Erica von Essen

Stockholm University | SU · Stockholm Resilience Centre

An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterize invasive alien species (IAS) eradication. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labor to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these...

The battle against invasive alien species (IAS) rages on, and is being driven by recently articulated global biodiversity agendas. While the current United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to ensure pristine, protected areas comprise 30 percent of the world's total surface area by 2030, there remains much to be done for the remaini...

You can view the article with this link to Nature Sustainability: https://rdcu.be/dMB0g Proposals to downsize the human population or protect large areas of the planet imply that biodiversity conservation is possible only when humans are excluded, but effective conservation action is shown by groups engaged in consumptive wildlife use. We demonstr...

Grazing of both domestic and wild large herbivores can contribute to multiple ecosystem services. However, grazing systems strongly differ in the intensity of management and outcomes, and we define sustainable grazing as grazing which benefits multiple environmental ecosystem services. Previous studies have found that, in general, grazing systems w...

We appeal to the concept of a broad spectrum of solidarities, including those typically dismissed as merely rhetorical and parasitical. The concept of a solidarity spectrum captures both the phenomena of nonhuman solidarities among wild so-called co-predators, working togethr, and human solidarity with co-predators. We first consider the present no...

Hunting has a unique status as a sport and leisure activity alongside its practices having high stakes for society related to ecology, biosecurity, animal welfare and public safety. As such, hunting must increasingly legitimate itself before the public both in terms of ethically justifiable motivations for why to hunt and ethical standards for how...

The topic of animal ethics has advanced in tourism studies since its inception in 2000, based on a diverse range of studies on species involvement, types of uses and contexts, level of engagement, states of animals, and theoretical perspectives. While there is still considerable scope to amplify research on animal-based tourism, a gap exists in tou...

Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a ‘problem’ animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they...

Wildlife management across Europe is increasingly characterised by a 'war on wild boar'. In response to epidemiological and economic threats to pig production and agriculture, state agencies, policymakers and hunting organizations have altered their management as they attempt to contain wild boar. Through a cross-section overview of eight European...

The fence provides two functions in wildlife management. First, it physically blocks, deters or impedes wild animals from access to protected areas or resources. Second, the fence signals impassability, danger, pain or irritation to animals through both of these pathways: the actual blockade and the signal of no access both communicates to wild ani...

The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so. Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning resistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people responsible and methods used that undermine...

biosecuritization of wild animal threats in modern society. Previously mostly studied on the lofty biopolitical level of directives on combatting invasive species or culling pests, we outline the conceptual and methodological points of entry for bringing the on-the-ground work of culling out-of-place, unwanted, individual animals and populations. T...

Modern hunting is an ambivalent practice, torn between leisure and labor. Nowhere are these conflicting dimensions better manifested than for wild boar-a simultaneous game and pest species in many countries. Here, we consider the sociological, political and cultural phenomenon of wild boar hunting from a change perspective, starting at its historic...

Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman enta...

Conflicts over wolf management are a stable feature of Norwegian public debate. In some segments of the population, nature management, and especially predator management, have a very low legitimacy. A strong expression of these controversies is the illegal killing of wolves, a practice sufficiently extensive to impact wolf population size. In sever...

Although hunting is declining in western countries, numbers of people taking the hunting exam in Sweden are stable and new demographic groups are becoming hunters. Through interviews done in Sweden with both new and experienced hunters, as well as focus groups with young hunters at agricultural colleges, we investigate how they navigate praxis and...

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodif...

Wolves and other large predators make their presence felt in the wider landscape. We investigate how to grasp this affective challenge to living in a multispecies world where coexistence never comes in ‘neutral’. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/wolves-ecologies-of-fear

Illegal killing of wildlife is challenging conservation efforts worldwide. Ecological research has shown that illegal killing is severely affecting the transboundary Swedish-Norwegian wolf population. A previous study indicated that unwillingness to report illegal killing of wolves among Swedish hunters contains an element of protest against percei...

