Wild attachments are persistent, affective ties between people and wild animals. They form when individual wild animals, populations, or species come to matter to a human person, community or culture, beyond simple preference or copresence. They develop through an interplay of nonhuman charisma, material–semiotic interactions, and the incorporation of wildlife into individual, collective, and place identities. Despite having clear sociopolitical, ecological, and management implications, these attachments have not been clearly conceptualized as a distinct phenomenon. This article establishes a conceptual framework for understanding wild attachments, integrating empirical research on human–wildlife relations with theoretical insights from animal geographies, anthrozoology, and conservation social sciences. The framework maps attachments across two dimensions: the form an attachment takes (personal, collective, or symbolic) and its focus (a wild individual, population, or species). Understanding wild attachments helps explain why certain animals inspire more care than others, and why interventions that threaten them provoke intense resistance. Human responses to animals and their management are also political, entangled with questions of identity, place, community, and belonging. Examining these attachments raises important questions about the conditions that foster them, their permanence and stability, and the ethics of their strategic use in conservation.
This article centers on the role of open water bodies in the creation and/or destruction of value in urban settings. This dialectic is increasingly pressured in urbanized deltas across the world, because climate change presents new risks on closing value gaps. To date, however, environmental gentrification literature lacks a systematic assessment of the role of water bodies. This review argues that we draw our attention to blue gentrification to understand how surface water bodies are used to close value gaps. It combines three literatures: (a) longstanding political-economic and cultural understandings of gentrification, which present water as a resource in value creation, (b) emergent climate gentrification studies, which cover the flood risks and subsequent impacts on value gaps, and (c) recent more-than-human perspectives on gentrification, which argue that urban blue spaces, and the species that rely on them, are lively entities with agentic capacities impacting value gaps. The integrative discussion of literatures demonstrates how blue gentrification entails a dialectic of resource and risk formation, in which both human and other-than-human actors invest capital and labor. We conclude with defining six key features of blue gentrification and a research agenda.
Conservation's moral significance for capitalist reproduction has been vividly evident through its neoliberal formations, in which conservationists exalt the virtues of “natural capital” for “saving the planet.” Political ecologists and human geographers have critically engaged conservation's neoliberalization but not explained how and why conservation emerged as a prominent and durable realm of capitalist virtue-making. To address these questions, we focus on the relationship between neoliberal conservation's emergence, capitalist class formations, and their moral ideologies, particularly the convergent ascendance of conservation and the professional-managerial class (PMC) following WWII. We trace how modern conservation became a key domain of PMC virtue-making during this period and continued as such through the shift from state-centric managerialism to market-centric technocracy that began in the 1970s. During the late twentieth-century neoliberal policy turn, PMC actors refashioned their virtue-making around market logic, enabling mainstream conservation to endure and expand as a prime source of capitalist moral authority. Its prospects appear less certain amid rising authoritarianism.
Amidst escalating global socioecological crises and persistent failures of conventional environmental governance, Indigenous Political Ecology (IPE) offers an important paradigm for advancing ecological wellbeing and justice. This article argues for a transformative IPE that moves beyond merely incorporating Indigenous perspectives to fundamentally recentering Indigenous legal orders and relational accountability as foundational to equitable environmental governance and justice. IPE asserts that global environmental crises are inextricably linked to ongoing processes of colonialism, dispossession, and violations of Indigenous sovereignty. We define IPE as a critical, decolonizing framework grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, land-based legal orders, and relational ontologies. This article advances a global IPE and traces its foundations and historical trajectories, while engaging contemporary debates and emerging frontiers that expand its analytical scope and relevance in addressing decolonizing futures. We explore IPE's intersections with allied fields — decolonization studies, climate justice, environmental humanities, and critical development studies — highlighting its capacity to contribute to transdisciplinary conversations. Drawing upon diverse global case studies, this article demonstrates how Indigenous-led approaches to stewardship, relationality, and place-based responsibility offer viable, time-tested pathways for ecological wellbeing. We advocate for a paradigm shift for embracing Indigenous self-determination, epistemologies, and relational principles to confront and dismantle colonial-capitalist logics of domination and extraction.
