Moral entanglements: The emergence and transformation of bird conservation in Great Britain and Germany, 1790--2010

The dissertation investigates the development of moral concern for the conservation of wild birds in Great Britain and Germany from the late eighteenth century to the present. Bird conservation was the earliest and most vigorous expression of concern for wildlife conservation. This development is analyzed from the point in time at which the greatest declines in bird life took place to the current large scale efforts at biodiversity conservation and environmental policy. In order to analyze the nexus between bird conservation in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the project ties together ethnographic and historical-comparative methods to advance an historical ethnography for the understanding of this peculiar process of cultural change. The core finding of the dissertation is that concern for wild birds emerged from the very practices and institutions that had previously made for their destruction and decline. It is demonstrated that this concern developed out of a gradual re-interpretation and re-appropriation of already existing social forms. Concern for the conservation of birds and other species does therefore not describe a radical departure from the practices and institutions of modernity, commonly identified as processes of urbanization and industrialization, advances in science and technology, and the rise of capitalism and a bureaucratic state. The dissertation shows instead that concern for conservation developed from these practices and institutions. Species conservation is part and parcel of modernity as we know it and not some more recent anti-, counter-, or post-modern departure from it. The embeddedness of the development in the social forms of "traditional modernity" is captured by the project's title moral entanglements.