Articles
Routes Conversation Round Up – Environmental Change: A More-than-Human Perspective
Written by Hannah Cowdell (Routes Network Builder)
On 23rd June 2022, Routes hosted a virtual conversation on the intersections between human and animal mobilities and environmental change. Scholars from Human and Physical Geography, and Psychology, came together with Routes members from a diverse set of backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities to discuss what we can learn from taking a whole-ecosystem view of mobilities resulting from the effects of global warming.
We were privileged to host Dr Ricardo Safra de Campos, Dr Jonathan Bennie and Dr Malcolm Burgess as a panel of introductory speakers, who presented their perspectives on the topic of discussion. Dr Safra de Campos kicked off the discussion with an overview of the more-than-human aspects of his research on human mobilities and environmental change, especially highlighting the impact of climate change on ecosystem-based livelihoods, and links with displacement and migration. Dr Bennie then took the conversation in a different and enlightening direction by describing his work on climate-driven range expansion of butterflies in Southeast England and the movement of the Arctic tree line. Dr Burgess further expanded the non-human aspects of the discussion by highlighting various environmental impacts on migratory birds. The subsequent lively Conversation ranged across a wide variety of topics, touching on (among other things) the impact of human migration discourse on the linguistic choices of biologists; climate-related urbanisation and changing land use, and the impact of the latter on migratory species; the restriction of human and animal mobilities by national borders; planned relocations of human and animal species; and the legal rights of persons displaced by climate factors.
We very much expect this interdisciplinary conversation will be the beginning of further exchanges and collaborations on this important and pressing subject.
About our speakers
Dr Ricardo Safra de Campos is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter. He is a population geographer working on the spatial mobility dimensions of human interaction with environmental change, with a focus on migration, sustainability and subjective wellbeing.
Dr Jonathan Bennieis a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter. His research interests lie in issues of spatial scale in the biosphere, addressing how global environmental change scales down to the local level and how physiological and biological responses to environmental change at the level of the organism affects systems at higher levels of ecological complexity.
Dr Malcolm Burgess is a Principal Conservation Scientist with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, where his research focuses on ground-nesting birds, predation, diagnosing declines of migratory birds, and understanding temporal trends and species responses to a changing climate. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.
About Routes Conversations
Routes Conversations are informal gatherings where individuals from different disciplinary or practice backgrounds come together to catalyse a conversation around migration. For details about upcoming Routes Conversations, please visit the Routes Events page. To join the Routes mailing list, please email routes@exeter.ac.uk.
Date: 15 June 2022