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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the concept of care in the political, affective and material messiness in more-than-human relations in nature conservation in the highly contested and restricted natural environments of the Netherlands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the concept of care in the political, affective and material messiness in more-than-human relations in nature conservation in the highly contested and restricted natural environments of the Netherlands. With the established return of the wolf and expanding re-wilding initiatives the question of which species are worthy of care has become politically divisive, leading to protests and sometimes violent actions, subverting official ecological management. In particular I consider the fraught relations between different groups of humans and the animals that live within boundaries of a central re-wilded National Park, which since its creation has been controversial, especially for how life and death are conceptualised as part of wild nature. I suggest that these more-than-human tensions reveal specific gendered value hierarchies of care. Common expert notions of ecology that have founded and run rewilding projects have a perceptible masculine character, which frames the relation to the environment in a distinct rationalized way, seeing death as part of the natural course that nature sometimes takes. Lay views on nature management, particularly expressed by female activists, insist on alternative relations of care, that acknowledge the call of reciprocal obligation that comes forth from living in entangled and interdependent worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), leading them to climb the fences of the park to start feeding animals of their own accord. This paper thus discusses how the material and situated condition of a politics of care comes to be articulated in matters of loving and dying in more-than-human entanglements.