This paper gives critical attention to the nature versus caution porch conversation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, arguing that this is a legitimate addition to the anthropological discussion of nature versus culture. Addressing literary critics as well as scholars of the environmental humanities and of multispecies studies, I argue that Hurston's nature-caution discussion is a helpful epistemology which Hurston employs throughout her novel to suggest a single, unified way of understanding the human and nonhuman.

The lives of black-tailed godwits and farmers in the meadow landscapes of the Netherlands are closely entangled. While godwits and other ‘meadow birds’ have lived in around the human shaped meadows for many centuries and, especially in the first half of the 20thcentury, profited from farming practices, from the second half of the 20thcentury, their populations started to decline rapidly. Based on studies to the ecology and ethology of godwits, and interviews with farmers that work to save godwits and other birds on their land, this thesis explores the relationship between godwits and farmers situated in the meadow landscape through lively ethographic storytelling. Storytelling is a powerful method because it leaves open for multiple perspectives, without privileging the one over the other. Through this approach I aim to tell the stories of godwits and farmers alongside each other, in a way that gives individuals agency and presents their lives as meaningful. Through these stories I hope to engage readers with, and (re)connect them to, the lives of godwits and farmers and open up to a ‘capacity for response’.