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Introduction
Irus Braverman currently works at the School of Law , University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Irus does research in the intersection of legal ethnography, geography, and science and technology studies.
Publications
Publications (149)
The intensifying loss of coral reefs from global climate change and local stressors has seen international commitments targeted at conservation and repair, for example the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Fulfilling these targets requires decisions to be made on where, when, and how to act, ultimately dictating where limited resource...
Drawing on a handful of in-depth interviews with coral scientists, this essay considers two Red Sea stories, the first about oil flow and the second about coral enclosure. These stories demonstrate the varying, at times contradictory, dimensions of flow, underlining its relational significance and how it can only be understood within a particular s...
The story of the Hula Valley in the Galilee region of Palestine-Israel serves as the focus of this article, which draws on the concepts “more-than-One Health” and “settler ecologies” to highlight the harmful ecological implications of settler colonial projects in this region and elsewhere. Specifically, I tell the story of the Zionist drying of the...
The vulture is an impressively large raptor with a wingspan that can reach 10 feet. Her charismatic presence in the natural landscape makes the vulture “a good animal to think with” about settler colonialism, militarism, and about how both manifest in Palestine-Israel. Alongside the Persian fallow deer, the Asiatic wild ass, and the Arabian oryx, t...
"Settling Nature" draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Braverman plants the...
In Paolo Patelli, Giuditta Vendrame, & Elise Limon (eds). Friction Atlas (2022 Onomatopee).
Abstract
The space under the street is densely occupied and extremely limited. When referring to this underground world, most of the informants I spoke with from various American cities speak of chaos and messiness, sealed and covered up by the tidy appear...
In Ben Minteer & Harry Greene. A Wilder Kingdom: Rethinking the Wild in Zoos, Wildlife Parks, and Beyond (forthcoming 2023, Columbia University Press).
Abstract
Does the Partulid snail care if she is at the London Zoo or at her place of origin in French Polynesia? Can a tardigrade distinguish between an urban backyard and the Amazon forest? And...
Areas beyond national jurisdiction are the largest environment on earth and marine genetic resources are its new, and perhaps final, frontier. It is no wonder, then, that the scope and protection of marine genetic resources in this oceanic space have been hotly contested and that a new doctrine for ocean governance has been coined in this context:...
The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is an audacious endeavor to obtain whole-genome sequences of representatives from all eukaryotic species on Earth. In addition to the project’s technical and organizational challenges, it also faces complicated ethical, legal, and social issues. This paper, from members of the EBP’s Ethical, Legal, and Social Issue...
You and me
Knew life itself is
Breathing,
(Out, in, out, in, out …)
Breathing
– Kate Bush, ‘Breathing, on Never for Ever (1980)
This article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region's settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages betwe...
Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justic...
Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book high...
This article aims to make visible expert practices that take place behind closed doors and that are perceived as being of no concern to the public, who wouldn’t understand them anyway. The experts that this article is concerned with are medical practitioners of a particular kind: zoo and aquarium veterinarians. I utilize both text and multimedia pr...
This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the...
Drawing on in-depth interviews with marine biologists and engineers, this chapter explores the relationship between human scientists, nonhuman animals (crown-of-thorns starfish and deep sea and tropical corals), and robotic entities (COTSbots, ROVs, AUVs, and OceanOne humanoids). The chapter considers how the drive to ecological management is artic...
Ocean life is often portrayed as antithetical to life in the city. Drawing on interviews with coral hobbyists and aquarists, my article focuses on the emergence of the coral aquarium hobby within the urban home. I depict the recent fascination of city dwellers from around the globe with corals, explore the history and contemporary characteristics o...
The ocean and its inhabitants sketch and stretch our understandings of law in unexpected ways. Inspired by the blue turn in the social sciences and humanities, Blue Legalities explores how regulatory frameworks and governmental infrastructures are made, reworked, and contested in the oceans. Its interdisciplinary contributors analyze topics that ra...
The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely discusses aquariums. Despite their independent historical trajectory and unique characteristics and challenges, aquariums are typically considered the younger sister to the more established terrestrial zoo institutions. This article is an initial exploration of modern pu...
Drawing on interviews with, and observations of, officials from Israel’s Nature and Park Authority, fieldworkers from environmental and human rights nonprofits, and local Palestinian farmers, this article tells stories about springs in the occupied West Bank. Entangled with the physical decline of the springs’ water supply and quality, it examines...
The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely discusses aquariums. Despite their independent historical trajectory and unique characteristics and challenges, aquariums are typically considered the younger sister to the more established terrestrial zoo institutions. This article is an initial exploration of modern pu...
Drawing on interviews with, and observations of, officials from Israel’s Nature and Park Authority, fieldworkers from environmental and human rights nonprofits, and local Palestinian farmers, this article tells stories about springs in the occupied West Bank. Entangled with the physical decline of the springs’ water supply and quality, it examines...
Coral scientists are currently facing an existential crisis: their organisms, reef building corals who have existed on earth for nearly 250 million years, are dying en masse because of human induced changes to their environments. How do the scientists plan to save corals? My contribution argues that this scientific community has been oscillating be...
