Elizabeth Lunstrum
Biographic Data
| ID | 264367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Lunstrum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Lunstrum |
| SIGNATURE | LUNSTRUM E |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0097-4596 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 480 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Bringing Back the Buffalo
Restoring coexistence with cultural keystone species
Re-establishing society’s ability to coexist with wildlife species that were historically extirpated presents a critical challenge for reintroduction. Tribal-led efforts across North America aim to restore American Buffalo (Bison bison) as an ecological and cultural keystone species. Yet low social tolerance remains a limiting factor, especially in cattle ranching communities. This article explores the Blackfoot Nations’ efforts to restore coexis…
Militarized landscapes
As militarized landscapes proliferate globally, it is timely to ask: what exactly constitutes a militarized landscape, and how might we intervene in the scholarship on military-environment relations to better understand their key features. In this introduction to the special theme issue on Militarized Landscapes, we invite readers into these questions. We first define militarized landscapes as socio-ecological landscapes that contribute to or are…
Rethinking Indigenous Hunting in National Parks
Designed to be “wilderness” spaces with minimal human impact, the establishment of national parks contributed to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from traditional territories across North America, preventing access to dwindling populations of wildlife essential to cultural and material well-being. With the systematic near extermination of buffalo during the nineteenth century and forcible relocation of Tribes onto reservations, Tribal food system…
Demilitarizing Conservation
Introducing Jurisdiction
Transformative Politics of Nature
Professor of Environmental Studies and Global Studies and Research Director, School of Public Service, Boise State University, Idaho, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Chasing colonization back
In this interview, we hear from influential Blackfoot Elder and Cultural Educator Ninna Piiksii, Dr. Michael Bruised Head. Mike reflects on the colonial naming of national parks and the need to return to Indigenous place-names, examining how we occupy a pivotal moment where park staff are more open to substantive Indigenous engagement and presence within parks, although more needs to be done. Drawing connections across topics that may initially s…
Protecting people and wildlife from the potential harms of drone use in biodiversity conservation
In this policy intervention, we recount the process of producing a policy briefing targeting researchers and practitioners who use drones in biodiversity conservation. We use the writing process as a springboard to think through the ways that interdisciplinary exchange has and might further inform the ethical use of new technologies, such as drones. This approach is vital, we argue, because while drones may be deployed as tools that enable or emp…
The rhino horn trade and radical inequality as environmental conflict
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most acute global conservation challenges. This paper examines what is driving young men to enter the rhino horn trade while advancing theory on environmental conflict. We show how the illicit rhino horn economy is a telling instance of environmental conflict-largely between ground-level hunters and increasingly militarized state conservation forces-that emerges from a context of radical inequality. …
Environmental Displacement in the Anthropocene
This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene-this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change-and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognition that displacement is driven not just by climate change but also broader forms of environmental cha…
Biocultural nation making
While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identic…
Field-Based Experiential Education in Geography
Drawing on our experience teaching a 2-week field-based geography course on urban environmental issues, we reinforce the value of field-based experiential education (EE) especially as it faces growing threats. We show how such experience can enable students to understand the diversity of urban environmental challenges in situ; grasp cities as sites of environmental sustainability; understand the innovative ways local organizations and actors – ma…
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
A feminist political ecology of wildlife crime
Wilderness” revisited
This paper questions whether the rescaling of conservation practice in Canada to include local and Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private market‐based actors represents a move away from wilderness‐thinking in conservation, and what implications this might have for the future of conservation in Canada. We explore the links between Cronon's “wilderness” ethic and coloniality, racism/sexism/classism, and political economy, and the extent to which…
Why we must question the militarisation of conservation
Transnational environmental crime threatens sustainable development
Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene
Hegemonic narratives and practices around environmental change, even when coming from concerned and seemingly progressive fronts, often contribute to a larger project of population control. The Malthusian specter of overpopulation looms large in pervasive images of imminent ecological disaster in ways that are profoundly depoliticizing and that serve projects of militarization, misogyny, and racism. In this paper, we expose and challenge problema…
Deploying Difference