Emergent conversations at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies are reshaping histories of Western empire by gaining more nuanced knowledges about pre-colonial Afro-Indigenous and American Indian worlds, and how the violences of slavery and colonialism upended and transformed American Indian and Afro-Indigenous relationships to land, water, and the more-than-human world. Most importantly for this conversation, these intersections are also concerned with the epistemic traditions that have been submerged or lost in the process of sedimenting the logics and praxes of empire. This themed intervention, centered around Black and Indigenous environmental geographies, brings together two early career scholars whose work on the Texas Gulf Coast and the Pascua Yaqui (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari) lands (Arizona) to discuss their relationships to and critiques of dominant scientific inquiry, their histories in their respective geographies, and their aspirations for how Black and Indigenous methods can shape future epistemic practices.
Domestic water supply responsibilities in the Global South are typically explored through the lens of the efficiency or failure of different models. In this article, we explore how, why, and with what effects various responsibilities have been assigned at different scales, focusing on global–local relations and perspectives of individuals (end users), social groups, and communities. We conceptualize responsibilization in water by proposing a framework to analyze three questions: (1) How is responsibilization institutionalized and rationalized?—including its rationales and mechanisms of power; (2) How is it operationalized and negotiated?—focusing on capacities and negotiations of responsibility; (3) With what impacts at the individual level?—particularly competing, gendered responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Through a literature review, we critically examine the techniques and expansion of responsibilization, highlighting how they may lead to negative impacts.
This article examines the first decade of work in Critical Physical Geography (CPG): an approach that integrates study of biophysical landscapes and the human structural inequalities that together coconstruct the environment. Based on a bibliometric analysis of 255 articles and book chapters that cite core CPG texts and 138 theses and dissertations that include CPG in their title, abstract, or keywords, we examine how the field has grown and changed since its launch in 2014. We find that while CPG-related work continues to find its primary home in Anglophone Geography, it has developed a notable presence in other languages and fields. In terms of authorship, early career scholars remain central to the field's development. Our analysis also raises questions about the field's normative commitment to ecosocial transformation. Ecosocial transformation remains foundational to CPG, but in published scholarship it is often framed in terms of pragmatic solutions and management interventions. We conclude with a review of recent trends we find hopeful, including growing momentum for more normative, community-engaged work, expanding ties to new areas of nature/society research including Black Ecologies and Indigenous geographies, and increasing connections to scholarship in Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
This article develops a critical review of how geography and cognate social sciences have engaged with health as a 'multispecies' or 'more-than-human' phenomenon in the context of nonhuman animals. We find that these literatures have employed some key ontological and epistemological innovations to address the human-centredness of dominant health approaches, including those, such as Planetary Health, that strive to integrate human, animal, and ecological health. In doing so, they have been successful in advancing fuller understandings of the multispecies dimensions of health. However, our analysis suggests that they have had limited results in rethinking health in ways that are equitable across species. Building on this review, the article draws on multispecies justice scholarship to identify three conceptual avenues that offer promise in terms of generating anti-anthropocentric accounts of multispecies health: in-difference, intersubjectively affirmed agency, and re-animalisation. Attentive to how animal health and ill-health are deeply embedded within human systems, we conclude by examining how these three approaches might provide us with the necessary 'reflective' tools for more equitable accounts of multispecies health.
Earth system science is revealing how animals regulate planetary metabolism and shape landscape dynamics, disclosing a range of ecosystem engineers and geomorphic agents. This science informs a subset of Nature-based solutions (NbSs) that aim to address the risks posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. This article examines the biopolitics of NbS, introducing the concept of governing through Gaia to describe a mode of governance that targets the life–earth interface by deploying animals as metabolic levers to modulate geomorphic processes and geochemical cycles. It reviews a range of empirical examples and outlines the scientific framework underpinning NbS, introducing concepts from biogeomorphology, biogeochemistry, and the Gaia hypothesis. The analysis presents NbS as a distinct mode of metabolic politics that seeks to repair the metabolic shifts enacted by modern environmental management. It provides a framework to differentiate NbS by the types of repair that they perform, distinguishing between those that maintain and those that transform the status quo. The conclusions identify the potential of NbS and call for further work by a range of environmental geographers to develop just and adaptive approaches to governing through Gaia.
