Landscapes & Letters
Paul McCarney
About Me
I am interested in connecting with people to create knowledge about wildlife. Hunting has changed my life and informed my perspective on conservation. My goal is to celebrate and explore the complexities in hunting and conservation. To effectively conserve wildlife, we need multiple groups of people to engage in meaningful dialogue. I want to build relationships, collaborate to create knowledge about wildlife, and work towards effective conservation.
I’m writing this from Kugaaruk, a community of about 800 people in Nunavut’s Kitikmeot Region. Kugaaruk is on the southeast side of Pelly Bay, which at its north end opens up into the Gulf of Boothia, in the Canadian Arctic. The community itself is right at the mouth of the wide Kugaaruk River and is surrounded by an amazing topography of rocky hills and islands. Right now, the ice in the bay… Read More
When the whole story about Cecil the lion (Panthera leo) broke out in July, I didn’t expect it to continue “trending” for very long, and I’ll admit that I was surprised this post still had some relevance. In any case, I still planned to post it, because I think the conversations that have been generated by this story have ongoing relevance for hunters and the field of conservation. This particular story might have… Read More
Far too often, popular representations of hunting tend to both polarize and homogenize it, leading to misrepresentations and simplifications. In the last few days following the Cecil story, a number of media outlets have discussed and represented hunting through broad assumptions, generalizations, and stereotypes. In response, we’ve seen hunters come forward with proclamations about the enduring honour of hunting as a tradition that is defined and given meaning by its most respectable proponents…. Read More
One of my hesitations with social media is the inherent difficulty in using these tools to discuss issues that are located in a large and complex grey area of social opinion and politics. However, increasingly, news websites seem to be showing Twitter responses as part of their coverage, so there’s no denying that these are important platforms for engaging with current issues. This does not mean that we need to simplify our discussions to… Read More
Paul McCarney