Abstract: Economic globalization has led to the seemingly unstoppable spread of a culture of exploitation and consumption; and both people and planet are suffering as a result of its unintended consequences (Böhm et al. 2015). In light of increasingly startling statistics on climate change, resource depletion, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, we are starting to see a global shift towards conservation and restoration. As more research reveals the complexity of these ecological problems and demonstrates their inextricable connections to socioeconomic instability and poor public health (Cross et al., 2019), practitioners are beginning to employ community- and place-based approaches to restoration and conservation. With a growing consensus in the global conservation community that the participation of local communities is essential for the success of conservation initiatives (United Nations, 2021), there remains a large knowledge gap in how to integrate conservation and community well-being. I propose that a series of community characteristics and project design factors grounded in a biocultural approach can help guide this integration. I present ethnographic and ecological evidence from four communities engaged in community-based conservation in Costa Rica. My main finding was that while each community operates within its own unique social-ecological context, communities engaged in conservation share notable similarities in community characteristics and project design.
Continue Reading
Richard Pritzlaff gives us a good idea what to expect, and not expect, from Nick Patoski’s book. This is not a grand theoretical or comprehensive work on land use or conservation, but, as Pritzlaff explains, stories from real families about their experiences of restoring land, especially grazing land. Pritzlaff gives us enough of a taste to sense the morsels that are here and to let us know how our plate will be filled by reading the whole book.
Continue Reading
Journal of Sustainability Education is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. 
