Presentation short abstract

This presentation traces the use of necropolitical ecologies across Scottish rewilding. I explore framings of the ecological deathscape, the necrobiome as a pathway to ecological abundance, and social erasure within rewilding’s necropolitical turn.

Presentation long abstract

In this presentation, I apply a necropolitical framework to examine how prominent rewilding groups in rural Scotland are actively producing encounters with death in the landscape, focusing both on practices of memorialisation and the concept of the necrobiome. The first strand concerns framings of rewilding as a pathway to restore ‘life’ to a landscape which is haunted by the spectral "absence–presence" of familiar species (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2022). I will explore how necropolitics are evoked within rewilding campaigns to locate haunting within industrial agri-food systems and their “necropolitical technology” of death (Sneegas, 2022 p.65). These spectral landscape framings, and spatial markers of memorialisation, support Walter’s (2019) ‘pervasive dead’ as the renewed integration of non-human death in the everyday. As an extension of this pervasive (eco)dead, I present the rising interest in necrobiome rewilding, which emphasises the nutrient and habitat value of deadwood and deer carcasses left in-situ. Whilst the necrobiome may be viewed as a form of anti-necropolitics (Strange, 2024), where ecological death signals a pathway to re-birth, these practices have simultaneously prompted discomfort regarding public encounters with carcasses. I position the necrobiome as a new iteration of the deathscape, where cultural unfamiliarity with decay and new proximities to the dead have prompted planning to (re)negotiate death’s sequestration from society. To close, I will reflect on the use of necropolitics in the context of Clearance and internal colonialism in the Highlands/Gàidhealtachd, whereby framings of the pervasive (eco)dead must take care not to depoliticise biotic loss under rewilding’s necropolitical turn.