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The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists
Irus Braverman
University at Buffalo School of Law, irusb@buffalo.edu

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Recommended Citation
Irus Braverman, The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively
Legalities 19 (Irus Braverman, ed., Routledge 2016)

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively
Legalities on 12/22/2015, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Animals-Biopolitics-Law-Lively-Legalities/
Braverman/p/book/9781138943117.

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at Buffalo School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Contributions to Books by an authorizedadministrator of Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. For more information, please contact
lawscholar@buffalo.edu.

[Draft before copyedits]

Published in Irus Braverman (ed.). 2016. Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities(Routledge).
Chapter 1
The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists
Irus Braverman[A]nimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking
pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied,(j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken
the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
---Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, quoting from Borges’ “a ‘certain Chinese
encyclopedia’” (1970, xv).
It is with the whimsy and wonder of the above quote that Foucault begins his great
expedition into the order of things. “Out of the laughter that shattered,” Foucault says, “all thefamiliar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age andour geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we areaccustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards todisturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other”(1970, xv). It is not incidental, I shall argue here, that Foucault began his study of order with the
project of classifying nonhuman animals in the form of a list. The divide between the “human”
and the “animal” is foundational for identifying, uniting, and distinguishing “us” from “them.”
As such, it provides the basis for the most fundamental classification of all—that between humanand animal—and for the regulation of this classification through legal institutions.
The age-old capacity of lists to make and resist order has become a topic of renewed
attention as of late. A growing literature on lists describes their power to create and organize

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global connectivities (Staeheli 2012, 234), emphasizing their role in security regimes inparticular (Amoore 2011; Leyshon and Thrift 1999). What has been overlooked in this wave ofrenewed attention, however, is the important role of the list as a regulatory device for ordering
human-nonhuman relations. This chapter will thus diverge from the anthropocentric focus of theexisting literature on lists to explore the legal project of listing nonhuman species as “threatened”
and “endangered.” “All kinds of things become more interesting once we stop assuming that‘we’ are the only place to begin and end our analysis,” offer Hinchliffe and Bingham along theselines (2008, 1541). It is precisely toward such interesting valences around the seemingly
technical and boring performance of the list that this chapter intends to direct attention. I will
highlight the regulatory power of lists and their role in the grand project of ordering life: bothhuman and nonhuman.
The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists ofthreatened and endangered species (see, e.g., de Grammont and Cuarón 2006, 22). In 2010, atleast 109 countries had produced a national red data book, national red list, or other national listof threatened species (Miller 2013, 198) and more than 25 listing systems of threatened species
were used across North America only (2013, 192). The International Union of Conservation of
Nature’s (IUCN) Red List for Threatened SpeciesTM (hereafter, the Red List) is the “mother” of
all threatened species lists, the first and most comprehensive attempt at the global listing of all
threatened species. For the last five decades, the Red List has provided “a map of how to doconservation,” according to a prominent IUCN official (Lamoreux, interview).
Drawing on my previous work on the biopolitical dimensions of the Red List (2015a;
2015b), this chapter will explore the more and the less visible regulatory frameworks of listing
threatened species through the Red List. Such explorations illuminate a number of common

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[Draft before copyedits]themes between human- and nonhuman-focused lists: visibility, translatability, comparability,
inexhaustibility, simplicity, flexibility, credibility, objectivity, neutrality, technicality, andcontagion. At the same time, these explorations also illuminate the differences between humanand nonhuman lists: whereas various security lists (such as the secret drone “kill list,” no-fly
lists, and terrorist lists) identify humans who risk or threaten, threatened species lists typically
identify nonhumans who are threatened.
The source of the difference between human- and nonhuman-focused lists is evident
when examining them through a biopolitical lens: according to Foucault, only (certain) humans
are privileged with political life. Animals and plants, along with all that is considered natural or
wild, are relegated to the realm of biological life—namely, that which is killable. By contrast,
this chapter applies the distinction between biological and political life also in the nonhumancontext. Through their listing as threatened, certain species’ lives are elevated to a politicalstatus, while the rest (initially, at least, the unlisted) remain biological, or mere, life (Braverman
2015c). In other words, whereas the rule for nonhumans is biological life and the threatened list
is the exception, the situation is reversed in the case of humans, where the general rule ispolitical life, and the list exceptionalizes and reduces such life to the biological realm.
Threatened species lists are thus both biopolitical and regulatory technologies: they(re)produce and reinforce underlying species ontologies by creating, calculating, and governing
the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Indeed, alongside their reinforcement of the
biopolitical differentiation between various nonhuman species, threatened species lists also
distinguish human from nonhuman species. Such a differentiated treatment of the life and deathof nonhuman species through their en-listing, down- and up-listing, multi-listing, and un-listingtranslate into the positive protection and active governance of such species. Listing threatened

