Paper short abstract:

A recent turn to rewilding in nature conservation has prompted biologists to rethink position of the human in the management of the living world. This rethinking, I argue, inadvertently challenges discrete anthropologies in ways that may mediate anew feelings of responsibility across species-divides

Paper long abstract:

During the last decade, biologists and other biodiversity champions in Europe and beyond have begun to champion rewilding as an effective tool in the attempt to rehabilitate a natural world that is growing less diverse by the day. In recent years, however, rewilding has turned from a conservation strategy into a goal in itself: The wild.

Taking as the empirical starting point biologists engaged at the Mols Laboratory in Denmark, a nature reserve and rewilding testing tube celebrated for its live diversity, dynamism, and vivacity, the paper explores how this new wave of idealizing the wild partakes in and feeds from an eerily familiar, yet deeply 'polybiguous' re-configuration of the human. That is, as biologists discuss 'natural processes', the meaning and significance of 'invasive species', and the 'unconditional entitlement to exist' of all living beings, they repeatedly, if mostly implicitly, frame relations between the human and (the rest of) nature in ways that alternate between continuity, contiguity, and stewardship, setting up fragile and polymorphous structures of alterity.

If it is true, as Donna Haraway has argued, that the ripening of the human happens "from the soil of the animal" (1989:11), this particular expression of what I call biologists' doublethink (Orwell 2000) - that is, to paraphrase Willerslev (2004), humans are not nature and not not-nature - serves to problematize, in ways that are perhaps themselves problematic, narrowly defined anthropologies in ways that may generate or mediate feelings of responsibility across species-divides.