Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with rewilding projects, this paper explores how biota are classified as “native” or “invasive”. To understand the complex entanglements of and relationships between more-than-human lives we must think not only with the species that are present, but also about haunting absences.

Paper long abstract:

Rewilding, an increasingly popular practice of ecosystem transformation, addresses the clashes between (un)desired presences and absences and within ecologies. Based on my fieldwork in Scotland, I look at notions of “native” and “invasive” biota, interrogating how different species are assigned qualities of usefulness and desirability. Who is classified as unwanted, wanted, and longed for by whom and to what end?

As a practice, rewilding is based on a critical analysis of environmental history and how different agents have shaped it. By looking at how humans and more-than-humans have impacted “nature” historically and in the present, rewilding lends itself to a deconstructive approach towards the nature – culture dichotomy. In this paper I examine how the relationships of humans to more-than-human environments are actively reimagined, along with what it means to be an agent in first place, who and what is eligible, and the frictions that arise around these questions.

In order to fully comprehend the complex networks and relations rewilding projects hope to (re)instore, however, I argue we must not only think about and with those biota currently present in the Scottish ecologies, but also account for those absences, which haunt Scottish lives and landscapes today. Imagination and creative practice become useful tools in this instance, whose benefits and limits I discuss in this paper.

The final question I will pose is what lessons we can (or should) learn from rewilding and methods of more-than-human studies to move towards a world of multi-species conviviality and more-than-human survival in the Anthropocene.