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.