The ongoing devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought new urgency to questions surrounding the origins, management, and complex dynamics of infectious diseases. In this mini review, we use growing international concern over the pandemic potential of emerging infectious diseases as motivation for outlining a research approach to study the emo...

SLU:s vetenskapliga råd för djurskydd fick i en skrivelse den 27 november 2018 i uppdrag av Johan Beck-Friis, Svenska Djurskyddsföreningen, Camilla Björkbom, Djurens Rätt, Åsa Hagelstedt, Djurskyddet Sverige och Johanna Sandahl, Naturskyddsföreningen att sammanställa forskning om jakt med pilbåge för att svara på hur lång tid tar det för djur skjut...

Hunter education classes are a compulsory education tool for all hunters in North America, Europe and some other regions. However, little research focuses on hunter education. We surveyed Swedish hunters, examining how they valued key aspects of hunter education, and identifying socio-demographic predictors for those preferences. Learning about dog...

By animal-based tourism, a host of activities offering passive viewing or active interaction with wild, semi-wild or captive animals is included. The multibillion dollar industry is on the rise globally today, offering modes of engagement with animals that trade on increasingly embodied close encounters with non-human animals. As new modes of anima...

The seeming absence of mutual consent in interspecies sports makes it difficult to justify non-human animals participating on equal terms with humans in for example sport hunting. Nevertheless, hunted animals might appear to be ‘playing the game’ to the extent they resort to counter-deceptions, which often fool the hunters or their dogs. In this pa...

Crop damage by wildlife can cause significant economic loss and non-human primates can be nuisances to farmers following their ingenuity in crop-raiding strategies. There is an emerging research interest on interspecies interaction in human-wildlife conflicts, following the growing field of merging human-animal barrier, at least analytically. We co...

Understanding whether people view non-native species as belonging in a place will help guide important conservation efforts ranging from eradications of exotics to re-introduction of extirpated species. In this manuscript we describe the degree to which Swedish hunters perceive key wildlife species as belonging in Swedish nature. We surveyed 2014 S...

‘Care’ is a term that hunters increasingly apply to diverse practices pertaining to their interactions with wildlife. In this article, we investigated the extent and durability of hunters’ use of care language, including appeals made to sentiment, relation, compassion, embodiedness and situated morality. After establishing the use of such language...

In a review of situational pressures on tourists, we identify seven sins or risk zones that induce moral disengagement and allow for behaviour that would be considered unethical by the same people when not on holiday. The context of hunting tourism reveals the following sins act cumulatively on the hunting tourist: “The Pay Effect”, “The Tourist Bu...

Swedish hunters sometimes appeal to an inviolate ‘right to exist’ for wolves, apparently rejecting NIMBY. Nevertheless, the conditions existence hunters impose on wolves in practice fundamentally contradict their use of right to exist language. Hunters appeal to this language hoping to gain uptake in a conservation and management discourse demandin...

Hunting trophies are shown to be undergoing socialization in photos. They are no longer personal souvenirs that serve a purely introspective function for the individual. Hunting photos are discussed, critiqued, and conspicuously displayed across online and print platforms. They are shared between hunters and lately also between hunters and the publ...

While calls for critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship in environmental communication (EC) abound, few articles discuss what this may practically entail. With this article we aim to contribute to a discussion in EC about the methodological implications of such scholarship. Based on our combined experience in EC research and drawing from...

Modern hunting appears to be undergoing an identity crisis as a result of transitioning from labour to leisure. This transition is by no means linear or absolute. Today, hunting is framed both as a hobby for the leisure participant, and as a societal duty that delivers wildlife management, pest control for agriculture, sustainably sourced meat and...

In this paper we explore in which ways and to what extent Swedish visitor centres in protected sites work as forums for public deliberation on environmental issues, such as nature conservation and natural resource management. By hosting deliberations on nature in nature the deliberation process is connected to its materiality. Nature interpretation...

Hunting is a social world in which members socially differentiate themselves into smaller social worlds on the basis of adhering to a particular method, aesthetic, or game. Such identity constitution has been understood as forming communities of practice of hunters. Importantly, these communities frequently take pride in their distinct identities a...