מדעני הסביבה חלוקים כיום בשאלה כיצד להתמודד עם סכנת ההכחדה ההמונית של המינים, המואצת בשל שינויי האקלים. אנשי השימור המסורתי קוראים להמשיך ולהגן על המגוון הביולוגי באמצעות פארקים ושמורות טבע. לעומתם, יותר ויותר חוקרים מעריכים שמאמצי השימור של חלקות טבע ״טהורות״ נכשלו, וקוראים דווקא להעמיק את ההתערבות האנושית במערכת האקולוגית כדי למנוע הידרדרות נוספת...
J Murray Roberts is a professor of applied marine biology and ecology in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His main research focus is deep-sea, or cold-water, corals. I interviewed him by Skype on January 27, 2016, and then over breakfast at a café in Edinburgh on April 20, 2016—in between two of his long excursion...
Chapter 2, ““And Then We Wept”: Coral Death on Record,” documents the despair side of the pendulum as it contemplates the existing modes and technologies for recording coral bleaching and death. Here, the trajectory is typically of devastation and gloom, as the numbers are depressing at best. Much of the chapter focuses on the third global bleachin...
Ken Nedimyer is founder and president of the Coral Restoration Foundation. He has lived and worked in the Florida Keys for over forty years and has witnessed firsthand the degradation of the Florida Reef Tract. He established one of the largest coral nurseries in the world and has been training restoration groups, especially in the Caribbean, on ho...
Ruth Gates is director of the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawai‘i. The institute occupies its own tiny island, known as Moku o Lo‘e, or Coconut Island. She is also the (first female) president of the International Society for Reef Studies. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about Gates in the ...
Coral Whisperers is structured as a pendulum swinging between hope and despair. Chapter 1, “Coral Scientists between Hope and Despair,”explains the workings of this pendulum and the stakes involved. Relying considerably on my observations at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Hawai’i in June 2016, this chapter relates the intellectual and em...
Peter F. Sale is a marine ecologist. He has been a faculty member at the University of Sydney, Australia; the University of New Hampshire, USA; and the University of Windsor, Canada, where he is currently professor emeritus. His research in Hawai‘i, Australia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East has focused primarily on reef fish ecology and on the...
Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many...
The fifth and final chapter in the book, “The Coral Holobiont: Hope and the Genomic Turn,” explores the hope encapsulated within coral life in the flesh. Holobionts, hologenomes, chimeras, and reticulate evolution are just a few of the concepts deployed by coral scientists to shed light on the microscopic and macroscopic complexity of corals, highl...
Conservation is the art of cultivating—here, that means cultivating both corals and hope for the future. The book’s conclusion begins with a description of two art-science collaborations and then moves to review the main themes of the book. It highlights that alongside the story of correlation, complexity, and wonder, Coral Whisperers has also told...
In chapter 4, “Coral Law under Threat,”the pendulum swings back to despair. The chapter documents the focus of contemporary legal regimes—in particular, the U.S. Endangered Species Act—on threat and endangerment, exposing how ill-equipped this law is for dealing with coral species and also with the sheer scale of their “super wicked problem.” Here,...
In chapter 3, “Nursing Corals Back to Life: Fragments of Hope,”the pendulum swings again, this time to document acts of hope by coral restoration scientists. Drawing on my visits to five coral nurseries—Culebra in the Caribbean, southern Israel, Honolulu, Coconut Island in Hawai’i, and the Florida Aquarium—this chapter explores the scientific, cult...
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is the inaugural director of the Global Change Institute and a professor of marine science at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has held academic positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Sydney, and is a member of the Australian Climate Group and the Royal Societ...
Jeremy Bradford Cook Jackson is an American marine ecologist and paleontologist, a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama. He has published over 150 scientific articles—including eighteen in the prestigious journal ...
Coral Whisperers focuses on coral scientists attempting to understand their world, both individually and as a community. The book is organized around their oscillation between hope and despair, with climate change playing an intensifying role for both approaches. The phrase“on the brink” in the book’s subtitle captures the sense of urgency and cris...
Questions pertaining to the role of nonhumans in law shed light on some of the most fundamental assumptions and constructions of contemporary modern law. I start by reviewing the traditions of animal welfare and animal rights in legal studies and by discussing the constitutional frameworks that contend with the animal. Then, I move beyond the indiv...
In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical mome...
The role of zoo veterinarians has changed significantly in the last several decades, reflecting and revealing broader transformations in zoo culture, especially among North American accredited zoos. This article draws on several interviews with prominent zoo vets, as well as on regulations that pertain to their work, to highlight their current posi...
Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. These cutting-edge technologies raise legal, ethical, cultural, and ecological questions that are so bro...
Captive
Zoometric Operations in Gaza
Irus Braverman
“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-a...
The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists of threatened and endangered species. This article draws on interviews with prominent list managers and observations of their assessments to explore the scientific practices of list-making in the context of species conservation. Delving into the complex calculations of ri...
Corals have recently emerged as both a sign and a measure of the imminent catastrophic future of life on earth and, as such, have become the focus of intense conservation management. . Bleached! draws on in-depth interviews and participatory observations with coral scientists and managers to explore the management of the corals' ecological catastro...