George Holmes
georgeholmes.bsky.social
George Holmes
@georgeholmes.bsky.social

Professor of Conservation and Society @envleeds.bsky.social. Known to students as Dr. Evil. Biodiversity conservation. Human geography. Political ecology. Protected areas. Social impacts of conservation. Human-wildlife coexistence. Rewilding. Sarcasm. .. more

George Edward Thomas Holmes is a British academic administrator, previously serving as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greater Manchester (2006-2025).

Source: Wikipedia
Environmental science 47%
Economics 14%

this paper in @consletters.bsky.social is a superb primer on what power means in conservation - a big job to summarise centuries of social theory and decades of conservation social science research into a few thousand words!
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Naming It Is Not Enough: An Orienting Map for Understanding Conservation's Entanglement With Power
Power is frequently acknowledged in conservation as a limiting factor, something to be cited, problematized, or managed, less frequently is it engaged with as a lived, situated, and multidimensional ....
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Fancy coming to POLLEN in Barcelona and joining our panel on "Political Ecologies of Restoration: Reintroduction, Assisted
Migration, and Rewilding"? Then submit an abstract via the link below!

pollenpoliticalecology.network/pollen-2026/...
Programme - POLLEN
Login
pollenpoliticalecology.network

thanks- the first draft mentioned infant Ibex goats being "kid-napped", but the reviewer didn't like it. It's my mission to put dad jokes and puns into all my papers.
🚨 We are looking for 3 new colleagues to join the GreenFrontier team as Postdoctoral Researchers!

Deadline for applications: 25 Nov 2025

Each of the 3 openings will involve extended ethnographic fieldwork + plenty of opportunities to consolidate research & leadership skills!

Please share widely!

(warning. This paper contains dad-jokes)

This started off life as a @naturalengland.bsky.social / DEFRA England Species Reintroduction Taskforce blogpost. By the way, the amazing Gabriel Rowland has just started a PhD exploring the social and ecological aspects of illicit and unregulated translocations
Short piece in @consletters.bsky.social exploring social, cultural, political and ecological apsects of illicit and unregulated species translocations - what others (not me, due to homophone errors) might call guerilla rewilding. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Who Let the Frogs out? Illicit and Unregulated Species Translocations
Click on the article title to read more.
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Reposted by David L. Roberts

The bison in Kent can be seen by some as a species 're'-introduction, because bonasus and priscus are so genetically and phenotypically close, or a taxon substitution, because they perform the same ecological function, or an introduction of another species altogether, just because it is cool.

Reposted by David L. Roberts

We assume that bonasus are a forest species, because that's were the remnant populations were - but they may have preferred grasslands, and only live in forests because they are the last refuge from human pressures. So the forest bison may not be truly at home in forests in Kent or anywhere else

Reposted by David L. Roberts

The Kent bison are European forest bison (bison bonasus). No bonasus remains have been found in Britain, but plenty of extinct Steppe Bison (Bison Priscus) remains have been dug up. How different these species were - genetically, phenotypically, ecologically, is contested.

Reposted by David L. Roberts

A fun visit to the University of Kent, to discuss species reintroductions. Here's me in front of the campus mural of a European Bison. There's a small herd of them living just three miles from this mural, but it is not a simple story of a 're' introduction.

Yes. I'm presuming it was a careful choice not to quote her exact words in the letter, so I'm not going to post them here. I believe some news outlets reported those words, so you can find them elsewhere. But they were pretty mild and a MILLION miles away from anything dangerous or prejudiced.

Reposted by Anthony Burke

This is an important petition on academic freedom, for a professor at Syracuse, NY, USA, who has been indefinitely suspended for a very mildly sarcastic four-word social media post relating to US politics.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Letter of Support for Professor Farhana Sultana
As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Profe...
docs.google.com
Today I am mostly thinking about the popular inter-war literary genre 'animal stories written by fascists'. Join me.

new virtual exhibition on wetlands, exploring how people interact with their wetlands, their rhythms, dynamic changes, and flows of many kinds. www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/...
Wetland Times
www.environmentandsociety.org

This paper - on what habituation does and should mean - is a must-read for anyone working on wildlife conservation, human-wildlife interactions/conflict/coexistence, translocations, in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences.

I've long thought of our research as artworks 😉. But now it is actually true - our research on Caspian seal conservation has been integrated into an artwork in Berlin, on ecological degradation and human-nature interactions. w/ @phoca-sapiens.bsky.social.
www.studio1-0-6.com/carried-by-t...

Another productive meeting of the Defra/ @naturalengland.bsky.social Species Reintroduction Taskforce, this time at Wild Ennerdale, Cumbria. Classic Taskforce behaviour, crouching in a forest looking at a successfully translocated Hairy Wood Ant colony.

Provocative but very necessary argument in @consletters.bsky.social on rethinking politics and definitions in carnivore conservation in Europe, moving away from crisis mode now that meta-populations are healthy. By @hannalp.bsky.social and von Essen
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Now What? The Conundrum of Successful Recovery of Wolves and Other Species for European Conservation
The recent decision to downlist the wolf from a “strictly protected” to “protected” status in the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive marks a turning point for European conservation. While reflect...
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Happy Fat Bear Week, for all of those who celebrate: explore.org/fat-bear-week
Fat Bear Week 2025
Fat Bear Week 2025
explore.org

along with @monicavasile.bsky.social and @hannalp.bsky.social I a huge fan of underwhelming species reintroduction videos. Here is my contribution, releasing some native ramshorn snails into my garden pond.
🦊 Reimagining habituation: The case for a reciprocal and contextual understanding ➡️ buff.ly/6rbtYxu

@livwildlab.bsky.social @ethanddoney.bsky.social @vdonfrancesco.bsky.social @hannalp.bsky.social @csandbrook.bsky.social
Excited to share the preprint of our first @cascade-hei.bsky.social paper on “Potential for academic institutions to support international biodiversity commitments” 🌿 🌍.
Potential for academic institutions to support international biodiversity commitments
doi.org

My academic sphere crosses between critical geography and conservation biology. Of the two, I've seen more racism in geography arenas than in biology. For all the anti-racist rhetoric, there can be some major lack of reflection. Doesn't help its ability to address all the horror in the world.

See "The Rider on the White Horse" (Der Schimmelreiter), a classic late 19th century German novella by Theodor Storm - which @untamed.bsky.social suggested I read before our trip to the dykes and marshes of the Wadden Sea. Also, my geophysicist friend Adam Booth can image beaver tunnels underground.

There is a long history of animals in/on dykes in that general area - e.g. sheep are good (they compact dyke soil, suppress vegetation), mice and rabbits bad (tunneling/loosen soil). Plus stories of burying live animals (including humans!) in dykes as a superstition to ensure strong dykes.

Piece in @theguardian.com on 17-metre long beaver tunnels in Dutch dykes. Shows the potential issues with beaver re-introductions, and how risks/benefits vary vastly between places. Also, neatly reworks the metaphor of beaver dams/tunnels as ecological engineering www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Beavers were welcomed back to the Netherlands. Until they started digging 17m-long tunnels | Renate van der Zee
Reintroduced to help boost biodiversity and retain water, beavers are now in danger of causing serious flooding. Should there be more culls? asks Dutch writer and journalist Renate van der Zee
www.theguardian.com

My comment on a student's draft of a PhD thesis chapter, and their reply. Some books are a classic for a reason. I judge a book on how often PhD students borrow/steal it from my bookshelf.