Wisse van Engelen

YouTube video by Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Buffalos of Botswana | Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom

One episode that we describe in the article is about the so-called ‘buffalo exercises’, during which veterinarians darted and tested nearly 1000 buffaloes for FMD. Interestingly, I recently found out that this operation was also aired on TV and now is available on YT: youtu.be/aEpa6VWNTCg?...

Based on research in the Botswana National Archives, we point to the ways that Britain exerted influence on veterinarians in Botswana, while conversely there was - and still is - little attention to the ways in which Botswana and its wildlife is to be accommodated in international FMD control policy

In this article we complement existing histories of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) science with a perspective from Botswana, where colonial and postcolonial veterinarians dealt not just with livestock but also wildlife

First article from my PhD is out!

‘Provincialising Foot-and-Mouth Disease: The Construction of the African Buffalo as Disease Reservoir in Botswana, 1961–1976’, with Andreas Weber and @estherturnhout.bsky.social

I could have been clearer. I actually applaud the initiative and wish there was a more powerful lobby for it to take on the hunting lobby

I’m sorry I didnt mean this to be an attack on you or any of the initiators of the motion; it was just a comment on the final motion for people who read the headline but not the motion itself

Crucially the motion notes that it “does not apply to recreational or tourist hunting” - a practice that exactly targets older animals

www.kth.se/anthropocene... I am looking forward to the new journal #AnthropoceneHistory starting with a double issue to be launched in October 2026

@iceho.bsky.social @eseh.bsky.social
@carsoncenter.bsky.social
@austhistassoc.bsky.social
@aehhub.bsky.social @nichecanada.bsky.social

Perhaps @ark-rewildingnl.bsky.social knows?

Thesis cover in the making… by the wonderful Becky Arrendondo www.instagram.com/stories/becc...

@annetpauwelussen.bsky.social perhaps relevant for Ocean Nexus :)

We are very happy to announce our new online lecture series 'Livestock Histories: Regional and Global Perspectives'. The first lecture will be next week, where Steven Van Wolputte will be talking about cattle, microbes and veterinarians as entangled life forms in the history of Northern Namibia.

You really need to thoroughly check your text after they return it to you. Just now I discovered that they introduced an error in the concluding sentence of our paper…

One thing that has surprised me (in a bad way) as someone new to publishing is how terrible the copy-editing service of scientific journals is. Without tracking the changes they just modify your text, and instead of improving it they introduce errors. You’d think proper copy-editing is the minimum

In some cases cattle farming is a key vehicle of colonization and conservation can become complicit by greenwashing it. In other cases anti-cattle sentiment has been exactly what has made conservation colonial. Regional histories are crucial to consider

I think we should be careful in examining how these discourses are mobilized. There is a big difference between supporting the livelihoods of transhumant pastoralists in Eastern Africa and greenwashing the activities of large-scale settler ranchers in the Midwest

The interest in regenerative grazings seems to draw on varied discourses, incl. neoliberal conservation (conservation should be profitable), community-based conservation (should be done by landowners) and rewilding (should be done through grazing)

Will we still eat beef in 50 years? When drought became a perennial visitor to the Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado in the late 1990s, Steve Wooten remembers telling his family, “We got to do something different.” Between 1997 and 2003, ...

Although it has a bad headline, this article covers a very interesting issue: the controversial promotion of regenerative grazing by international conservation organizations

news.mongabay.com/2025/08/will...

A Chinese mining company is accused of covering up the extent of a major toxic spill in Zambia The spill happened in February when part of a dam that held waste from the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia copper mine collapsed.

A huge environmental disaster has taken place (perhaps the biggest tailings dam catastrophe ever?) and we are not supposed to know about it www.pbs.org/newshour/wor...

As someone whose research touches on pinniped health, this is really concerning...

“both the human and slime mould cases illustrate how memory can become decoupled from individual learning, instead becoming accessible to others through environmental structures.”

Interesting essay on what might be called ‘more-than-human mnemonic infrastructures’

PhD Position: Transforming Governance through Non-Human Animal Representation | Radboud University Do you want to work as a PhD Position: Transforming Governance through Non-Human Animal Representation at the Nijmegen School of Management? Check our vacancy!

'Transforming governance through non-human animal representation': an extremely interesting PhD position at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

We're on a roll and have another research seminar coming up in a couple of days - Larissa Fleischmann will share her research on the 'Postcolonial Borders of Animal Health: Veterinary Fencing in Germany and Namibia'. Register below :)

Papers written by @requenamora.bsky.social @danbrockington.bsky.social @forrestf.bsky.social @christinahicks.bsky.social @gkallis.bsky.social @upascual.bsky.social @pettorelli.bsky.social @estherturnhout.bsky.social @juliegwen.bsky.social and their colleagues

Eco-paradox USA: The relationships between economic growth and environmental concern generally, and by different income groups Environmental values are commonly explained through three theories: post-materialism suggests affluence enables environmental concern, materialism arg…

This also comes forward in this study done in the USA. It shows that the prioritisation of environmental protection over economic growth is more pronounced in lower income groups than higher income groups, pointing to the possibility of a ‘degrowth from below’ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

One of the ways forward, according to the paper, is to empower ILPCs and consider them leaders for environmental action

Unveiling pervasive assumptions: moving beyond the poverty-biodiversity loss association in conservation This paper reflects on the continued persistence of the idea in conservation research and practice that poverty drives biodiversity loss (the poverty-…

This study identifies the reasons behind this persistence and suggests ways to address them. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In the related context of biodiversity conservation, however, the idea persists that biodiversity loss is caused by cash poverty, not the production and consumption patterns of the world’s richest

High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide - Nature Climate Change While climate injustice is widely recognized, a quantification of how emissions inequality translates into unequal accountability is still lacking. Here researchers examine how affluent groups disprop...

First, this attribution modelling study finds that high-income groups do not just disproportionally contribute to GHG emissions but to actual global warming and extreme heat events. Among other findings, it attributes two-thirds of warming to the wealthiest 10% www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In case you missed these: some great papers appeared in the last few days that address the relation between monetary wealth and environmental degradation/protection 🧵👇