Conservation and multispecies relations in the making of contemporary European tourism environments

this Editorial and associated collection of articles builds on recent developments in landscape studies and multispecies research to explore how the human and non-human constitute one another in the context of nature tourism. the six papers presented emerged out of conversations among anthropologists, geographers, and historians brought together in the research consortium CoNtoUrS: Conservation, tourism, remoteness (2021–2023), and reflect our different approaches to the study of tourism landscapes. our research group started out with a broad interest in what happens when environmental and conservation projects meet tourism pursued as a strategy for regional development. Within that context, landscapes appear as a physical presence, repositories of different kinds of histories and as collective concerns that provoke and inspire ever-new interpretations and discoveries. as we detail below, we draw on approaches in the social sciences and humanities that address landscapes in their temporality as well as their multispecies formation. in doing so, we attend to the longue durée of human engagements with the world through a focus on particular material practices.