Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance by Katja Grotzner Neves

Author:Katja Grotzner Neves [Neves, Katja Grotzner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781438474557
Google: jLKZDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43505735
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

3.3 A “First Point of Contact with Nature”: Relational Monarch Ontologies of Conservation

The morning of February 28, 2018, started as mornings often do in Montreal at that time of the year: gray and windy. The heart-warming effect of the city’s snow-covered landscape had just given way to an endless sea of pebble-covered sidewalks. This is a normal occurrence in Montreal, when snowfall is followed by gloriously sunny—though frigid—weather: the city’s sidewalks turn into treacherous ice paths that no amount of salt can effectively prevent. Excepting the outdoorsy folk who were enjoying winter offerings like Old Montreal’s skating rink or Mont Royal’s forested trails, most people seemed to have retreated to the coziness of cafés, pubs, underground shops, and workplaces. With thermometers hovering around the zero Celsius mark (32-degrees Fahrenheit), the temperature had been higher than usual for end of February. Still, somehow, the intermittent freezing rain that had settled in felt worse to bear than one might recall of Montreal’s diurnal end-of-February average of –7-degrees Celsius (19.4-degrees Fahrenheit).

I felt particularly grateful for being able to conduct research not only on but also at institutions like the Jardin Botanique Montréal (Montreal Botanical Gardens) and the Montréal Insectarium—two of the institutions that comprise Espace Pour la Vie/Space for Life (EPLV) together with the Biodôme Montréal and the Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan Montréal. Setting aside any romantic notions that may be associated with the warmth of lush tropical greenhouses and mesmerizing vivariums during winter, botanic gardens and kin institutions are fascinating sites for social-scientific research. The breath of the historical legacies of these institutions with their roles in the rise of modernity, the nation-state, and empire building is bewildering. Their histories within processes of postcolonial struggle are equally inordinate—as is their current reinvention all around the world into institutions of environmental research and practice.

As highly visible constituencies in the production and dissemination of monarch conservation knowledge, institutions like the Insectarium Montréal and the Jardin Botanique Montréal (as well as EPLV, more generally), hold great responsibility over the conceptualization and representation of contemporary environmental problems. On that particular day, I was especially looking forward to begin a series of interviews about the research, education, and public outreach initiatives that Espace Pour la Vie/Space for Life (EPLV) had developed and implemented over the years in reaction to the monarch butterfly’s plight. Thanks to the generous support of Anne Bruneau, a colleague at the Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science, I had been granted meetings in February and March with Dr. Maxim Larrivée, director of EPLV’s Insectarium Entomological Collections and Research; Sonya Charest, education program officer and former coordinator of Monarchs without Frontiers; and Andre-Philippe Drapeau Picard,46 Mission Monarch coordinator. It was a follow-up to research I had conducted in previous years at the Jardin Botanique Montréal regarding its collaborative role in promoting monarch conservation within EPLV.

My goal was to collect additional data to illustrate three intersecting axes of change in biodiversity conservation, which I had identified in the course of my research at botanical gardens, and, which first motivated me to write Postnormal Conservation.

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