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species thus becomes a way to affirm—and justify—which lives are more and most important tosave, thereby reifying the distinction between those who save (humans) and those who can only
be saved (nonhumans).
Despite their significant differences, the bulk of this chapter will turn to examine several
themes of the nonhuman list that are highly applicable in the context of the human list, too. This
exploration will utilize an empirical and ethnographic methodology to illuminate characteristicsof the list that travel across the human-nonhuman divide but that may not be as obvious orvisible when observed only in the human context. I will start by introducing the list in general,and the Red List in particular, and will then proceed to examine the biopolitical aspects of the
Red List as well as its global, regulatory, scientific, and seductive powers.
The List
The word “list” originates from border, edge, boundary (from Old High German lîsta;OED 2013), but it also means lust and desire, or inclination. Dating back to Old English frombefore the twelfth century, hlyst also means “to listen” (OED 2013). “List-making is frequently
seen as one of the fundamental activities of advanced human society,” offer Bowker and Star
(1994, 188), while Goody (1977) suggests that the first written records to exist were lists of kingsand equipment. Belknap adds along these lines: “Lists have been used for varied purposes
throughout history. Among other things, they serve to enumerate, account, remind, memorialize,
order. Lists abound in various sizes, shapes, and functions” (2000, 40).
A grocery list, kill lists, sex offender lists, and lists of threatened species—all areconsecutive configurations of discrete items linked by a common goal that assigns them meaning
and functionality. Lists name, classify, document, and simplify; they aspire tocomprehensiveness, comparability, consistency, and uniformity, and are structured to delineate

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[Draft before copyedits]boundaries, produce authority, and promote visibility. Making a list is a way of making
something apparent (or heard, recall hlyst) that is not otherwise so. Related to and drawing uponthese functions, certain lists also standardize and regulate. Whereas all lists rely on various formsof classification, effectively “sorting things out” (Bowker and Star 1999)—some also prioritize.
With such lists, not only the listed items but also their particular order is significant. Threatened
species lists are a good example of this dual function. Such lists also typically share thefollowing characteristics: they are a scientific method for highlighting those species under higher
extinction risk with the explicit or implicit goal of focusing attention on conservation measuresdesigned to protect them (Possingham et al. 2002, 503; emphasis added).
The Red List is by far the most influential and widely used method for evaluating global
extinction risks. The IUCN has been producing red data books and red lists since 1963
(Lamoreux et al. 2003, 215). During the five decades of its use, the IUCN Red List of
Threatened Species has evolved from a subjective expert-based system lacking standardized
criteria to a uniform and global rule-based system (Miller 2013, 195; Mace et al. 2008). Despite(or as a result of) the insistence by many IUCN scientists on the Red List’s non-prescriptive andapolitical character (Hoffmann, interview), it has had a profound influence on conservation laws
and practices around the world (Possingham et al. 2002; Rodrigues et al. 2006). For instance, theRed List has inspired the development of numerous national and regional red lists and has
functioned as an important source for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)—a powerful international convention on trade that
determines whether and how commercial trade in certain species will be regulated. Why does the
Red List have such enormous normative power, and how does it work in the world? To answer
these questions, I will first explore the biopolitical properties of the Red List.

