Paper short abstract:

This paper examines animal infrastructures, namely oyster breakwaters and beaver dams, as emergent forms of post-carbon infrastructure in the Anthropocene. It theorises how the infrastructures redefine human-animal relations by resituating the human and fostering collaborative conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines animal infrastructures, namely oyster breakwaters and beaver dams, as emergent forms of post-carbon infrastructure within the context of natural flood management (NFM) and the Anthropocene. As municipal planning transitions from the construction of 'hard' defense infrastructures to 'soft,' we see animals increasingly enrolled as NFM infrastructures that foster wetland restoration, entangled with the humans, sciences, and politics engaged in the transition. Following two cases in Northern California: Living Shorelines' construction of oyster breakwaters and Worth A Dam's conservation of beavers/dams, I explore how animal infrastructures are constructed in relative collaboration between animals and humans. By investigating how the engineers, designers, and conservationists associated with the projects create and understand animal infrastructures and the 'work' they are collectively conducting in the field of NFM, I theorise how these infrastructural collaborations redefine human-animal relations in the Anthropocene in two key ways. First, animal infrastructures resituate the human within the environmental, messy-wetland assemblage, decentring them in the 'Anthro'pocene. Second, once rethought as resituated, human-animal collaboration resulting in and from animal infrastructure opens possibilities for collaborative conservation: working with and trusting multiple bodies' work in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Collaborative conservation is conceptualised not as operating within a flattened hierarchy, but rather as a place-based, biopolitical, interspecies/thing approach to pragmatise assemblage thinking in the Anthropocene. This transition to animal infrastructures in NFM provides a conduit to understand how human-animal relations are being redefined and how that opens multiple futures, for multiple beings, coexistent on the same planet.