Landscapes & Letters
Paul McCarney
About Me
I am interested in connecting with people to collaboratively create knowledge about wildlife. Hunting and gathering wild food has changed my life and informed my perspectives and relationships with conservation. Conservation is inherently bound up in ecological, social, and political issues. My goal is to examine the complexities in hunting and conservation, create opportunities for meaningful dialogue, and take action to support wildlife and social justice.
Wolves sometimes stand more as an embodiment of ideological narratives and politics than a species on the landscape. We often talk about wolves-the-symbol rather than wolves-the-species. When this happens, people and organizations frame wolves in terms of economic and political interests rather than the biological aspects of the species and their role on the landscape. Questions about wolf reintroductions bring together a complex intersection of biology and social values. If we can… Read More
In March 2022, I sat down with Wendy Keefover of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to chat about a petition the HSUS submitted to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The petition requested that the California Fish and Game Commission suspend the black bear hunt in the state. I wanted to chat with Wendy about what the HSUS hoped to achieve in California related to black bear hunting… Read More
In 2015, I was in Kugaaruk, Nunavut interviewing hunters for my graduate research. We were talking about ringed seal and polar bear ecology and the environmental changes hunters had noticed over the years, including changes to sea ice, climate, and wildlife. We were also running a harvest-based seal sampling program in which hunters took measurements and submitted samples of seals that would be used to understand seal health and learn about the… Read More
The world needs “ambitious, systemic and sustained efforts to address the full range of direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity change.” We are well into a sixth mass extinction, with untold numbers of species each year permanently leaving the planet in what environmental historian and author Bathsheba Demuth poignantly refers to as “quiet, unsung extinctions.” A new report by an expert panel of more than 50 researchers from 23 countries examined current… Read More
A British Columbia Supreme Court ruling in June 2021 (Yahey v British Columbia) found the B.C. government had breached its Treaty responsibilities to Blueberry River First Nations by allowing resource extraction and other development on their territory that caused ongoing cumulative impacts affecting their Treaty rights. It was a landmark ruling. It was the first time a court ruled that treaty rights had been breached due to the cumulative impacts of developments…. Read More
This post is essentially an unedited transcript of my discussion from Episode 13 – Enhancing the Social License to Hunt of the Hunt To Eat Show covering recent initiatives to suspend black bear hunting in California. California has had a busy year with bear hunting. In February 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener proposed Senate Bill 252 (SB-252), which was sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), to end black… Read More
Last month, I posted about the new Agreement for the conservation and recovery of the Woodland Caribou in Alberta signed between the Canada and Alberta governments. One of the themes in the history of caribou conservation across Canada is the federal and provincial governments failing to follow the timelines and requirements of Canada’s Species At Risk Act (SARA). As I’ll explain, while SARA establishes shared federal and provincial responsibility for species at… Read More
An Examination of the Hurdles Created by Differing Conservation Legislation in the U.S. and Canada Casey Pelzl and I collaborated on this piece as Conservation Contributors with Hunt To Eat. It was originally published on the Hunt To Eat blog. Some of us are familiar with Aldo Leopold’s appreciation for Canada geese when he mused that, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of… Read More
Despite being listed as threatened under the federal Species At Risk Act (SARA) in 2003, the Alberta government has made very little progress on woodland caribou protection or recovery. The Canadian and Alberta governments recently signed a new collaborative agreement to work towards caribou conservation. The agreement has some strengths and promising features but also leaves a lot of space for further delays by the Alberta government.
Canada has less than two years to meet its target to protect 17% of terrestrial and inland waters and 10% of ocean areas by 2020, commitments made under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Icons of the conservation movement, such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, are widely credited for convincing the public to care about protecting natural spaces in the late 1800s. Today, 47 National Parks protect 328 198… Read More
Paul McCarney