Human geography scholarship understands extreme heat as socially produced and politically mediated. However, dominant notions of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation fail to capture heat-related harm as predictable and institutionally tolerated. This paper conceptualizes geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice to foreground how extreme heat is governed through differential exposure and thresholds of acceptable loss. Extending debates on abandonment, thermal violence, and climate necropolitics, it shifts the analysis from descriptive vulnerability toward the political allocation of harm. It offers a new lexicon and methodologies for sensing sacrifice and weathering and concludes with hopeful thermopolitics as a justice-oriented praxis of redistribution, repair, and care.
The risks of climate change on human health are increasingly studied through various conceptualizations of (social, environmental, and health) vulnerability, from different ontological and epistemological standpoints. Within this diverse body of work, questions around how different structures and forms of power shape why, how, where, and by whom such vulnerability is experienced and contested remain marginal, fragmented, or concentrated in certain disciplines. Synthesizing transdisciplinary literature and insights from a Feminist Political Ecology perspective, this paper advances four future directions in research and proposes new questions related to climate-related health vulnerability regarding: its intersectional, systemic, and structural drivers; its relational nature; the agency and strategies of resistance that emerge from and against it; and the embodied forms of knowing around it.
Research indicates that, contrary to common perceptions, wildfire activity is declining globally, primarily due to reduced fire activity in savannas. This finding exposes the normative view of fire as hazard and the neutrality of using satellite data for assessing fire regimes, as these overshadow local contexts, histories, and politics that shape them. The evolution of the fire regime concept reflects historical ambiguities in fire science and policy in colonial contexts. Today, fire research is influenced by carbon market considerations and informed by global fire datasets. This paper critically examines whether modern satellite data usage moves away from colonial legacies in fire management, particularly in West Africa. It highlights the complexities of fire regime changes, arguing that current policies oversimplify fire into a “good/bad” dichotomy. The authors propose a framework to document diverse local fire trajectories influenced by factors such as demographic shifts, land cover changes, and biogeography. Through sequence analysis, nine distinct fire trajectories are identified, revealing that while global fire activity in savannas is decreasing, many regions remain stable in terms of fire intensity and seasonality. These insights encourage a reevaluation of fire management strategies in West Africa, moving beyond simplistic classifications to better reflect the diversity of local realities.
New data technologies abound in environmental politics. It is promised that these technologies will make the task of managing human impacts on the environment faster, easier, and more rational. Geographers have been among those eyeing this turn critically, illuminating how new data technologies are performing new environmental entities and scales of equivalence that become subject to political attention and dispute. The pulling of data through centralised infrastructure then adds layers of social judgement, as data are cleaned, formatted, and categorised to support the aims of the infrastructure's owners and managers. Throughout this process, the political economy of measurement – the idea that more measurement is a necessary precondition for more effective environmental decision making – acquires hegemony as political actors organise themselves around the politics of data and its control. With the environmental data turn reorganising the bases of environmental governance, geographical work is illuminating what is at stake and how these shifts can be engaged politically.
This article argues that geographical debates on care in animal agriculture often operate under a stable set of ethical coordinates. Such a frame of reference limits understandings of animals to their status as either food or not, and forecloses the possibility for farmed animals to be subjects of environmental politics and (in)justice in their own right. The paper reviews geographical scholarship on animal agriculture and academic debates on foie gras. Through this, we develop a typology of how care operates within and upholds this frame of reference: (1) care as/for production; (2) care as/for tradition; (3) care as/for welfare; and (4) care for animals as individuals or collectives. The article analyzes how care seemingly dissolves the contradictions emerging from this frame of reference by either: (a) negating farmed animals’ status as food or (b) claiming that they can be both food and cared for as more-than-food. However, this position as more-than-food is always conditioned by farmed animals’ eventual reduction to food in human projects. The article ultimately calls for environmental geographers to pay critical attention to the frames of reference their research operates in.