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The Biopolitical List
Beyond their descriptive and declarative functions, threatened species lists normalize andregulate conservation and related actions; they also prescribe a series of material effects on very
particular animal bodies (Braverman 2015a). While recognizing these functions and their effects
on the individual level, the power of threatened species lists emanates from their capacity toorder life at the level of the biological species—what Foucault refers to as biopolitics (Foucault
1990). Thinking and governing through species regimes, and through compiling lists ofthreatened species in particular, enables both an abstraction—a grid over the Linnaean kingdoms(Foucault, 1970)—and an embodiment: a personification of ecosystems, habitats, andpopulations. Since humans understand themselves primarily as an exceptional species andtherefore both relate to, and differentiate themselves from, other species—it is important tocritically examine the species lens and the work that it performs in the world.
For conservation scientists, the species is the foundational ontological unit through whichlife can be calculated and known (Braverman 2015c; Sandler 2012). Biermann and Mansfieldreflect on the perspective of conservation experts that: “Managing individual nonhuman lives ismeaningless in responding to the crisis of biodiversity loss; individual lives acquire meaning
only when they advance the long-term well being of the broader population or are essential tosustaining key biological processes, especially evolution” (2014, 264). According to this way of
thinking, the death of an individual gains meaning based on the level of endangerment of her or
his species: once on the brink of extinction, the individual becomes larger than a singular life,and her or his death is therefore more than a singular death—it becomes the death of a life form,
the death of nature (Braverman 2015c). Nonhuman life is measured numerically and valued
according to its place in the scheme of the threatened list.

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At the same time, the deaths of so many other life forms who are not rare, charismatic, orvisible enough to warrant the threatened designation fall outside the range of legal protections
established by the list, or outside the list altogether. Such life forms are effectively “list-less”:
incalculable, unmemorable, and thus killable. Toward the end of this chapter, I argue that theconservation value of a species is defined through its inclusion and rank in an ever-proliferating
number of lists and that the regulatory power of such lists is constantly eroded as new lists taketheir place in defining what is even more threatened, endangered, or extinct.
While much recent biopolitical work emphasizes thanatopolitics or necropolitics, thischapter brings into focus an affirmative biopolitics (Rutherford and Rutherford 2013, 426),
namely “the ways in which biopolitics can be more about life than death, about inclusion rather
than exclusion” (429). What happens to those listless lives that fall outside the realm of thethreatened list does not configure into this account, which focuses instead on the viability of thelisted. But such a focus on the affirmative does not entail a disavowal of death. Quite thecontrary, “to make live does not mean to avoid death altogether but to manage death at the levelof the population. In a biopolitical regime, death is transformed into a rate of mortality, which isopen to intervention and management. This transformation erases the fact that not all life isequally promoted” (Biermann and Mansfield 2014, 259). I will discuss such erasures later, in thecontext of the scientific powers of the list.
The Global List
In its aspiration for a totalizing regime, the Red List illuminates the suitability of the list
form for furthering global classification schemes. “The IUCN Red List assesses the status of
species at a global level because this is the scale at which extinction occurs,” explain Mace andother prominent figures in the Red List’s construction (Mace et al. 2008, 1437). Lists are not

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only a way of channeling communication flows; they also “do the global” in their work asboundary objects that operate across time and space in an attempt at universal standardization.
The Red List “does the global” in a number of ways. First, it produces simple and visible
chain-like links between otherwise loosely connected species, geographies, temporalities, andrisks. “A global list deals with the global by adding, combining, and possibly ordering items—
without the obligation to create a totalizing signifier of the global” (Staeheli 2012, 234). The useof species as the foundational unit of threatened lists—effectively rendering them the “currencyof conservation” (Lamoreux, interview)—is not only ideological, as emphasized earlier, but also
pragmatic. Species are the most common, visible, and easily measured unit for assessing the stateof biodiversity. The Red List’s visibility is an important factor in its global efficiency. Indeed,threatened species are “among the most visible and easily understood symbols of the rising tideof extinctions,” making them an “emotive and politically powerful measurement of biodiversity
loss” (Miller 2013, 192; see also Wilcove 2010).
In addition to utilizing species units, the Red List’s visibility is enhanced through thelist’s color-coded visualization of danger (the red list) and its clear topology of endangerment, as
well as through its adoption of “catastrophe-governance” that focuses on raising alarm byidentifying and quantifying threats and extinction (Aradau and van Munster 2011, 85-106). John
Lamoreux of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is a member of the IUCN and actively
engaged in the red list assessments. He argues that “birders are famous for making lists: you haveto be able to see what you saw. There’s almost a listing mentality” (interview). Beyond theseapparent functions, Lamoreux points out that the Red List is also important as a “rallying cry.”“As an organization, you know what you stand for if you make a list of what’s important,” hetells me. The Red List, and threatened lists more generally, are thus a technology for the

