Writing has been one of the main ways I have deepened my scholarship and made sense of what I have learned from people, places, and practice. It allows me to reflect on experience, to connect ideas across disciplines, and to give form to concepts, frameworks, and approaches that are both intellectually honest and useful for progressive action.
I am using this page to bring together curated collections of academic writing that mark distinct strands in my thinking.
The first three collections reflect core concerns that have run through much of my work to date:
- Academic writing on rewilding, where I explore rewilding as a scientific, practical, and narrative shift in conservation.
- Theoretical and conceptual writing on conservation governance, which develops frameworks for understanding conservation actors, institutions, culture, and power in conservation
- Selected popular writing on human engagements with nature, written to explore how people relate to nature in practice and how conservation ideas are received, contested, and reshaped in public debate. (To follow)
Together, these collections reflect an ongoing effort to think across disciplines and audiences, and to use writing as a way of consolidating learning while remaining open to uncertainty and change.
Rewilding
These writings explore rewilding as a scientific, practical, and narrative shift in conservation, and reflect my engagement with its emergence, governance, and future directions.
Recoverable Earth: a twenty-first century environmental narrative
Ambio, 2019
My engagement with rewilding deepened when I realised that rewilding narratives differed markedly from the dominant environmental narrative of crisis and collapse. One summer, I analysed and compared the structures of different environmental narratives and argued that rewilding represents the emergence of a more hopeful environmental story—one characterised by a willingness to reassess beliefs, embrace uncertainty, and act collectively to bring about change.
A rewilding agenda for Europe: creating a network of experimental reserves
Ecography, 2016
My first peer-reviewed intervention on rewilding, this paper traces the origins of European rewilding and positions it as a radical shift from target-driven conservation to process-led ecological recovery. I wrote it to argue for protected experimental space where new forms of conservation science and practice could emerge together.
De-extinction beyond species: restoring ecosystem functionality through large herbivore rewilding
Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, 2025
This paper sought to widen de-extinction debates by shifting attention from resurrecting species to restoring lost ecological function. Focusing on the de-domestication of cattle and horses in Europe, I explored the policy and institutional innovations needed to allow these animals to act as ecosystem engineers at scale.
To capitalise on the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, we need institutional redesign to empower advances in restoration ecology and rewilding
People and Nature, 2022
Written at the start of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, this paper argues that scientific advances in restoration will stall without institutional change. I made the case for adaptive governance arrangements that enable experimentation, learning, and scaling in restoration and rewilding practice.
Governing with nature: a European perspective on putting rewilding principles into practice
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2018
This paper explores how rewilding challenges conventional models of environmental governance based on control and optimisation. It was written to show why working with ecological dynamics, uncertainty, and surprise requires new governance logics, not simply new management tools.
Rewilding’s next generation will mean no more reserves full of starving animals
The Conversation, 2018
Written in response to controversy over animal welfare at the Oostvaardersplassen, this article explains why future rewilding depends on larger, better-connected landscapes and new economic models, rather than neglect. Its purpose was to move debate beyond caricature and show how rewilding is becoming more ethically and socially grounded.
Conservation governance
These writings foreground theory and conceptual frameworks that examine how conservation is shaped by actors, institutions, culture, and power.
What is a conservation actor?
Conservation & Society, 2011
This paper arose from a series of discussions within my research group about who or what actually acts in conservation. It unsettles the assumption that humans and their organisations alone determine outcomes, and draws attention to distributed agency across institutions, species, cultural frames, and conservation networks.
A theory of flagship species action
Conservation & Society, 2016
Working with Maan Barua, I developed a theory of how flagship species generate action, not just attention. We wrote this paper to explain why some species mobilise resources and institutional change while others fail, grounding flagship use in governance theory and trait-based ecology rather than symbolism alone.
Toward a biocultural theory of avoided extinction
Conservation Letters, 2008
Richard Ladle and I wrote this paper to address a blind spot in extinction science: the lack of attention to cases where extinction does not occur. We developed a biocultural theory showing how cultural values, institutions, and human–nonhuman relationships can stabilise species at the brink.
Conservation culturomics
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2016
In another collaboration with Richard Ladle, we developed a conceptual framework and methods to apply the emerging science of culturomics to conservation. This work used word frequencies in internet data to quantify human engagement with nature and conservation, helping to establish a new line of enquiry often referred to as iEcology.
Protected area stewardship
Biological Conservation, 2017
This paper arose from research showing that governments were withdrawing support from protected areas because they were framed as non-economic land. I developed a natural asset framework to identify the diverse monetary and non-monetary values that protected areas can generate in different contexts, shaping later work on rewilding enterprise and nature finance.
Saving a species threatened by trade: a network study of Bali starling conservation
Oryx, 2016
Drawing on my direct professional engagement in efforts to prevent the Bali starling’s extinction, this paper applies network theory to reveal the limitations of enforcement-led approaches in Indonesia. It shows how conservationists succeeded by changing network dynamics—particularly through the strategic use of captive breeding.
You can find a full list of my academic publications on Google Scholar