Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany

by Stefan Bargheer

At the center of Stefan Bargheer’s account of bird watching, field ornithology, and nature conservation in Britain and Germany stands the question of how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments. Using life history data derived from written narratives and oral histories, Moral Entanglements follows the development of conservation from the point in time at which the greatest declines in bird life took place to the current efforts in large-scale biodiversity conservation and environmental policy within the European Union. While often depicted as the outcome of an environmental revolution that has taken place since the 1960s, Bargheer demonstrates to the contrary that the relevant practices and institutions that shape contemporary conservation have evolved gradually since the early nineteenth century. Moral Entanglements further shows that the practices and institutions in which bird conservation is entangled differ between the two countries. In Britain, birds derived their meaning in the context of the game of bird watching as a leisure activity. Here birds are now, as then, the most popular and best protected taxonomic group of wildlife due to their particularly suitable status as toys in a collecting game, turning nature into a playground. In Germany, by contrast, birds were initially part of the world of work. They were protected as useful economic tools, rendering services of ecological pest control in a system of agricultural production modeled after the factory shop floor. Based on this extensive analysis, Bargheer formulates a sociology of morality informed by a pragmatist theory of value.

336 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2018

Reviews

[Indigo bear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly appreciate this book and it’s summary of John Dewey’s pragmatism. Chapter 1 provides a very thorough overview of that.

So using the cases of Britain and Germany, Bargheer shows how conservation was founded in those countries and in the wider international context that British bird watchers were involved in. So we about the origin of WWF and BirdLife international and other organizations.

The primary argument of the book focuses on how observing birds in the wild became the foundation for conservation, and even the environmental movement as a whole. The argument goes, in very short form, that at first people really liked to go out and kill animals for fun and for collections such as in museums. But then because of technological innovations, especially the invention of cheap cameras and cheap binoculars, people transitioned from killing to observing, and when they were observing, they realized that they needed to conserve nature if they wanted to keep observing it, and then conservation and the environmental movement were born. When the primary mode of engaging with nature was to shoot animals to put them in a museum, people didn’t really have to worry about conservation because rare creatures could be shot and then kept in the museum in perpetuity. But then when field observations became the main game people were playing, rare creatures that were alive became the most valuable for the game.

The case of Germany is a foil in general for that main argument, a place where birds for most of the 19th and 20th centuries were thought of as essential for agriculture and forestry in that they ate insects. So instead of being a game, they were more part of a workflow, and then they were valued much differently. Eventually the German way of engaging with birds
in Germany itself was replaced by the British way, which is the method of observing and keeping records from field observations.

I have two main critiques, but I’ll save that for my own publications about this topic, the topic of people who have a close relationships with nature and how these relationships affect them.