Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe's National parks

Many of Europe's national parks pose a unique challenge to conservation work, as they are not just historically wild and contested places, but are also sites of more recent geopolitical disputes. Understanding the role these parks play in local perceptions of place, identity, species movements, and human rights of access involves conservation as refracted through multiple languages and cultures: it requires, in short, a humanities-based as well as a scientific-managerial approach. Featuring a team of six researchers, three based at the University of Leeds and three at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, this project aims to apply interdisciplinary perspectives derived from a new field partly pioneered at Leeds, conservation humanities, which examines the humanistic aspects of biodiversity loss. These perspectives will be used to consider the past, present, and future of four of Europe's most iconic national parks: Wadden Sea National Park, Pyrenees National Park, and Bavarian Forest and Sumava National Parks.

The two key concepts are mobility and boundaries. All four parks either abut or traverse national borders; they thus depend upon negotiated forms of transboundary cooperation that indicate the transnational parameters of conservation itself. All four parks also raise issues of mobility that have political and philosophical underpinnings. Whose freedom is it that is protected in national parks: that of the people who live within their boundaries or that of their resident wildlife? What happens when these ideas of freedom come into conflict? Who or what moves in, across, and beyond national parks, and according to which sets of conservation principles are these intersecting movements - of humans, animals, landscapes, knowledge - to be both practically managed and theoretically understood? Do different designated boundaries - geographical and political, but also notional, as in the species boundary - facilitate or impede these movements, and what happens when such boundaries are transgressed?

Imaginatively combining methods drawn from ecocriticism, animal studies, environmental history, and conservation social science, the project will address these questions in three interrelated work packages. Each focuses on a single species or family (the sandpiper, the brown bear, the bark beetle) but also adopts a 'multispecies' approach involving multiple human-animal entanglements and explores some of the issues (species decline, habitat loss, disease, predation) that these entanglements raise. A fourth work package brings these findings together and assesses their relevance to current and future conservation policy in European national parks. The project's main outputs will be a book, a film, seven co-written articles, and four policy briefs that set out recommendations for future conservation policy with respect to European national parks, both as national institutions and transnational spaces within the overarching context of an ecologically threatened world.

Impact generated from the project will derive from (1) its public engagement work and (2) its work with a wide range of non-academic partners. The main aim in the first case is to increase public awareness of, but also participation in, contemporary conservation initiatives in European national parks, while the main aim in the second is to forge sustainable alliances with the various professional bodies that are either invested in these initiatives and/or responsible for the management of these parks.

First and foremost, the project team will work closely with the relevant park authorities, all of which are invested in research and have considerable experience of collaborative projects with academics. Three other partners stand out. Bund Naturschutz is the oldest and largest environmental NGO in Bavaria, while the EUROPARC Federation and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), both currently based in Switzerland, are global authorities on the natural world and the measures needed to protect it. We will work with all of these partners, representatives from which will be invited to all of our events and meetings and will be encouraged to co-create the project as it evolves. Still other partners will be involved, for example in the creative industries (for example, in 2021 we aim to show a film at NaturVision, an annual nature film festival in southern Germany). Other examples of collaborative work include a one-day public workshop (2020) in Munich in conjunction with Bund Naturschutz and Bavarian Forest National Park, which will concentrate on practical conservation issues, and a two-day guided field trip (2021), also open to the public, in Pyrenees National Park. 2022 will witness our final conference, which will include mixed activities aimed at a general audience.

All of these events and activities are designed to maximize the impact generated by the project, which also aims to benefit members of the general public: indeed, as noted above one of the project's explicit aims is to increase public recognition of contemporary conservation initiatives in and across Europe's national parks. The project's engagement activities are also aimed at opening up practical opportunities for public involvement, including policy analysis (the 2020 workshop) and citizen science (the 2021 field trip).

Policy work will also be incorporated into the project as a whole, which aims to produce short policy briefs in relation to each of its four work packages. These short reports will register attempts to translate research findings into policy at both national and transnational (European) levels, situated within the context of such current and recent policies as the German Government's 2016 Environment Report and, on the broader European level, the raft of legislation associated with the Natura 2000 network of protected areas. Our work will also integrate with NGO policies: both those associated with local conservation organizations in each site and those developed by European and international organizations such as the IUCN and Rewilding Europe. Our broader aim here is not to provide solutions to the problems of managing national parks, but to raise consciousness of the conservation issues involved in them and to reflect on possible paths forward; as such, our policy work will take the form of recommendations rather than firm principles for policy change.