State actors are increasingly treating protected areas as sites of security threats and policing resident communities as though they are the cause of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorised by security concerns and logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by drawing upon empirical work from two borderland conservation areas: Mozambique's Limpopo National P…
Linking green militarization and critical military studies
The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses. Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies, increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even sophisticated military technology used to address the problem. Scholarly investigations on the topic have largely been approached from a political ecology perspective and hence have not made co…
Capitalism, Wealth, and Conservation in the Age of Security
This article illustrates how for-profit actors and private wealth vitalize state power, here in the form of advancing the state's project of militarized conservation. My contribution complements, first, the neoliberal natures and conservation literature, which largely sees state power as diminished by neoliberal processes or else reinvented as a handmaiden of capital. In contrast and by drawing in part on Gramscian perspectives of state natures, …
Green grabs, land grabs and the spatiality of displacement
The M ozambican state is currently working to relocate 7000 people from the interior of the L impopo N ational P ark (LNP), itself part of the G reat L impopo T ransfrontier P ark (GLTP). As the process began in 2003, this stands out as one of the region's most protracted contemporary conservation‐related evictions. I draw from this case to shed light on the increasingly complex spatial dynamics of land and green grabs and, more specifically, dem…
Environmental displacement
In this introduction to a special section on environmental displacement, we introduce the concept and ground it in seemingly distinct processes of climate change, extraction, and conservation. We understand environmental displacement as a process by which communities find the land they occupy irrevocably altered in ways that foreclose or otherwise impede possibilities for habitation or else disrupt access to resources within these spaces of life,…
Feed them to the lions
Accumulation by securitization
Green Militarization
Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, a…
Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene
Hegemonic narratives and practices around environmental change, even when coming from concerned and seemingly progressive fronts, often contribute to a larger project of population control. The Malthusian specter of overpopulation looms large in pervasive images of imminent ecological disaster in ways that are profoundly depoliticizing and that serve projects of militarization, misogyny, and racism. In this paper, we expose and challenge problema…
Feed them to the lions
Articulated sovereignty
Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. While this reinforces predictions in the early transfrontier conservation literature, it stands in tens…
Linking green militarization and critical military studies
The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses. Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies, increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even sophisticated military technology used to address the problem. Scholarly investigations on the topic have largely been approached from a political ecology perspective and hence have not made co…
Green grabs, land grabs and the spatiality of displacement
The M ozambican state is currently working to relocate 7000 people from the interior of the L impopo N ational P ark (LNP), itself part of the G reat L impopo T ransfrontier P ark (GLTP). As the process began in 2003, this stands out as one of the region's most protracted contemporary conservation‐related evictions. I draw from this case to shed light on the increasingly complex spatial dynamics of land and green grabs and, more specifically, dem…
Capitalism, Wealth, and Conservation in the Age of Security
This article illustrates how for-profit actors and private wealth vitalize state power, here in the form of advancing the state's project of militarized conservation. My contribution complements, first, the neoliberal natures and conservation literature, which largely sees state power as diminished by neoliberal processes or else reinvented as a handmaiden of capital. In contrast and by drawing in part on Gramscian perspectives of state natures, …
Mozambique, Neoliberal Land Reform, and the Limpopo National Park
Central to its transformation from a state-centered to a neoliberal, free-market economy, in 1997 the Mozambican state passed a radical new land law that guarantees the rights of individuals and communities to occupy land and transfer land-use titles, a move seen as necessary for attracting private investment. By comparing how the land law has been applied to the Limpopo National Park and several adjacent villages, I show how it has led to geogra…
Terror, Territory, and Deterritorialization
During the Mozambican "civil" war, residents across large areas of the countryside were terrorized out of their villages by the South African-backed Mozambican rebel organization Renamo. Drawing on the deterritorialization debates and investigations into the relation between territory and terror -- literatures that have rarely engaged \nwith one another -- and bringing them together with interviews with survivors of the conflict, I show how Renam…
Environmental displacement
In this introduction to a special section on environmental displacement, we introduce the concept and ground it in seemingly distinct processes of climate change, extraction, and conservation. We understand environmental displacement as a process by which communities find the land they occupy irrevocably altered in ways that foreclose or otherwise impede possibilities for habitation or else disrupt access to resources within these spaces of life,…
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
Environmental Displacement in the Anthropocene
