The conservation of wilderness is critical to the future of our biosphere, on both ecological and social levels. Current maps provide geophysical information such as access roads and landscape topology which indicate the optimum location in terms of power generation and distribution, but what about the impact of the turbines on flora, fauna, the local community, and the tourism industry? How would you visualize, analyse and ‘map’ these other important perspectives, such as value and meaning for inhabitants, which are not readily quantifiable? One key obstacle is that current methods for mapping the landscape and the populations which inhabit them are incommensurable in scale and intrinsically prioritize one perspective over another. Land management decisions are predominantly based on maps created from satellite imagery which provide visual representations of broad vegetation cover and macrostructures of the built environment, yet these maps are blind and deaf to the details of the lives of the myriad critters (humans among them) which flourish in wild spaces. In an ongoing project we are exploring the potential for diverse forms of listening as a point of encounter between ethnographic and ecological perspectives, with the aim of integrating both within the standard geophysical, cartographic format, in order to create inclusive, multivocal wilderness maps. Our work builds upon contemporary research across ecological sciences, anthropology, and political geography which highlights the importance of the soundscape – understood broadly as all the sounds emanating from a given landscape – as a significant component of both ecosystem function and human experience, as well as a key factor in the politics of environmental justice and land management.
Keywords: ecoacoustic|wilderness|transdisciplinarity|conservation
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