CFP: European Congress of Conservation Biology (ECCB) 2026 - "Conservation Histories and Humanities: Understanding the Present, Unearthing the Past"

[George Holmes]

Dear colleagues

Please see below for the abstract for our session on "Conservation Histories and Humanities: Understanding the Present, Unearthing the Past". We invite people to present papers exploring the histories of conservation. Please send abstracts to George Holmes (g.ho...@leeds.ac.uk) and Monica Vasile (monica...@oulu.fi) by the 9^th of February.

With best wishes

George Holmes, Monica Vasile, Cormac Walsh, Astrid Eckert 

Conservation Histories and Humanities: Understanding the Present, Unearthing the Past

What can conservation’s past tell us about conservation’s present and its future? This is a vital question, given frequent calls to learn from conservation’s failures and successes, and critiques of conservation’s ‘fadism’, the tendency to constantly look for the new, short-term solutions over understanding conservation as a longer-term enterprise (Chambers et al, 2022, Massarella et al, 2018). Despite the work of some key academics, much of the work done by environmental historians goes unnoticed within mainstream conservation discourse (Pooley, 2013). Similarly, rare are the cases when an ecologist bridges the disciplines by training as a historian (Martin, 2022). The purpose of this session is to explore the history of conservation, bringing key events, projects, and trends to light, and to discuss their implications for current and future ideas and policies in conservation. It will put conservationists, their work, values, struggles, successes and failures into their historical context. By doing this, it will look at how we created the conservation of the present, the institutions, policies, practices and knowledge that now exists. It is part of a wider move to increase dialogue between humanities disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literary studies, and conservation science and practice.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  

George Holmes

Professor of Conservation and Society

 

Sustainability Research Institute

School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability

University of Leeds

 

g.ho...@leeds.ac.uk

@georgeholmes.bsky.social

(He/him)

 

Book time to meet with me