This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene-this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change-and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognition that displacement is driven not just by climate change but also broader forms of environmental cha…
Reconstructing history, grounding claims to space
The recent creation of Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) and its integration into the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) promise to effect profound political, social, and ecological changes. These range from removing sections of the international border fence and restocking wildlife in the LNP to the planned relocation of several thousand people living within the park. These transformations have inspired complex, conflicting ex…
Wilderness” revisited
This paper questions whether the rescaling of conservation practice in Canada to include local and Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private market‐based actors represents a move away from wilderness‐thinking in conservation, and what implications this might have for the future of conservation in Canada. We explore the links between Cronon's “wilderness” ethic and coloniality, racism/sexism/classism, and political economy, and the extent to which…
The rhino horn trade and radical inequality as environmental conflict
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most acute global conservation challenges. This paper examines what is driving young men to enter the rhino horn trade while advancing theory on environmental conflict. We show how the illicit rhino horn economy is a telling instance of environmental conflict-largely between ground-level hunters and increasingly militarized state conservation forces-that emerges from a context of radical inequality. …
Introduction Environmentally Induced Displacement and Forced Migration
Disappearing coastlines, fields and homes flooded by rising waters, lands left cracked and barren by desertification, a snowpack shrinking in circumpolar regions year by year—these are only a few of the iconic images of climate change that have evoked discussion, debate, and consternation within communities both global and local. Equally alarming has been the threat of what such degraded and destroyed landscapes might mean for those who depend up…
A feminist political ecology of wildlife crime
Transnational environmental crime threatens sustainable development
Biocultural nation making
While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identic…
Rethinking Indigenous Hunting in National Parks
Designed to be “wilderness” spaces with minimal human impact, the establishment of national parks contributed to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from traditional territories across North America, preventing access to dwindling populations of wildlife essential to cultural and material well-being. With the systematic near extermination of buffalo during the nineteenth century and forcible relocation of Tribes onto reservations, Tribal food system…
Protecting people and wildlife from the potential harms of drone use in biodiversity conservation
In this policy intervention, we recount the process of producing a policy briefing targeting researchers and practitioners who use drones in biodiversity conservation. We use the writing process as a springboard to think through the ways that interdisciplinary exchange has and might further inform the ethical use of new technologies, such as drones. This approach is vital, we argue, because while drones may be deployed as tools that enable or emp…
Introducing Jurisdiction
Chasing colonization back
In this interview, we hear from influential Blackfoot Elder and Cultural Educator Ninna Piiksii, Dr. Michael Bruised Head. Mike reflects on the colonial naming of national parks and the need to return to Indigenous place-names, examining how we occupy a pivotal moment where park staff are more open to substantive Indigenous engagement and presence within parks, although more needs to be done. Drawing connections across topics that may initially s…
Mozambique, Neoliberal Land Reform, and the Limpopo National Park
Central to its transformation from a state-centered to a neoliberal, free-market economy, in 1997 the Mozambican state passed a radical new land law that guarantees the rights of individuals and communities to occupy land and transfer land-use titles, a move seen as necessary for attracting private investment. By comparing how the land law has been applied to the Limpopo National Park and several adjacent villages, I show how it has led to geogra…
Terror, Territory, and Deterritorialization
During the Mozambican "civil" war, residents across large areas of the countryside were terrorized out of their villages by the South African-backed Mozambican rebel organization Renamo. Drawing on the deterritorialization debates and investigations into the relation between territory and terror -- literatures that have rarely engaged \nwith one another -- and bringing them together with interviews with survivors of the conflict, I show how Renam…
Reconstructing history, grounding claims to space
The recent creation of Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) and its integration into the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) promise to effect profound political, social, and ecological changes. These range from removing sections of the international border fence and restocking wildlife in the LNP to the planned relocation of several thousand people living within the park. These transformations have inspired complex, conflicting ex…
War, Violence, and Population
Articulated sovereignty
Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. While this reinforces predictions in the early transfrontier conservation literature, it stands in tens…
Introduction Environmentally Induced Displacement and Forced Migration
