Today, the focus on protecting and conserving wild nature and biodiversity is intertwined with the international focus on climate change and the urgent need to act (Pascual et al., 2022). There is a growing recognition of the unfortunate consequences current lifestyles has on our planet. Biodiversity is under treat, and we might be heading towards a six mass-extinction. According to the European Environment Agency report “State of Nature in the EU (EEA, 2020) habitats in Denmark is in such a bad shape, that the country is placed in the bottom amongst European countries when it comes to protecting and preserving nature.
The rapid decline in biodiversity has prompted the state to focus on restoring Danish nature, a task that has proven difficult despite wide public support for more nature friendly policies. A poll made by Danish news media, DR, showed that more than one third of nature protection initiatives in Danish municipalities are disrupted by landowners or local citizens (DR, 2023). UN General-Secretary, António Guterres, said in his speech at COP27 “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator” (UN, 2022). We have the facts of which consequences our anthropocentric practices have for the Earth, but as the debate on Nature National Parks in Denmark also shows, difficulties arise when we try to transform nature spaces for the benefit of non-humans.
This PhD project argues that the majority of current consumer research on nature-based consumption is focused on human consumption as activities staged in nature (Arnould & Price, 1993; Celsi, Randall, & Leigh, 1993; Arnould, Price, & Tierney, 1998; Belk & Costa, 1998; Arnould, Price, & Otnes, 1999; Vespestad & Lindberg, 2011; Canniford & Shankar, 2013). By doing so, it overlooks the potential for knowledge on the multiplicity of nature-based consumption practices that may differ in ways of non-human relationships and interactions.
Trying to capture this multiplicity, this PhD will answer how is nature co-constituted in transformative nature spaces? It will do so by on the one hand identifying different stakeholder discourses of nature, as well as how these discourses constitute different ways of relating to and interacting with nature. On the other hand, it will study how these discourses are enacted through non-human co-consumption and what consequences different types of consumption practices has for the nature space transformation and the consumption taking place there. The goal is to shed light on why transformative nature restoration initiatives may be supported or opposed, and how we may move towards post-anthropocentric nature-based consumption in the future.
Contact: Christina Elvira Dahl, PhD Student, ced@sam.sdu.dk
Main supervisor: Julie Emontspool, Associate professor, juli@sam.sdu.dk
Co-supervisor: Alev Kuruoglu, Associate professor, alev@sam.sdu.dk