Living Roofs and Brownfield Wildlife: Towards a Fluid Biogeography of UK Nature Conservation

Abstract

This paper follows the trials and tribulations of a loose alliance of urban conservationists seeking to create and maintain spaces for brownfield wildlife in East London. It focuses, in particular, on the construction of living roofs—an innovative conservation strategy where wildlife habitat is created on top of new and old buildings in the city. The paper identifies three obstacles that have challenged the development of brownfield conservation, which relate to the urban geographies, lively temporalities, and inconspicuous forms of brownfield wildlife and wild-living. These obstacles differ markedly from those of the nonhumans prioritised in mainstream conservation. Brownfield conservationists have developed a novel and fluid model of practice, whose emergence and characteristics can be linked to wider developments in UK nature conservation. This model chimes clearly with new approaches to theorising human-nonhuman interaction that have been developed in nonequilibrium ecology and relational geography. Drawing together these empirical and theoretical innovations, the paper concludes by outlining the parameters of a fluid biogeography of UK wildlife conservation to help understand and guide future conservation practice.