

From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.

This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.

Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate.
Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.

Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.

History in action 

In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.

These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.

The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.

Sargasso Sisters: Celebrating the European Eel

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Eel Thoughts – Michael Malay

1. On the birth and death of eels

Eels are tiny when they are born, no bigger than a grain of rice, and completely transparent. If you were to look at them with a microscope, you would see into the world. But as they grow older they begin to absorb light, to bend and to capture it. Their skin darkens, their bodies lengthen, and their translucency is replaced by a brackish brown. Streaks of yellow run down their flanks, like bars of muddy gold, and their eyes grow more pronounced. The grain of rice has become a yellow eel.

But the transformations only continue, change following change. As they grow older, their yellow flanks darken, shade into umber, until, reaching full maturity, they take on the colours of a starry midnight. A slick, glossy black covers their top half, while their underbellies take on a silvery sheen. Glints of brown and green cover their back like flecks of mica. The yellow eel has become a silver eel.

Later, when they are ready to breed, eels will abandon their mud-holes in the river and turn their noses west, to the Sargasso Sea. It’s a place they hardly know, having left it when they were only a few days old. But it’s a region written into their bodies, and to which they return with unerring precision. During the day, they dive down to depths of two hundred metres, before moving upwards again at night. Their voyage thus describes a kind of sinewave, a diurnal dipping followed by a nocturnal surfacing: the arc of their homecoming.

The journey back is determinedly single-minded. Eels do not take a single morsel of food as they swim west, having already prepared for this voyage by storing up rich layers of fat. This is why they are rarely caught at sea. They are not returning for themselves but for the future, which makes itself felt as an itch in their bellies. After breeding, it is thought that adult eels simply perish and fall to the sea floor, where they turn into so much silt. But what survives them is instinct: millions of eggs floating up to the surface of the sea, like sparks from an unseen anvil. Each egg is a tiny plasma of light, each an eel waiting to be born.

And so they return east again, towards the rivers of Europe and North Africa: the Shannon, the Oued Sebaou, the Loire, the Elbe – and other points north, east and south.

2. Springtime

Elvers – the name for juvenile eels – arrive in Britain in the spring. And sometimes, in tidal rivers such as the Severn, they surge upstream on the spring tides of April and May. Part of the magic of elvers, then, part of their elvish charm, is how they unite the various meanings of spring. They leap into our world as the sap begins to rise, on the first spring tides of the year. (Spring: from the Old English springan, meaning an energetic leap or a sudden burst.)

As with the return of swallows, then, elvers help fetch the year to us; their entry into rivers is calendricallly precise. And if one could hover over the rivers of Britain, staying there patiently for days, for weeks, one would see what the kestrel sees: a greenness blooming as the elvers pass, an activating greenness that summons the ramsoms and bluebells of April, the cornflowers and dandelions of May…

3. Stenography

Eels are finding it harder to live here. After arriving in Britain, fresh from their Sargasso voyage, they meet with a series of strange hurdles: dams, sluice gates, tidal fences, barrages, weirs. Today, it is thought that there are more than one million man-made obstructions in rivers and streams across Europe.

The contradiction couldn’t be greater. On one hand, the hardness of concrete and the flushness of steel, and, on the other, this sinuous rope of changing life. Over its lifetime, an eel undergoes no fewer than four metamorphoses, as it transforms from being a leptocephalus to an elver, and then from yellow eel to a silver eel. It is an emissary from a world of alterations and flows, a creature of change and movement.

But what if eels are living letters sent from the Sargasso? If so, what messages might they carry?

What if, after looking into the water for weeks, we found ourselves surrounded by thoughts?

Sargasso Sisters from novadada on Vimeo.

A short meditative video-sonic piece celebrating and highlighting the habitats of the endangered European Eel (Anguilla anguilla).

Released for Fish Migration Day, 2020

Conceived and developed by Antony Lyons and Michael Malay.

Music contribution from The Fantasy Orchestra
fantasyorchestra.org
(excerpts from ‘Final Moments of the Universe’ by Richard Dawson)
Arranged and conducted by Jesse D Vernon
extra soundtrack audio by Antony Lyons

Filmed at loactions in Portugal, Ireland and the UK.
Recorded and edited by Antony Lyons
Some Ireland footage by Will O’Connor (ECOFACT)

Poem: ‘L’anguilla’ by Eugenio Montale
narrated by:
Manuela Castagna & Francesca Cozzolino
Translation based on a version by Paul Muldoon.

Additional text by Michael Malay

Produced with funding from Leverhulme Trust and University of Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities

Exploring the Wildfilm Archive in University of Bristol Special Collections, by Georgina Lever

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Bristol is widely seen as the ‘Hollywood’ of wildlife film-making and is famously home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit, formally established in the city in 1957. The University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections has embarked on a 2 year project to preserve and promote the mixed-media ‘Wildfilm’ archive, supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust. 

An example draft shooting script for the first episode of ‘The Living Planet’ (1984), working title ‘Planet Earth’, later re-used in the 2006 BBC series! [G. Lever] 

I am the Project Archivist working to catalogue and re-package the material, making it available to search online and access in person at the Special Collections reading room. There are treatments, post-production scripts, dubbing cue sheets, filming trip planning, photographs, research and correspondence – documenting a given programme from conception to broadcast – as well as audience research reports, publicity and press packs.  