Sport hunting has been shaped by modernization processes such as commoditization and rationalization. But these processes have also precipitated counterreactions seeking to return hunting to a state of authenticity. This is manifested in the rise of atavism such as bow-hunting and exemplified in an embodied turn that involves a more intimate and ca...

Abstract We argue that animal resistance to systemic oppression is a joint animal/human project. Escaping from slaughterhouse or marketplace, animals are primary agents of change appropriately described as resisting oppression and injustice. Nevertheless, animal resistance fundamentally depends on reasonable human persons positioning animal escapes...

Following contentious debates around the status and justifiability of illegal direct actions by animal rights activists, we introduce a heretofore unexplored perspective that argues they are neither terrorist nor civilly disobedient but ethically vigilante. Radical animal rights movement (RARM) activists are vigilantes for vulnerable animals and th...

Hunters are accustomed to a degree of “freedom with responsibility” and exemption from having to justify their practices to the general public. But the time for sovereignty may be over. Hunters increasingly have to justify their hunting forms, their shooting practices, the way they talk about wildlife and killing generally to the general public, wh...

Self-policing is essential for addressing wildlife-related crime where illegal activity is extremely diffuse, and limited resources are available for monitoring and enforcement. Emerging research on self-policing suggest key drivers including economics, folk traditions, and socio-political resistance. We build on this research with a case study eva...

Abstract In this paper, we examine the possibility of interspecies political agency at the level of social movements. We ask to what extent animals and humans can be co-participants in one another’s liberation from oppression. To do so, we assess arguments for and against including animals in the ‘total liberation package’, taken as the liberation...

All religions are associated in one way or another with the oppression and domination of animals. In this paper, however, we ask whether religions contain ideological resources to challenge the oppression and domination of nonhuman animals. We do not ask whether religions ground devotional support for animal liberation in their particular doctrines...

The first rule to poaching is that you do not talk about poaching. If you do, you do so behind a veil of anonymity, using hypotheticals or indirect reported speech that protect you from moral, cultural or legal self-incrimination. In this study of Swedish hunters talking about a phenomenon of illegal killing of protected wolves, we situate such tal...

This study examines how processes of modernization affect hunting ethics, including commodification, cosmopolitanism, demographic shifts, technological innovation, and invasive species. The impact of such change processes has been documented in indigenous hunting societies, but not in postindustrial Western hunting communities. Instead, wildlife et...

Urban-based conservation elites often condemn rural communities as backwards when they appeal to the value of tradition. Nevertheless, drawing from an interview study of Swedish hunters, we show that appeals to tradition express a coherent, if problematic, philosophical vision. We ask, then, two questions: (1) Do the ideas of Swedish hunters reflec...

In this article, we consider the phenomenon of message crimes involving harm to wildlife from a sociological and criminological perspective. Using a case study of dissident Nordic hunters killing protected wolves to send a message to the state agencies responsible for their conservation, we engage philosophically with the question of wildlife victi...

This ethnographically based study examines Swedish hunters’ claims to victimhood through appeal to the term ‘persecution’. Perceiving disenfranchisement, injustice and discrimination on the basis of wolf conservation policy, we present hunters’ self-styled predicament as victimhood-claimants of persecution at the hands of a state that has been co-o...

This essay offers a critical overview of how neoliberal colonialism has nurtured wildlife crime in many contexts, and discusses future research avenues opened by incorporating a critique of neoliberalism into wildlife criminology studies. Specifically we suggest neoliberalism’s tendency to convert nature into alienable property and exclude people w...

Because of their status of res nullius —owned by no one—property theory is underdeveloped in regard to wildlife. In this article, wildlife is seen to be sometimes subject to a shadow ownership by class interests in society. Hunters accuse protected wolves of being the “pets” or “property” of an urban-based conservationist middle class. This phenome...

In this paper, we discuss the bridging potential of “interspecies” solidarity between the often incommensurable ethics of care and justice. Indeed, we show that the Environmental Communication literature emphasizes feelings of care and compassion as vectors of responsibility taking for animals. But we also show that a growing field of Political Ani...

