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Presentation long abstract

This presentation analyses the chronobiopolitics of transhumance as a re/wilding practice.

I focus on proposals to reintroduce transhumance in the Lake District on land owned and managed by Lowther Conservation, the most ambitious rewilding project in England by size.

Conservationists hope to leverage the connectivity of upland common land to recreate a wildlife corridor, using domesticated herbivores as proxies for extinct megafauna. This shift from heritage to conservation grazing, from sheep to cattle, is framed as a post-pastoral utopia in a UNESCO cultural landscape. It is a yearning desire for an alternative world grounded not in a pre-farming past but rather in farming's golden age: Rewilding here is not anti-pastoral, but post-pastoral, restoring, rather than replacing, a pastoral practice (hefting) into its more authentic version: transhumance.

Blurring the often found opposition of rewilding and heritage, these proposals also reconfigure the bio- and chrono politics of rewilding. I first analyse the biopolitics of transhumant rewilding, particularly the biosecurity regulations governing the mixing of cattle on the uplands when moving from different farm holdings in the valley (i.e. BCMS) and how this is reconfiguring breed selection for tenanted farms. I argue with Rancière (2022) that time is “not simply the line stretching between past and future”, but time is a “hierarchical distribution of forms of life”: life forms that are timely and those that are anachronic. Such a temporal framing allows for a critical scrutiny of which lives are made to coexist in post-pastoral utopias.