Since 2013, Northern Bald Ibises, large migratory birds, have been reintroduced into the European habitat, almost 400 years after their local extinction. What distinguishes this from other reintroduction projects is that the environment that is made available to animals live “in the wild” is not a geo- graphically bounded site. Rather, it’s a transcontinental expanse. This necessitates a different understanding of the relationship between the work done by the reintroduction project and the environment it seeks to create.
We use an interdisciplinary perspective, combining visual arts, media studies, and geography, to make visible how the notion of environments folds into the concept of infrastructure through their analogous functions as dynamic, relational spaces that contain and are contained by. Critical mapping provided an important tool to bring together the complexity that is normally separated into the concepts of infrastructure and environment.
They are connected by human interventions that aim to foster those relations that support the circulation of the birds, and to disentangle those that impede it. To be successful, the work of relating human and non-human actors has to adjust continuously outside each actor’s control. Thus, the environment comes into view as something in need of continuing more-than-human maintenance and care, in order to serve as an infrastructure for survival.
Key Words: data, environment, human–animal relations, infrastructure, rewilding
Stalder, Felix, and Gordan Savičić. “From Environments to Infrastructures of Survival: The Case of the Northern Bald Ibis.” GeoHumanities, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2025.2574268