Two obstructionist ways of doing politics on contentious wildlife management issues currently reflect a legitimacy deficit in official channels for public engagement. The first is that of a pernicious “direct-action” politics, in the form of resort by hunters in rural Sweden to illegal killings of protected wolves over whose policy they contest. Th...

In recent years, hunting and agrarian communities have increasingly risen in opposition to nature conservation policy that is perceived to infringe on their traditional ways of life. They charge ‘conservationists’ with having a disproportionate influence on policy and maintain that the state system now disenfranchises their needs and interests. In...

This study examines citizens’ responses to exclusions, injustices and power asymmetries in the context of public participatory processes in solid waste management within the Mtendere township in Lusaka, Zambia. Interviews and field observations illuminate experiences of disenfranchisement from public spheres and a collection of everyday resistance...

In this article, we reinterpret the current liberal political turn in animal rights in a republican framework Appealing to the values of liberty, fraternity and equality, we argue for a conception of animal liberation within the context of a republican zoopolity assigning different categories of animals protective rights against human domination. R...

It may be challenging to see how illegal hunting, a crime that ostensibly proceeds as shoot, shovel and shut up in remote rural communities, at all communicates with the regime. Examining the socio-legal interplay between hunters and state regulation, however, clarifies illegal hunting to be part of a politically motivated pattern of dissent that s...

Rewilding is positioned as ‘post’-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, we argue that the autonomy of nature rhetoric in rewilding is challenged by human interventions. Instead of joining critique toward the ‘managed wilderness’ approach of rewilding, however, we examine the injustices thi...

In this article, we develop a republican framework for a growing field of relational animal ethics. This field offers an attractive alternative to hands-off, abolitionist approaches to the environment. We adopt this direction on the morality of the supplementary feeding of wildlife, using a case study of wild boars. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopoli...

In this article, we appeal to Hegel’s concept of the rabble to examine the predicament of wildlife hybrids. The EU Habitats Directive and the US Endangered Species Act presently exempt hybrids from legal protection and sanction their elimination as individuals, seeing them as threats to the genetic integrity of endangered species. In this paper, we...

In this paper, the potential for applying deliberative disobedience as a legitimation framework for environmental disobedience is unpacked. At present, disobedience on behalf of non-humans is not justified within the liberal theory of disobedience put forward by Rawls. Instead of framing harms to environment as indirect harms to humans, Smith’s fra...

As a way of coping with uncertainty and threats to their livelihoods following wolf reintroduction, livestock breeders in Greece deploy incriminating rumors about the wolf and the premises and actors around its reintroduction. In this paper, we identify the social representations with which livestock breeders make sense of and constitute the wolf a...

This study examines what happens when contentious lay citizens harness the technical-ecological repertoire of experts as means of challenging nature conservation policy. The causes, manifestations, and implications of this phenomenon are elucidated through a critical discourse analysis. The case study is based on the wolf reintroduction project in...

'Stakeholder' has become the primary category of political actor in decision-making, not least within nature conservation. Drawing from Habermas' theory on communicative action, this article argues that there are democratic deficits to the stakeholder model that promote citizens to remain locked in predetermined, polarized positions. It contends th...

In this paper, we determine whether illegal hunting should be construed as a crime of dissent. Using the Nordic countries as a case study where protest-driven, illegal hunting of protected wolves is on the rise, we reconsider the crime using principles of civil disobedience. We invoke the conditions of intentionality, nonevasion, dialogic effort, n...

Populist hunting movements have risen in recent years to safeguard rural interests against nature conservation. In extreme cases this movement has been accompanied by the illegal hunting of protected species. Using Sweden and Finland as a case study, the article elucidates how the perceived exclusion of hunters in the public debate on conservation...

This review explores the way that the illegal hunting phenomenon has been framed by research. We demarcate three main approaches that have been used to deconstruct the crime. These include ‘drivers of the deviance’, ‘profiling perpetrators’ and ‘categorizing the crime’. Disciplinary silo thinking on the part of prominent theories, an overreliance o...