Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions between care and control in rewilding projects, where an ideal of multispecies autonomy and conviviality needs to be balanced with imaginaries of environmental health. More-than-human agents ignoring these imaginaries and their rules trouble the ethics of rewilding.

Paper long abstract:

Rewilding projects commonly advertise for a withdrawal of human management of ecosystems. Yet, those involved with them often find themselves caught in complex negotiations of care and control that come into existence around multispecies engagements. These are caused by the complex and paradoxical investment of rewilding projects in both an ethics of liberation from capitalist, anthropocentric rule over ecosystems, as well as in a narrative of ecological destruction in need of being mitigated, demanding the drawing of strict boundaries determining who is in- and excluded from 'healthier' future ecologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with rewilding projects in Scotland, this paper explores how those boundaries (both physical and metaphorical) are inherited from capitalist histories and justified through appropriations of scientific terminology and concepts. But more-than-human actors seldomly share an active interest in our borders, fences, and rigid categorisations. Subsequently, the boundaries and rules of rewilding projects are continuously pushed against and breached by more-than-human agents: beavers leaving their allocated territories to enter zones where they are transformed from 'ecosystem engineers' to 'pests'. 'Native' birches seeding in peatbogs, where they are considered 'invasive'. 'Alien' larch trees becoming the favourite life-partner of rare red squirrels. Faced with this unruly behaviour and unapproved community-building, the ethical dimensions around rewilding practices are pushed to the foreground. I will explore this field of tension in which those involved with rewilding projects are required to balance their ethical ideals of multispecies autonomy and conviviality with a dependency on more-than-human labour to build imagined 'healthier' futures.