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Short abstract

The paper argues that community-led eucalyptus eradication reveals invasion as a socio-political and cultural issue, where local practices redefine care, belonging, and desired more-than-human relations beyond scientific notions of nativeness.

Long abstract

Recent humanities scholarship has questioned how humans might coexist with so-called invasive species, particularly amid large-scale eradication programs and troubling discourses of nativeness and purity that echo beyond ecology. This paper examines a situated case of community-led eradication in a northwestern Iberian region where eucalyptus (globulus and nitens) expanded rapidly during the late twentieth century. The spread of these trees was not merely ecological but politically driven: industrial pulp production and the displacement of rural communities from common lands enabled extensive monoculture afforestation. As a result, eucalyptus coverage increased dramatically over several decades and now occupies a substantial portion of the regional landscape.

Despite longstanding ecological concerns, including biodiversity loss, altered fire regimes, and hydrological impacts, regional authorities have avoided classifying eucalyptus as invasive because of its economic value. Over the past decade, however, grassroots groups have organized volunteer brigades to remove eucalyptus independently of state initiatives, actively employing the invasive species discourse. Yet, their actions frame eradication not as a technocratic intervention but as a form of communal landscape restoration and care.

By analyzing these practices ethnographically, the paper contributes to critical invasion studies by shifting attention from scientific definitions of nativeness to locally grounded meanings of belonging. Recasting biological invasion as a more-than-biological phenomenon raises broader questions about which human and more-than-human communities are desired, by whom, and according to what historical, cultural, and political imaginaries.