Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Stronza.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I am an anthropologist, professor, conservationist, and photographer based in Austin, Texas. I am passionate about animals and the people who live closest to wild animals all over the world. When I’m not teaching and learning with my students at Texas A&M University, I am somewhere upriver or deep in a forest, doing what I can to support community efforts to protect wildlife.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I am very much a glass half-full person, and I can think only of how life has given me opportunities to pursue the passions I do.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I study how humans interact with other animals. I’m interested in why and how we care about certain species and what we do to show that care. I also ask why we experience “conflict” with other species and why we have feelings of indifference, fear, or even disdain. My training is in anthropology, ecology, animal studies, and philosophy, as well as many years of living in rural and Indigenous communities around the world and learning from people who have generously shared their homes and stories with me. These are places where ideas of “nature” and “culture” are still deeply entwined and where people know wild animals as ancestors and kin.
At Texas A&M, I am a professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Ecology and Conservation Biology, and Rangeland, Wildlife, and Fisheries Management. I teach classes in conservation, protected areas, and human-wildlife conflict and coexistence, and with my PhD students and postdocs, I lead a few research projects on human-wildlife interactions—with elephants in the Okavango, lions, cheetah, and wild dogs in the Kalahari, macaques in Nepal, and a new project on “village dogs” around the world, exploring how they roam freely in canine realms of their own while also entangled in the lives of humans. I also co-founded the Applied Biodiversity Science Program, bringing students and faculty together across the social and biologist sciences to collaborate on conservation research.
One of my biggest joys is photographing and sharing stories about animals. People often tell me I capture what they feel, even if they don’t know how to express it. I love finding ways to channel whatever talent this is into wildlife conservation, animal rescue, and research. One of the projects most dear to me is the non-profit I co-founded in Botswana, Ecoexist. Our work is to protect elephants—Botswana has the largest population of elephants on the planet–and support people in rural villages who live with elephants. My other long-term work includes 30 years of ethnographic research on ecotourism and wildlife conservation with Indigenous communities in various parts of the Amazon.
The smaller efforts means so much to me, too. I love using my photography and stories to nurture communities of care around animals. It’s like crowdsourcing love. Together we’ve cared for a pod of hippos stranded in the drought, an injured owl who was reunited with his mate in the wild, a hummingbird who lost her ability to hover but not hum, a colony of stray cats in Botswana, and a snapping turtle named HOPE!
Most loved of all is my 17-year-old life dog, Matilda. She came to me as a puppy when she was 6-7 months old. I found her hiding under my house in rural Texas. She was extremely shy, and yet somehow, for some reason, already so attentive to me. We quickly became best friends. In her lifetime so far, she has journeyed across five deserts on two continents, crossed paths with elephants and zebras in Botswana, coyotes and moose in Colorado, and armadillos and bobcats in her own backyard in Texas. She’s played in the surf of three seas, hiked to alpine lakes in the Rocky Mountains, crossed the Rio Grande, and kayaked the green rivers of the Hill Country. She’s climbed boulders in Joshua Tree, run the beaches of Big Sur, played among the ancient giants of Sequoia, and perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon. For all her travels, she loves the grasslands of the Texas Hill Country, especially in the spring when the world is blanketed with wildflowers.
Lately, Matilda and I have been creating memorials to honor animals we find killed on roads, trails, and sidewalks. I stop when I can and carry the animals to rest in the grass, covering them with branches and leaves, and making it safer for vultures to come. The first photograph I shared on social media was a squirrel I’d found on the hike-and-bike trail downtown. I carried her to a tree, circled her with pinecones and wildflowers, and shared her photo on Instagram with the caption, “I’m sorry. No one who sees you now will dismiss you as “just a dead squirrel.” The photo and story struck a nerve. People said they were moved by the beauty of the image and the circle of care around the [circle] squirrel. But they also said they were heartened by the compassion, that the act of honoring gave them some peace, too. They said they appreciated seeing the memorial and having the chance to care, to see and to care for this one squirrel. I began sharing more of the memorials and created the hashtag, “See them all.”
They have drawn so much attention, tens of thousands of kindred spirits. Every day, people write from all over the world with stories of grief, or to tell me how talking about death is helping them cope, or to show me a memorial they created. They send photos of robins, butterflies, bees, squirrels, and pet cats and dogs. One woman memorialized a wallaby joey killed next to his mother; another, a bobcat kitten and mother killed on opposite sides of the same road.
To me, this outpouring says a lot about how disconnected we are from death, even as we are emerging from a deadly global pandemic, sitting on the precipice of global war, and facing ecological collapse, the 6th mass extinction, and climate change. The care and attention to the memorials tell me how we long to (re)connect with the lives of animals in meaningful ways.
Any big plans?
I am planning an art exhibition this summer featuring the animal memorials.
Contact Info:
- Email: Astronza@tamu.edu
- Website: www.amandastronza.com
- Instagram: Amandastronza
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amanda.stronza
- Other: www.see-them-all.com
Image Credits
Photo Credit for me with Matilda: Joe Smith Photo Credit for me: Lee Fitzgerald All other photos: Amanda Stronza
