In June 1622, the silver mining metropolis of Potosí, Bolivia, erupted in gangland violence, only halted three years later by a viceroy’s blanket amnesty. Basque immigrants were at the center of the controversy, squaring off against nearly a dozen other nations known collectively as Vicuñas. At stake were the world’s richest silver mines, a means to wealth and power in the Americas, Europe, and beyond. As mines flooded and Indigenous workers died or fled, the city descended into a maelstrom of swordfights, gun battles, ambushes, sniper attacks, and summary executions. Though its roots were economic, the Basque-Vicuña conflict strained the sinews of Habsburg global governance even as it exposed festering local tensions, only some of which were unique to Potosí. This rich collection of original sources, all of them archival documents housed in Bolivia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, consists of contemporary eyewitness accounts from several perspectives, allowing readers to play historian. All sources have been expertly translated and carefully annotated in a manner that will engage students and scholars alike. Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell includes an extensive introduction, seven vital documents in translation, and appendices on everyday life in 1620s Potosí and on the historiography of this watershed episode of colonial violence.

Explains how education and regulation are required to prevent the proliferation of unsustainable practices. This book demonstrates the animal welfare, ecological, economic, social, and conservation trade-offs that exist between different management systems. It offers insights into the viability of community-based wildlife management of a species.

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Shiver River, Vampire Cave, Stove-Top Volcano, and a mysterious raven named Nevva Moore. . . . Victor Vicuna is in for some very exciting adventures during his family’s vacation at Verna Aardvark’s Volcano Village!

Shiver River, Vampire Cave, Stove-Top Volcano, and a mysterious raven named Nevva Moore. . . . Victor Vicuna is in for some very exciting adventures during his family’s vacation at Verna Aardvark’s Volcano Village!

Things have changed. In 1969 when the Convention for the Conservation of the Vicuña was drafted, in an attempt to save the vicuña from its tumbling decline towards extinction, both the science and the philosophy of wildlife conservation were radically different. It is thus a tribute to the prescience of those involved at the time that the rescue plan had, even through the harsh lens of hindsight, a d- tinctly Twenty First Century flavour. After all, it was predicated on the expectation that if vicuña could be saved, they would one day become a valued asset, generating revenue for the human communities that fostered their survival. Embodied in this aspiration are the main structures of modern biodiversity conservation – not only is it to be underpinned by science, but that science should be of both the natural and the social genres, woven into inter-disciplinarity, and thereby taking heed of e- nomics, governance, ownership and the like, alongside biology. In addition, it should include, as a major strut, the human dimension, taking account of the affected constituencies with their varied stakes in alternative outcomes. This c- temporary framework for thinking about biodiversity conservation is inseparable from such wider, and inherently political, notions as community-based conser- tion and ultimately sustainable use.