Feral Political Ecologies? The Biopolitics, Temporalities and Spatialities of Rewilding

• Published in: Conservation and society Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 71 - 76
• Main Authors: Wynne-Jones, Sophie, Clancy, Cara, Holmes, George, O’Mahony, Kieran, Ward, Kim J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bangalore Wolters Kluwer India Pvt. Ltd 01.04.2020; Medknow Publications and Media Pvt. Ltd; Medknow Publications & Media Pvt. Ltd; Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Biopolitics; Environmental restoration; Ontology; Power; Reintroduction; Special Section: Rewilding ‘Feral Political Ecologies’; System dynamics; Wildlife conservation
• ISSN: 0972-4923; 0975-3133
• DOI: 10.4103/cs.cs_20_67

Critical scholars have questioned the shifting dynamics of power and governance involved, how these are enfolded in novel spatial and temporal framings, and the ethical and justice implications for both human-human and human-nonhuman relations. By mobilising scientific knowledge and employing mechanisms such as species lists and the concept of biodiversity, compositionalist conservation has demarcated, ordered and valued nature at both a species-population scale and through the bodies of individuals (Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Braverman 2015). Within this collection, the demarcation of life as protected or ‘made killable’ is a subject of discussion for papers by Clancy and Ward; O'Mahony; Ward and Prior, who evaluate the ways in which the lives of birds, boars and beavers (respectively) are ranked, ordered and regulated according to measures such as breeding and physiology, the extent and locations of territory, and behavioural dynamics. Reintroduction is a central feature of the rewilding movement, to enable the enhancement of trophic complexity and enrich depleted system dynamics (Svenning et al. 2016), but it is a fraught objective.