Creating Corridors for Nature Protection: Conservation Humanities as an Intervention in Contemporary European Biodiversity Strategies

This article seeks to provoke by linking two apparently contradictory perspectives on conservation in Europe. On the one hand, in light of the consistent failures of biodiversity protection measures to live up to the ambition of conservation policy, national parks can be seen as historical relics that are no longer fit for purpose. Conservation urgently requires forms of geographical and political connectivity that do not stop at national borders. On the other hand, national understandings of what nature is and how it should be protected continue to be underapplied. Indeed, the national is a key framework within which ideas about nature are presented and its potential can be put to work. In bringing these two perspectives together, the article makes both literal and metaphorical use of a term that is integral to connectivity-based models of conservation: the corridor. Corridors are conduits for the movement of biota in and between ecologically protected areas such as national parks, but are also passages that facilitate the movement of ideas between disciplinary perspectives and between scholarship and policy. Both sets of movements are needed to uphold the new interdisciplinary field of conservation humanities, which can support a more nuanced discussion on the wicked problem of nature conservation.