5 Books That Transformed How I Think About Wildlife Conservation
#1 ‘American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West’
I sort of fell into wildlife conservation as a topic of research during my Ph.D. As a linguist by training, my main focus for much of my graduate life had been on how people “construct”— tell stories about––their cultural and social worlds through the use of language.
But when I began researching local controversies around sea turtle tourism in Hawai‘i, mainly to investigate the language of debate and conflict arising as ‘ecotourists’ inundated local Hawai‘i communities to see, touch and swim with sea turtles, I was sucked into the complex world of wildlife conservation.
I began to ask how people tell stories about their relationship to the natural world through the use of language.
But stories aren’t just ways of talking about the world: they are ways of imagining future worlds, and provide a roadmap for guiding action and policy in directions that realize certain futures, and not others.
So I began to wonder, what stories are people and wildlife caught up in, and what kind of future are these stories leading in?
New and seemingly simple questions — on the surface at least — started to pester…
