Reconnecting with Care: The Embodiment of Conservation Volunteering in the Cairngorms

The embodied activity of conservation volunteering offers a unique engagement with the landscapes in places like the Cairngorms National Park. Place-based ethnography research explores what emerges from following 1 year of conservation volunteering. This paper thinks through the concept of care as entering into a relation with the landscape by participating in tasks aimed at improving landscapes based on decisions made by individual landowners within the park. Through encounters with red deer during conservation volunteering, care emerges as an act of learning based on noticing, sharing knowledge, and acknowledging a responsibility to care for the past, present, and future human and more-than-human inhabitants of a landscape. These learnings offer a deeper commitment to landscape for landscape architecture field practices.