Anne G. Short Gianotti

The concept of nonhuman animal agency has recently been introduced in fields from more‐than‐human geography to wildlife conservation. Nonhuman animal agency refers to the capacity of animals to create, set in motion, and cause or influence actions through their relations with humans and other nonhumans. Ecologists have long recognized that animal species are active components of ecosystems and have important ecological functions, yet most wildlife management treats species as objects that are (or should be) passive and controllable. We argue that explicit recognition of nonhuman agency can reduce human–wildlife conflict, enhance the capacity for coexistence, and create better outcomes for conservation and other human‐based projects. Rather than attempting to control species, the emerging more‐than‐human perspective suggests that a better target of management is place‐based relationships, where humans and a variety of nonhumans are active participants in shaping landscape structures and lived experiences. To implement this concept in practice, we present design with nonhuman species as a pragmatic approach that draws on and may combine elements of contemporary design methods, coexistence approaches, rewilding perspectives, adaptive management, and traditional land management practices. The uniqueness of this approach is its focus on responding to both human and nonhuman agencies and its interactive problem solving mediated by materials, objects, structures, spaces, and spatiotemporal patterns. Design with seeks to appreciate and embody desires and concepts, which can be understood as being held by both humans and nonhumans. Critically, design with enables forms of negotiation that are not based on impractical anthropocentric linguistic and political models. We encourage conservationists to engage with designers interested in design with nonhumans.

As cities worldwide increasingly adopt commitments towards climate justice, questions remain about the ways that city governments will be able to fund more just climate efforts. While the use of novel debt financing schemes has been examined in the literature for its justice implications, scholars have rarely interrogated how the more mundane tools and practices of municipal finance can be applied to enable more just urban transitions. Here, we use the USA as a case study to analyse the impacts of climate change and climate action on municipal budgets and to examine how cities are adapting their financial tools and practices to advance climate action and climate justice efforts. We employ a mixed-methods research design that combines 34 expert interviews with a systematic content analysis of municipal budgets from 15 US cities of different sizes. We find that both climate change and climate action can contribute to cities’ fiscal vulnerability by imposing additional expenditures and/or reducing municipal revenues. While most cities lack transparency about their investments in climate action and climate justice, some city governments are implementing ordinary innovations that embed climate and justice criteria into budgetary practices and funding tools. These ordinary innovations reveal that cities are beginning to reimagine municipal finance in the service of more just climate futures.

Even though neighborhoods are built for people, lots of wild animals also call these places home. You might have seen a squirrel, a fox, or a deer munching on your garden or running down your street. Living near people gives some animals food and places to live, but it can also cause problems for both animals and people. Sometimes people do not agree about what to do about the animals that live near them. We were curious about how people and wild animals live together and decided to investigate. We studied how people make decisions about deer in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where some people think there are too many deer and others are not so sure. We discovered that people often disagree, and politics matters. Paying attention to this disagreement can help people work together and make choices that let wild animals and people to live together with fewer problems.

While there is increasing recognition that social processes in cities like gentrification have ecological consequences, we lack nuanced understanding of the ways gentrification affects urban biodiversity. We analyzed a large camera trap dataset of mammals (>500 g) to evaluate how gentrification impacts species richness and community composition across 23 US cities. After controlling for the negative effect of impervious cover, gentrified parts of cities had the highest mammal species richness. Change in community composition was associated with gentrification in a few cities, which were mostly located along the West Coast. At the species level, roughly half (11 of 21 mammals) had higher occupancy in gentrified parts of a city, especially when impervious cover was low. Our results indicate that the impacts of gentrification extend to nonhuman animals, which provides further evidence that some aspects of nature in cities, such as wildlife, are chronically inaccessible to marginalized human populations.