Mini profile: Simon Pooley

Dr Pooley discusses his research and his involvement in the GCEE initiative

What’s your specialist research interest and what first attracted you to it?  

I am interested in the ways in which social and ecological systems interact over time, and what history can tell us about how to manage this, to better preserve biodiversity and maintain landscapes of great natural heritage value. I was incredibly lucky to grow up in game reserves in northern Zululand, South Africa, witnessing at first hand the challenges of conserving indigenous biodiversity in a developing country. While fascinated by the ecological science of my parents and their friends and colleagues, I was also interested in the social, economic and cultural dimensions of valuing and sharing landscapes with wildlife. I’m interested in developing multiple disciplinary ways of understanding social-ecological problems, and bringing a historical perspective to how these are and have been understood and managed. My foci thus far have been predators and wildfire. 

What does your research involve?  

Environmental History offers an integrative framework, enabling the exploration of environmental change in its ecological and social dimensions. Historical analysis reveals the ways in which environmental problems and conservation solutions have been framed over time by competing scientific, political and other groups. It shows why particular approaches were favoured, and how success has been evaluated. This allows the questioning of dominant narratives and the reconsideration of sidelined perspectives. Historical analysis reveals the conjunctions of environmental and societal factors which cause unintended consequences to flow from interventions based on sound scientific generalisations. The importance of both events and longer-term trends are revealed. My research involves triangulating a range of sources and approaches to analyse the ways in which specific conservation challenges, notably wildfire, biological invasions and the conservation of large dangerous predators, have been framed and tackled. I utilise a wide range of archival sources (published and ‘grey’ literature, photographs, maps, paintings etc.), travel extensively to interview key researchers, managers and other stakeholders, and to personally experience and interact with the people, landscapes and wildlife I am studying. I learn a great deal from the approaches and experiences of the scientists I work with, from fynbos, grassland and savanna ecologists to crocodile biologists and invasion biologists. 

What are you working on at the moment?

My current research project is a history of crocodilian conservation, with the aim of understanding the long-term changes and continuities in conservation philosophy, strategy and tactics employed to conserve these potentially dangerous and often disliked predators across a range of ecological, political and social contexts (principally locations in southern Africa, the USA, India and Australia). I am interested in the social and ecological reasons for these approaches, how they differ or do not and why, and the consequences of their implementation in different contexts. Mitigating human-animal conflict, regulating trade and achieving sustainable use of endangered species are central issues. I am developing an analysis tool for analysing long-term social and ecological data on crocodile attacks as a means of making human-animal conflict accessible to and worthwhile for conservation managers, and more effective for mitigating attacks. 

What attracted you to the Grand Challenges in Ecosystem and the Environment Initiative?

As a historian working in conservation science – a field opening up to the necessity of drawing on a range of disciplines from the natural and social sciences and now the humanities to tackle the social and ecological dimensions of biodiversity conservation – I am intrigued by how such collaborations come about, and play out. My research includes a focus on tackling the challenges of developing multiple disciplinary projects into genuine and fruitful collaborations. 

What Grand Challenge will you be tackling under the initiative?

I am interested in the management of target species in complex systems, currently how the crocodilians (venerated in some places, vilified elsewhere) are faring under different and changing socio-economic and environmental conditions. Crocodilians are used for sustenance and small-scale trade by indigenous peoples (food, leather, medicines), and are ranched and farmed on an industrial scale for the international leather trade. They are thus enmeshed in humans’ social and economic lives at local, regional and international scales. Their preservation has to be negotiated as many of them can be dangerous to people and livestock, and their commercial value has resulted in conflicts between developed and developing world approaches to regulating the trade in endangered species. Crocodiles are keystone species in the ecosystems they inhabit, and can be regarded as ‘canaries’ for water systems in their sensitivities to water pollution and temperature shifts. More broadly, I am interested in the history of human-animal conflicts particularly of large dangerous predators, and in finding better ways of collaborating on understanding and mitigating both sides of these conflicts. I am also very interested in the ways in which the Grand Challenge initiative as a whole will be approached, and in thinking about what works and what doesn’t, and why.