Presenter: Dr Francisco Gelves-Gomez, School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania, Anthropocene Laboratory, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
ACCESS Seminar: Ontological and relational transformation in conservation
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ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ Campus
Online via Zoom
Abstract:
In the face of escalating climate change, biodiversity loss, and widespread socio-ecological injustices, the question "What now?" becomes an urgent existential inquiry. We live in a time when some humans have transgressed the ecological limits that sustain life, compelling us to confront the profound consequences of our environmental impact. In this context, biodiversity conservation has been increasingly recognised as a crisis discipline. Given our deep interdependence with the Earth, it is imperative to adopt more comprehensive and radical approaches to reshape human-nature relations. Addressing these challenges demands not only shifts in individual attitudes and behaviours toward the more-than-human world, but also systemic transformations in societal and institutional structures. Yet, prevailing conservation perspectives often remain constrained—dominated by nostalgia for an idealised nature or pragmatic compromises that reinforce existing socio-political arrangements.
In this talk, I want to explore how conservation is, or must be, undergoing ontological and relational transitions: moving beyond dualistic and preservationist paradigms toward more situated, pluralistic, and entangled approaches that foreground the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds. In doing so, it calls for a reimagining of conservation through transformative justice and offers space for both empirical studies and conceptual frameworks that open alternative possibilities for living with and caring for the Earth.
Biography:
Francisco is an Environmental Geographer whose research interests lie at the interface between the natural and social sciences. Much of his work is focused on critical aspects of biodiversity conservation, the production of knowledge about the environment, and how this knowledge is shaped by and influences the world we live in. His research has delved into the various ways in which human interactions with the natural world are conceived and enacted. He also studies complex socio-ecological systems, more-than-human geographies, and the application of these forms of thinking for management and governance of land and sea.