Human dimensions of urban biodiversity: animal-oriented organizations as influences on human-avian relations

UnrestrictedLocal animal-oriented organizations are an understudied urban sector, though research indicates that these groups play important roles in shaping how the urban public perceives wildlife and environmental issues and in nurturing wildlife-oriented practices. The lifestyle and political decisions that members of the public make can have considerable ramifications for biodiversity in and outside of urban regions. As deleterious human impacts on the environment continue and as urban populations become increasingly dissociated from the knowledge of what a healthy, functioning ecosystem looks like, it becomes increasingly important to comprehend how these organizations operate and who they reach. This dissertation focuses on organizations devoted to birds, a taxon around which much conservation concern, environmental education, and rehabilitation efforts exist due to the widespread presence of birds in urban areas. It inquires how these organizations relate to the urban public and what the implications of these relations are for urban nature-society relations.; The dissertation approaches these general questions through a set of specific objectives. Much of the project focuses on Los Angeles County. The first objective examines newspaper coverage of bird-related issues in order both to comprehend contemporary human-avian relations in the county and the nature of attitudes toward birds. Findings suggest that conservation issues and recreational pursuits involving birds have high salience to Los Angeles, and that these interests are strongly oriented toward native birdlife. The dissertation then turns to bird-oriented organizations operating in the county to inquire about the degree to which these groups engage populations not traditionally involved in the mainstream environmental and animal protection movements, finding that the degree to which these groups have approached non-traditional populations is variable. Groups tend to locate their programs in white, higher-income areas, and tend to interface with lower-income populations and populations of color incidentally, if at all. The following objective, however, focuses on one of the organizations with an explicit interest in approaching a low-income Latino community. It examines this group as a model for dovetailing mainstream environmental and environmental justice objectives, concluding that the organization’s project may be seen as a model of “just sustainability,” although the group has experienced challenges with credibility and visibility in the community. Finally, the dissertation turns to a bird-oriented advocacy group in the New York City metropolitan area to examine its work in integrating a nonnative bird population into the urban landscape and state law. The chapter has particular interest in how the advocates’ campaign engaged with the bird’s nonnative origins in its rhetoric, finding that they were sometimes downplayed, sometimes used to curry sympathy, and sometimes used to fashion the exotic birds as a desirable addition to the urban landscape.; Broadly, the dissertation suggests the uneven relations with the urban public demonstrated by L.A. bird-oriented groups reproduce nature-society relations in the city by failing to reach communities with less exposure to biodiverse environments and perhaps less interest in wildlife conservation; and that the tendency of some of the organizations to draw on or cultivate place attachment and place-based identity may serve to draw animals into a place-based moral community