Disappearing coastlines, fields and homes flooded by rising waters, lands left cracked and barren by desertification, a snowpack shrinking in circumpolar regions year by year—these are only a few of the iconic images of climate change that have evoked discussion, debate, and consternation within communities both global and local. Equally alarming has been the threat of what such degraded and destroyed landscapes might mean for those who depend up…
Green Militarization
Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, a…
Conservation Meets Militarisation in Kruger National Park
Drawing on environmental history and political ecology, this paper contributes to growing debates concerning military-environment encounters and conservation militarisation/securitisation by investigating the complex histories and legacies of these relations. Grounding my insights in South Africa's iconic Kruger National Park, I chart how encounters between environment and military/security activity over the last century offer a repeatedly contra…
Accumulation by securitization
Green grabs, land grabs and the spatiality of displacement
The M ozambican state is currently working to relocate 7000 people from the interior of the L impopo N ational P ark (LNP), itself part of the G reat L impopo T ransfrontier P ark (GLTP). As the process began in 2003, this stands out as one of the region's most protracted contemporary conservation‐related evictions. I draw from this case to shed light on the increasingly complex spatial dynamics of land and green grabs and, more specifically, dem…
Environmental displacement
In this introduction to a special section on environmental displacement, we introduce the concept and ground it in seemingly distinct processes of climate change, extraction, and conservation. We understand environmental displacement as a process by which communities find the land they occupy irrevocably altered in ways that foreclose or otherwise impede possibilities for habitation or else disrupt access to resources within these spaces of life,…
Feed them to the lions
Deploying Difference
State actors are increasingly treating protected areas as sites of security threats and policing resident communities as though they are the cause of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorised by security concerns and logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by drawing upon empirical work from two borderland conservation areas: Mozambique's Limpopo National P…
Linking green militarization and critical military studies
The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses. Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies, increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even sophisticated military technology used to address the problem. Scholarly investigations on the topic have largely been approached from a political ecology perspective and hence have not made co…
Capitalism, Wealth, and Conservation in the Age of Security
This article illustrates how for-profit actors and private wealth vitalize state power, here in the form of advancing the state's project of militarized conservation. My contribution complements, first, the neoliberal natures and conservation literature, which largely sees state power as diminished by neoliberal processes or else reinvented as a handmaiden of capital. In contrast and by drawing in part on Gramscian perspectives of state natures, …
Why we must question the militarisation of conservation
Transnational environmental crime threatens sustainable development
Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene
Hegemonic narratives and practices around environmental change, even when coming from concerned and seemingly progressive fronts, often contribute to a larger project of population control. The Malthusian specter of overpopulation looms large in pervasive images of imminent ecological disaster in ways that are profoundly depoliticizing and that serve projects of militarization, misogyny, and racism. In this paper, we expose and challenge problema…
Wilderness” revisited
This paper questions whether the rescaling of conservation practice in Canada to include local and Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private market‐based actors represents a move away from wilderness‐thinking in conservation, and what implications this might have for the future of conservation in Canada. We explore the links between Cronon's “wilderness” ethic and coloniality, racism/sexism/classism, and political economy, and the extent to which…
Field-Based Experiential Education in Geography
Drawing on our experience teaching a 2-week field-based geography course on urban environmental issues, we reinforce the value of field-based experiential education (EE) especially as it faces growing threats. We show how such experience can enable students to understand the diversity of urban environmental challenges in situ; grasp cities as sites of environmental sustainability; understand the innovative ways local organizations and actors – ma…
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
A feminist political ecology of wildlife crime
Environmental Displacement in the Anthropocene
This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene-this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change-and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognition that displacement is driven not just by climate change but also broader forms of environmental cha…
Biocultural nation making
While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identic…
Protecting people and wildlife from the potential harms of drone use in biodiversity conservation
In this policy intervention, we recount the process of producing a policy briefing targeting researchers and practitioners who use drones in biodiversity conservation. We use the writing process as a springboard to think through the ways that interdisciplinary exchange has and might further inform the ethical use of new technologies, such as drones. This approach is vital, we argue, because while drones may be deployed as tools that enable or emp…
Political science (29 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Geography (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (10 works)