Conservation

Net art is build and distributed through a complex and intricate interrelated system of networks that presents an assemblage of art, technology, politics, and social relations – all merged and related to form a variable entity. In the last decade a discussion on how to conserve net art emerged in museums for contemporary art. Nevertheless, many net art projects from the 1990s have long disappeared: their server payments lapsed, software was not kept up-to-date, or artists felt the concept was no longer appropriate in a changed context. The project mouchette.org is an exception – the artist has kept the website up and running since it began. In this article I will show that net artworks are inherently assemblages that evolve over time. These works are distributed and ensured by networks of people, its continuation happens through its multiple authors and caretakers. All together they signify and give meaning to these works. Therefor instead of thinking of a ‘freeze frame’ the presentation and conservation of net art should focus on variability. This opens up different paths and choice options, making conservation strategies about assembling traces.

The last two centuries have seen the creation and rise of the conservation movement as well as the consequential rise of opposition. Traces of the movement began in the early 1800s with the rise of conservational discourse in the political, literary, and social spheres. Since then, participation in the movement has historically fluctuated with the perceived intensity of anticonservational activities by both public and private organizations. Stewart, Smith, and Denton break down the life cycle of social movements into five stages: genesis, social unrest, enthusiastic mobilization, maintenance, and termination (2012, p. 89). Through this framework, the history of the conservation movement reflects a tendency to default to a slow paced stage of maintenance with transitory surges of social unrest and enthusiastic mobilization as needed in order to bring resistance against any pressing anticonservational agendas at hand. This paper discusses the United States conservation movement from its genesis until the end of the Hetch Hetchy controversy by means of Stewart et al.’s model for the life cycle of social movements.

What is the relationship between militarized landscapes, especially overseas military bases, and the natural environment?  Some scholars have noticed that militarized spaces—permanent bases, demilitarized zones, live fire ranges, training areas, historic battlefields and so forth—are often accompanied by de facto nature reserves.  The unparalleled seclusion that militarization imposes upon delineated geographic spaces can create safe havens for plants and animals that would otherwise suffer from human encroachment.  Others retort that military activities cause severe damage to the natural environment.  In this article, I problematize attempts to evaluate the environmental impact of the militarized spaces in a way that divorces the natural environment from the broader web of social and political relations to which military activities belong.  In particular, I argue that environmental issues often serve as “greenwash” to distract attention—lay, scholarly and official—from the negative aspects of militarism, including instances of environmental degradation, the mistreatment of local populations and the perpetuation of colonial forms of government.  To illustrate and buttress my argument, I present a detailed case study of the US military base on Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Pennsylvania has an impressive array of state and federal public lands, totaling over 4 million acres, acquired mainly for natural resources conservation and recreation. In 1920, the Pennsylvania Game Commission began procuring lands for a State Game Lands (SGL) system that now exceeds over 300 individual units covering 1.4 million acres. Recognized as a functional coarse-filter conservation system for big-game as early as the 1930s by Aldo Leopold, SGLs have also inadvertently conserved many archaeological and historical sites across the Commonwealth. In this talk, I explore the value of SGLs 63 and 72 in conserving aspects of the early history of Clarion County, focusing on natural resources use (e.g., logging, oil and gas), industrial archaeology (e.g., charcoal iron production, early railroads), and post-mining cultural landscapes.

"Population size and distribution of a target species are among the most important features in conservation biology.
By knowing these parameters, an effective management for conservation can be applied in the range countries
of its distribution. This is particularly relevant for the smallest and long-term isolated autochthonous populations
of the Eurasian lynx in Europe. In 1941, zoologist Ivan Bureš was the first to acknowledge the subspecies status
of the Balkan lynx - Lynx lynx balcanicus Bureš (1941). However, this subspecies has never been recognized by
a wider scientific public, even though morphometric and genetic analysis support the subspecies status. The topic
of the critical status of the Balkan lynx has become even more alarming with a recent dramatic decline in population
size and the probability of extinction in the near future.
The main objectives of this paper are to present the distribution range, population size and conservation status
of the Balkan lynx. We have used three data sets in order to achieve the above mentioned goals: literature data,
questionnaires from a baseline survey performed in the study area (western Macedonia and eastern Albania) and
camera-trapping results. The conservation status of the Balkan lynx was assessed using the Species Information
Service of the IUCN. The distribution range was calculated taking into account the IUCN standards, thus focusing
on the Area of Occupancy (AOO) and Extent of Occurrence (EOO). The population size was calculated using
the Area of Occupancy and the mean density of the Balkan lynx inside the Mavrovo NP extrapolated from the data
acquired during the systematic camera-trapping session in 2010. The results show a decline in population size in
comparison with the results of the baseline survey. The pessimistic scenario for the population size of the Balkan
lynx is pointing to only 20 to 44 mature individuals, while the most optimistic one, to 220 individuals. These individuals
are distributed mainly in the western part of Macedonia and eastern Albania. No firm evidence could be
obtained for the presence of the Balkan lynx in the North of the study area (Kosovo and Montenegro). The Area of
Occupancy for the Balkan lynx is probably between 4,000-20,000 km2. According to the IUCN Red List criteria,
the conservation status of this taxon is Critically Endangered (CR (C2a(i,ii)D). We suggest taking urgent measures
in order to save the Balkan lynx from extinction."

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy of Megatherium were shaped by the arrival in London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genus Glyptodon by Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible.