Circling back: To head into the future of whales’ conservation we must go back in time.

Description

The blue humanities allows to combine multiple perspectives and methods to address historical trends of changes on ecosystems, sociocultural developments, impacts and the resulting consequences for marine populations. Within this dynamic field of research, we include both marine environmental history and historical marine ecology, and a series of species or populations can be analysed. The history of whales and whaling, that is the use of documentary, iconographic, cartographic sources and material evidence, to address past distributions, human practices and impacts on the ocean and its animals, is paramount to understand current environmental issues related to ocean conservation. Cultural products offer a sense of the importance of these animals to humans and the past and current state of interactions established. Analysing data from catches for Portugal since medieval times, and the former Portuguese colonial territories, we can draw a story of sequential use of targeted species of large whales. By exploring previously unknown natural history treatises, or other written sources alike, is now showing the scientific relevance of these animals for early modern society. Putting data together, we get an all-encompassing perspective on the historical, economic and cultural value of large whales up to the present day.

Period	19 Jun 2024
Event title	7th European Congress of Conservation Biology : Biodiversity positive by 2030
Event type	Conference
Conference number	7th
Location	Bologna, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International