Paper short abstract:

How can stories of wolf reintroduction offer insight into the principles and practices of global health? The transformation of wolves from vermin to co-inhabitants demonstrates the way a politics of protection & immunity reflects expanding moral horizons & the entanglements these entail.

Paper long abstract:

What can the politics of wolf recovery & reintroduction possibly have to offer as insight into the principles and practices of global health? Taken as a privileged example of interspecies relationship, one defined by humans as deeply agonistic, the transformation of wolves from predacious vermin to valued co-inhabitants can be said to demonstrate the ways in which a politics of protection and immunity both reflects and makes possible the expansion of moral and social horizons, including the willed entanglements such community entails.

An examination of the politics, policies and social processes surrounding the recovery and reintroduction of wolf populations in the US reveals the steps through which human communities go as they learn to live alongside wolves. This, in turn, allows us to observe the multiplicity of perspectives and interests converging in shared spaces, the conflicts and collaborations developing from them, and the emergence from these of a gradual, unstable, and fragile acceptance of the inescapable entanglement with an other whose interests will always be beyond domestication.

Using impertinent comparison as a method, the paper will thus endeavour to put forward a perspective for health that is dynamic, environmentally attuned, communal and modest in its expectations. Can we learn to approach global health without the concept, however latent, of eradication informing our values, defining our goals? If we did, what would happen then?