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identification, differentiation, and visualization of certain forms of life with the goal ofmobilizing universal support and political and legal action that aim to prevent (certain)
nonhuman extinctions.
To serve as an effective technology for mobilization, the Red List must be easilytranslatable into various contexts—a “pan-linguistic device” (Staeheli 2012, 240). Red List Unit
Programme Officer Rebecca Miller focuses on the broad functionality of lists as she writes: “Theprinciple aim of a threatened species assessment is to estimate a species’ risk of extinction in acomparable, repeatable, transparent, and objective manner” (Miller 2013, 191). The list’s power
as a global technology also lies in that it is both a plastic (Belknap 2000, 35) and a homogenous
register that promotes equality and comparability among species. The Red List is “applied tograsshoppers as well as blue whales,” John Lamoreux tells me accordingly. “There’s something
about the applicability across all groups that’s just truly amazing,” he adds. By 2013, the IUCN
Species Survival Commission network—the central scientific body of the IUCN that iscomprised of thousands of scientists and experts from around the world—evaluated the global
threat status of 71,576 species of animals, plants, and fungi (IUCN 2013c). The aim: to assess
and appropriately categorize every living species on earth (ibid.).
This global scope of the Red List demonstrates how “[l]ists promise order as well as
open-endedness, exhaustiveness as well as infinite addition” (de Goede forthcoming, 7). The
generic list’s “logic of infinite addition” (Staeheli 2012, 234) is an important element of thethreatened species list as well and is exemplified to the extreme in the Red List context. Mike
Hoffmann of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission clarifies that the Red List is not just about
registering threatened species, but about registering all species. “You can’t talk about the statusof biodiversity globally unless you’ve assessed everything,” he tells me in an interview. A 2014

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Science article by Stuart Pimm and others illuminates the massive scale of this project. While anestimated 1.9 million animal species have been described and documented according to theseauthors, between 2 and 11 million animal species are still unknown. Some further argue that
uncertainties in insect and fungi numbers make stating a plausible range for the number of
unknown species impossible (Pimm et al. 2014, 987).
The Regulatory List
The Red List is especially powerful for its simplicity and comprehensiveness: “you wanta category system that at the end of the day is relatively simple to implement,” Hoffmann
explains in an interview. The simplicity factor is intimately related to the aforementioned
heightened comparability that the Red List affords. Generally, the assumption is that the simpler
the categories and criteria, the more they can be applied across the board to regulate the various
taxa on the list. Indeed, the criteria and categories “are designed to apply whether you are amammal or a bird or a fungus or a plant or whatever you are” (Hoffmann, interview). For
example, Criterion D requires a threshold of fewer than 50 mature individuals (IUCN 2001)—anumber that applies to all taxa, from fungi to whales. Thus “one size fits all” approach can bequite problematic. The IUCN cautions, for example, that: “The choice of scale at which range isestimated may thus, itself, influence the outcome of Red List assessments and could be a sourceof inconsistency and bias. It is impossible to provide any strict but general rules for mapping taxa
or habitats; the most appropriate scale will depend on the taxon in question, and the origin andcomprehensiveness of the distribution data” (IUCN 2001).
Nonetheless, the central idea of the Red List “was to come up with one system that is
applicable across all taxa, and you can therefore make comparisons across your different
taxonomic groups” (Hoffmann, interview). In addition to its role in constructing a governable

