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- Convenors:
-
Liana Chua
(University of Cambridge)
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Ursula Münster (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel ethnographically explores contemporary biodiversity conservation beyond one of its most basic units of thought and intervention—the species concept—and asks what other scales, units and analytics shape its workings in multiple contexts.
Long Abstract:
The species concept has had a long, 'lively existence' (Kirksey 2015) in both biodiversity conservation and popular imaginaries of extinction and environmental crisis. Yet its 'apparent conceptual transparency' (Youatt 2015) belies its highly contingent and even contradictory character. On the one hand, species boundaries and categories are heterogeneous and malleable, acquiring multiple meanings and politics across different contexts (e.g. Braverman 2015; Kirksey 2015; Youatt 2015). On the other hand, species-based classifications and taxonomies can purify and essentialise, undergirding rigid biopolitical regimes unable to account for real life's messy, transgressive transformations and relations (e.g. Fredriksen 2016; Mitchell 2016).
Building on recent problematisations of this concept, this panel aims to explore different forms and practices of conservation beyond species. We invite contributions that ethnographically describe, interrogate or think with other units of and for conservation thought and intervention, such as landscapes, multispecies communities, biosocial ecologies, and microbial terroirs (among many other things). Some of these units nuance, expand or coexist alongside the species concept; others may undermine or contradict it. By foregrounding them, we seek to provoke thought about how conservation works with (or without) species, and what new relational formations and dynamics are emerging in contemporary conservation contexts. How might careful, critical attention to soils, bacteria, and viruses, for example, reshape the object(ive)s of conservation? How can we view living (and non-living) beings through different registers? How do we (re)scale the more-than-human stakes of conservation by thinking beyond species?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores assisted migration, a controversial conservation proposal aiming to relocate endangered species outside their native ranges. It unfolds how this practice reckons with a catastrophically fluid world and transforms its understanding of species as a unit of conservation.
Paper long abstract:
Assisted migration, the “safeguarding biological diversity through the translocation of representatives of a species or population harmed by climate change to an area outside the indigenous range of that unit where it would be predicted to move as climate changes” (Hällfors et al. 2014), is a relatively recent, marginal and controversial conservation proposal. It first took shape in a 1985 publication, but was not seriously pursued until 2004, first as the illegal and volunteer-led translocation of the endangered conifer Torreya taxifolia, and then as a series of scientific pilot and test-studies and articles providing scientific and terminological frameworks.
Assisted migration is an intriguing case study when it comes to the species concept in conservation, as it both upholds and undermines it. While ostensibly a practice that can only preserve single species, one pilot study at a time, it also represents a moment of reckoning with an environment that is threatening to change beyond any possible recognition or salvation. This pushes assisted migration closer to wide-scale bio- and geo-engineering projects, where the remodelling of landscapes and the entrepreneurial colonising of newly opened niches takes precedence over species-being – but it has also led to the emergence of a conservationist discourse grounded in deep-time migrations and prehistoric human-aided dispersals, in which the preservation of species is torqued by an intensified attention to interspecies communities and collective labour. I will attempt to unfold some of the contradictions inherent to this emergent conservation practice, and the challenge it poses in terms of conservation scales.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnography, this paper looks at the contrasting movements of categorisation and expertise on seals, from the mid-twentieth century, which questions the species and the way in which these emblematic animals are protected.
Paper long abstract:
Due to environmental and political changes, the way in which seals are viewed in the Western world has evolved. Since the mid-twentieth century, pinnipeds have been thought of in the singular, as a unique group to be protected from exploitation. The figure of the "baby seal" became the only known category, even in Canadian legislation. During the 2000s, other seals appeared. Grey seals, another species known by coastal communities but forgotten by politicians, managers and NGOs, are now increasingly on the Atlantic coasts (Canada, United Kingdom, France). They are seen as "over-protected", settling in protected areas, little used by humans.
These seals reveal problems of cohabitation in ecosystems, for example the non-recovery of groundfish (such as cod) in Atlantic waters. Thus, a pluralisation of species has emerged in an ambivalent way in the discourses and the deployment of expertise. At the same time, biological research is seeking to understand differences in the behaviour of these marine predators, particularly in order to understand depredation phenomena.
Based on ethnography (Magdalen Islands, Quebec) and qualitative research (semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and observations) conducted between 2019 and 2021 in Canada and France, this paper proposes to present these pluralisation and individualisation movements in order to question seal conservation practices based on different categorisations (speciesist or not), which coexist in time and space.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines muskox-human relations in Kangerlussuaq. Outlining an ethno-ethological approach, the paper argues that conservation and management efforts would gain from understanding muskox ecologies as hybrid communities rather than counting and regulating singular species.
Paper long abstract:
The Kangerlussuaq area in West Greenland is inhabited by the largest muskox population in Greenland. This is the result of a conservation effort in the 1960s, when 27 individuals from East Greenland were translocated to Kangerlussuaq. Although the exact population size is uncertain, questioned, and contested, the muskoxen sustain human livelihoods through their meat (subsistence and commercial hunting), hides (used to produce wool), heads and horn (trophy hunting), and through their simple presence in the landscape (tourism). Muskoxen take part in shaping Kangerlussuaq as a place, and in turn, muskoxen are shaped by human sociality and infrastructures as much as they are by ecological and climatic conditions. Wildlife management authorities suggest that the current number of muskoxen exceeds the carrying capacity of the area, while hunters and others living from muskoxen articulate concerns that the population is near a collapse.
This paper examines mutual shaping of humans and muskoxen in Kangerlussuaq as biosocial becoming and multiplication. I suggest that conservation and management efforts, rather than counting and managing animals as ‘living resources’ and species isolated from others, could gain from attending to muskox ecologies as hybrid communities, that is ecologies shaped by human as well as animal practices. This invites for collaborations across disciplines when it comes to understanding how animal populations and ecologies are affected by human presence and practices, and vice versa. The paper calls for and speculatively outlines an ethno-ethological approach – one that integrates anthropology, biology, and other ways of knowing human-environment-animal relations and sociality.