Paper short abstract:

Wildlife corridors are multi-species landscapes of conflict and compromise. This talk focuses on elephant corridors in Kenya and India, analyzing conservation rhetoric invoking historical precedence, future trajectories, and the status of elephants as keystone species or ecosystem engineers.

Paper long abstract:

The corridor is a key principle in conservation politics and practice around the world, informing land-use governance, international relations, and scientific research agendas. It’s also a notoriously slippery concept. A corridor can refer to (1) preexisting routes of migration, dispersal, and gene flow with deep biogeographical histories; (2) pathways of wildlife mobility shaped by histories of human conflict, such as habitat preserved along borders and in fracture zones; (3) modern state conservation projects such as “stepping-stone” wildlife refuges and strips of habitat linking larger protected areas; (4) built infrastructure such as greenbelts, fence-openings, and highway crossings; (5) and future-oriented initiatives to protect/restore connectivity, often at a continental scale, such as the European Green Belt, Yellowstone to Yukon, and the Terai Arc Landscape. In the Anthropocene, wildlife corridors are sites of socio-ecological contestation and compromise where dynamics of human settlement and development intersect with the pathways of free-ranging animals and the ecological networks they sustain. In a twenty-first century defined by rapid planetary change, corridors will be at the center of conservation politics.

In this talk, I’ll discuss wildlife corridors in a range of global contexts, though my main examples will be elephant corridors in Kenya and India. I’m particularly interested in conservation rhetoric invoking historical knowledge (e.g., “ancestral” routes and ranges, customary “use rights”), future planetary trajectories (e.g., climate change, development, population growth), and the status of elephants as “keystone” and “umbrella” species, “engineering” ecosystems by maintaining cross-territorial routes of migration and exploration used by other animals.