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platform of comparability between different taxa, the Red List also provides comparability
within particular taxa over time. It makes possible grand calculations such as this one: “Onaverage, 52 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians move one category closer to extinction
each year”; or this: “the deterioration for amphibians was equivalent to 662 amphibian species
each moving one Red List category closer to extinction over the assessment period, thedeteriorations for birds and mammals equate to 223 and 156 species, respectively, deteriorating
at least one category” (Hoffmann et al. 2010, 1507; see, e.g., Figures 4 and 5). The capacity of
the Red List to facilitate comparisons across previously disconnected units and fields
corresponds with what has been described elsewhere as “a new mode of hyperconnectivity,”
whereby “[e]very item can now be combined with every other item” (Staeheli 2012, 240). The
basic order of the list thus generates “a virtual space for recombinations, inventions, andnarratives” (ibid.).
Place Figure 4 here (IUCN 1)
Place Figure 5 here (IUCN 3)
The Red List’s regulatory powers lie also in its touted objectivity, transparency, andrepeatability (namely, that if another expert were to conduct the assessment he or she would
reach the same listing status; Brooks, interview). Nonetheless, it is not free from biases.
According to Hoffmann, the biggest source of bias is when scientists want to list “their” species
as threatened, “because they’re worried that if it’s not, they’re not going to get money.” Thereverse also happens, with researchers who prefer that their species be listed as Least Concern“so that they can collect their species, put it in a specimen jar, and do research on it.” “Our job,”
Hoffmann tells me, “is to be the neutral, objective, adjudicators of that process.” IUCN’s
Standards and Petitions Subcommittee is the particular adjudicator in cases of disagreement over

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[Draft before copyedits]a Red List designation. According to Hoffmann, they are “the experts in the criteria, and what
they say . . . would essentially be considered gospel” (interview).
This brings me to consider the Red List’s authority. Barney Long of the World Wildlife
Fund and the IUCN tells me that “when you say this species is red listed by the IUCN as
Critically Endangered, everyone automatically agrees and accepts that. There’s no conversation,
because the experts have agreed that it is Critically Endangered” (interview). These lists are so
important, Long continues, because they are a means for conservationists to communicate withthe public, and serve as a source of advice for policy makers on how to protect and manage
species. The credibility of the list, it is inferred, creates a front behind which disparate
conservation groups can unite, serving as a source of legitimacy, as a rallying cry, and also as ashared platform for regulatory controls. Today, the IUCN Red List is considered one of the mostauthoritative sources of information on the global conservation status of plants and animals(Lamoreux et al. 2003). Its influence has extended into numerous national and international
regulatory systems. According to Miller, 76 countries use the IUCN methodology for theirnational red lists (Miller 2013, 197). Because of its effectiveness in governing the global efforts
for saving threatened species the Red List has emerged as the central technology of modern
conservation.
Then there are also the adverse and unintended effects of particular listings, which point
to the unpredictability of governing across global and temporal scales. Brian Horne of the
Wildlife Conservation Society tells me in an interview that collectors often “want the rare, andthe unusual and different.” Hence, when turtle breeders learned that a certain turtle species was
soon to be listed under CITES’ Appendix I, their prices for that animal increased dramatically:“[t]he turtle went from being a hundred dollar turtle to [costing] one thousand dollars” (see, e.g.,

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Figure on page __, this volume). Another result is that once a species is downlisted (the term
used to indicate that it has become less threatened), “you become a victim of your own success . .
. because suddenly there’s less funding sources available,” which in turn translates into lessprotection (Bennett, interview). A final example of unintended consequences is that the price of
black rhino horn on Korean markets increased by more than 400 percent within two years of
their uplisting from CITES Appendix II to Appendix I, “which in turn coincided with a sharp
increase in the poaching of black rhinos and in illegal trade in rhino horn” (Rivalan et al. 2007,
530; see, e.g., Figure on page ___, this volume). The listing process produced by officials in one
corner of the world has thus triggered responses in other corners of the world that have translated
into the life or death of the relevant nonhuman animals.
The Scientific List
In addition to the simplicity, comparability, and translatability of threatened species lists,
their global power, mobility, and ubiquity derive from their configuration as scientific, technical,
and quantitative, and therefore as neutral and apolitical. According to the Guidelines for
Appropriate Uses of IUCN Red List Data: “The IUCN Red List is developed throughcontributions from a network of thousands of scientific experts around the world. . . . It uses ascientific process based upon objective criteria. Assessments are impartial, independent, and notpolitically driven. . . . The IUCN Red List is therefore a synthesis of the best available species
knowledge from the top experts” (IUCN 2011). The insistence on the part of conservationiststhat the Red List is never political but only scientific exposes the underlying ideal “that sciencedescribes nature (and nature alone) and that politics is about social power (and social poweralone)” (Bowker and Star 1999, 46). The list’s visibility, accessibility, and transparency
simultaneously serve to conceal its underlying political features and value-based judgments.