A Radio Times cover from 1962 featuring Peter Scott for the ‘Look’ series [G. Lever] 

A substantial part of the collection is audio-visual, including several hundred reels of 16mm film footage. Among the cans are films produced by Survival Anglia, the BBC, and ethologist Niko Tinbergen FRS (1907-1988) and naturalist Eric Ashby MBE (1918-2003). The archive also contains sound recordings, radio broadcasts and audio from talks and festivals. In Digi-Beta format there is a selection of the 150 most important wildlife films selected by BBC producer Christopher Parsons (1932-2002) and a VHS library collected by Jeffery Boswall (1931-2012), another BBC producer whose papers are also in the archive.  

An example of 16mm film cans in the collection [G. Lever]

As evidence of method and technique there are two of the home-made sound-proof boxes made by Eric Ashby, enabling him to capture intimate footage of badgers and foxes in their natural state of behaviour. For further interpretation there are some unusual supplementary objects such as the penguin flipper, skulls and skin collected during filming in South America for ‘The Private Life of the Jackass Penguin’ (1973).  

Eric Ashby’s home-made box for insulating sound made by camera equipment [Helen Lindsay] 
A dubbing cue sheet for an episode of the BBC’s ‘The World About Us’ [G. Lever] 

It’s an incredibly exciting project to be involved in. I’m working alongside Peter Bassett, a producer with the BBC Natural History Unit who has acted as guardian and advocate for the collection and is a font of knowledge on the history of wildlife film making. Nigel Bryant, Audiovisual Digitisation Officer will join the project for a year to produce lossless digital preservation copies of selected material, enhancing the accessibility of audio-visual media in the collection and protecting the longevity of these fragile, obsolete formats. We’re confident the archive offers significant research value to a variety of disciplines and interests – from the history of media and television to environmental studies, anthropology, history, philosophy and music.  

Consistently these films bear witness to changes in the natural world leading us towards today’s climate crisis, educating us about the animal kingdom and the landscape we inhabit, reminding us of our responsibility to protect it. 

The artist Jody’s mural of Greta Thunberg on the side of the Tobacco Factory, North Street, Bristol [G. Lever] 

The climate activist Greta Thunberg recently guest edited an episode of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. During a Skype interview with Sir David Attenborough, she said:  

“When I was younger, when I was maybe 9-10 years old, the thing that made me open my eyes for what was happening with the environment was films and documentaries about the natural world, and what was going on, so thank you for that, because that was what made me decide to do something about it.” 

The archive has its foundations in a project led by another Bristol based organisation, Wildscreen, founded in 1982 by Christopher Parsons. Wildscreen hosts an internationally renowned biennial festival on wildlife film (the 20th anniversary festival will be held later this year, 19-23 October 2020) and supports a variety of conservation organisations. It launched ‘WildFilmHistory: 100 years of wildlife film making’ in 2008, a Heritage Lottery funded project that led to a collection of material which now forms part of the ‘Wildfilm’ archive. 

Another compelling aspect of the collection is a series of oral history films made by the WildFilmHistory project, spanning all facets of film-making from producers and cameramen to composers and narrators. The interviews capture both the professional and personal alliance between subject and interviewer, enabling discussion to draw out the working relationships behind the creation of pivotal series such as the BBC’s ‘Life on Earth’ (1979) and ITV’s ‘Survival’ (1961-2001). 

The content of interviews ranges from anecdotal to technical, covering the logistical challenges of filming in remote places, photographic technique, reliability of equipment, battling physical elements, ingenious ways of tackling technological limitations and reflecting on moments of fortune and failure.  

It is a renowned ambition of natural history film-making to capture a rare species or behaviour on camera for the first time; paperwork in the archive documents how this is attempted and achieved, and the role narrative construction may have to play in documentary film.  

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum, Sir David Attenborough said: 

“When I made my first television programmes most audiences had never even seen a pangolin – indeed few pangolin had ever seen a TV camera!” 

There has been an astonishing level of cultural and technological change since the programme, ‘Zoo Quest for a Dragon’ was broadcast in 1956 on the BBC – then one channel with national coverage only recently extending beyond London and Birmingham. In his published diaries for the Zoo Quest series, ‘Adventures of a Young Naturalist’, Attenborough recollects the obstacles involved in locating species unique to regions of Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay. Through such programmes viewers gained their first glimpse of far flung parts of the world, now increasingly accessible with the growth of air travel and the tourism industry.   

Improvements in technology allow viewers to observe the animal kingdom from new perspectives. The archive spans an era during which television has evolved from black and white to regular colour broadcasting in the late 1960s, and the invention of cinematic IMAX presentation to home based on-demand UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4KTV offered by streaming services today. In the same speech, Attenborough says:  

“The audience for that first series, 60 years ago, was restricted to a few million viewers... My next series will go instantly to hundreds of millions of people in almost every country on Earth via Netflix”.  

As well as the BBC Natural History Unit, the archive contains material for Survival Anglia, Granada, Partridge Films and the RSPB Film Unit, and international networks like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and TVNZ.  

There is a slim body of literature and theory on the history of wildlife film, but within the archive there is a unique collection of studies and published papers by academics tapping into this potential. Two excellent books are ‘Wildlife Films’ by Derek Bousé (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and ‘BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough’ by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).   

Some material relating to Granada’s ‘Zoo Time’ series (1956-1968) [G. Lever] 

All this material is being described in a detailed catalogue, capturing key words such as species and filming locations to ensure relevant content can be found by anyone with an interest in the archive. When complete the full catalogue will be launched on the Special Collections webpage in the summer of 2021.