Paper short abstract:

This paper relies on an ethnographic study of an Argentinian rewilding project. It examines how the vision of a biodiverse future enacted by rewilding translates into embodied relations between human and nonhuman animals in the present, and how these relations come to shape future ecosystems.

Paper long abstract:

As concerns regarding the alarming rate of biodiversity collapse grow in the conservation community and beyond, debates about how best to conserve a rapidly eroding ‘nature’ intensify, and new conservation strategies emerge. Trophic rewilding is one such strategy. Born in the late 1980s out of the conviction that conservation should move away from merely “managing loss” (Sandom et al. 2013:413), trophic rewilding aims at actively restoring damaged ecosystems by reintroducing locally extinct species which play an important role within local food chains. This paper is an ethnographic study of a rewilding project carried out in the wetland area of Esteros del Iberá, Northern Argentina. It looks at the process through which captive green-winged macaws (Ara chloropterus) are being trained to fly, forage and distance themselves from caretakers so as to be released within their natural habitat, and asks how the vision of a biodiverse future enacted by rewilding initiatives translates into embodied relations between human and nonhuman animals in the present. Relying on six months of fieldwork among rewilding practitioners, I argue that reintroduced macaws, whose lives are shaped throughout by animal training practices, veterinary interventions and monitoring technologies, are perceived by practitioners as both pointers to a biodiverse future – and evaluated as such, through attention to their reproductive and survival potential within a given population – yet also as complex individuals who engage in daily relations of care, communication and intimacy with human caretakers. Rewilding practitioners thus navigate between producing the future, and ethically tending to the present.