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In 1994, the IUCN revised its expert-based risk-ranking system into a data-driven
quantitative system and finalized these categories and criteria in 2001 (IUCN 2014; Mace et al.
2008). To provide a global index of biodiversity and to identify those species most in need ofconservation attention, IUCN scientists have stressed that “the classification system must be
objective and transparent. It also needs to be applicable to a variety of species and habitats;standardized to yield consistent results independent of the assessor or the species being assessed;
accessible to allow a variety of species experts to use it; scientifically defensible; and reasonably
rigorous (i.e. it should be hard to classify species inappropriately)” (Mace et al. 2008, 1427).
Another scientist writes that the current Red List is designed to provide “a standardized,
consistent, and transparent method for assessing extinction risk, thereby increasing theobjectivity and scientific credibility of the assessments” (Miller 2013, 195). Yet some scientists
reject the Red List’s claim of scientific objectivity. James Watson is president-elect of theSociety of Conservation Biology and head of Climate Change Project at the World Conservation
Society. He says about the rigid criteria of the Red List, and of threatened lists more generally,that “[a]t the end of the day, all listings are arbitrary: they’re not driven by the laws of physics,
they’re actually created [. . .] by humans trying their best to develop the most appropriate
categories according to the best available knowledge” (interview).
Currently, the Red List classifies taxa into nine categories: Extinct (EX), Extinct in theWild (EW), Critically Endangered (CE), Endangered (EN), Vulnerable (VU), Near Threatened(NT), Least Concern (LC), Data Deficient (DD), and Not Evaluated (NE) (IUCN 2014). The
evaluation system consists of one set of criteria that are applicable to all threatened species(namely, those species within the categories of categories are Critically Endangered,Endangered, and Vulnerable) and that measure the symptoms of endangerment (but not the

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[Draft before copyedits]causes). Five criteria, listed A through E, are used to categorize taxa within these threatened
categories. The criteria are: A) a reduction in population size; B) a small, reduced, fragmented,
or fluctuating geographic range; C) a decline in size of an already small population; D) a verysmall or restricted population; and E) a quantitative analysis indicating the probability ofextinction. To be listed as Critically Endangered, for example, a species must decline by 90
percent or more, cover less than 100km2, or contain fewer than fifty mature individuals (IUCN
2014). A species need only satisfy one criterion to be listed. Although the other categories areincluded in the list’s database, species classified within them are not assessed in the same manneras those within the threatened categories, hence being “less” listed.
Each of the categories contains a list of species, which can be traced in the Red List’s
online database, with one exception: the category of Not Evaluated (NE) contains no data. Mike
Hoffmann explains: “NE just indicates that no attempt to evaluate the status of the taxon has
been made. In reality, any species not on the Red List (i.e., more than 90 percent of species) is
NE” (e-mail communication). A related concept is the “undescribed species.” The IUCN
Guidelines state that “The listing of undescribed species on the IUCN Red List is discouraged,
but in exceptional circumstances these may be included” (2014, 5). Hoffmann explains: “Nearly
all undescribed species are implicitly not evaluated, with a few rare exceptions when conditions
outlined in the guidelines are met and an attempt has been made to evaluate the undescribed
species against the categories and criteria.” Generally, the further away from extinction thespecies is ranked, the less visible it is from the list’s perspective—and the more “list-less” itbecomes.
The Red List example demonstrates the close, if not inseparable, relationship between
lists and databases, indeed “how the list may become a database” (de Goede forthcoming, 6).

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The Red List is one such hybrid database-list; it operates by translating analogous flows in risk
levels and flexible forms of life into fixed digital categories. Easily distinguishable from one
another, these categories serve as the basis for myriad regulatory actions. In this sense, the Red
List is “a technique of government” (14). But whereas de Goede suggests that the list’s “binarymode of in- and exclusion departs from risk based technologies of profiling and probability” (4),the Red List is an example of a sophisticated listing system that rests both on the binary ofinclusion (of all known species) and exclusion (of the unknown) and on a differentiation among
a set of distinct categories, determined by an algorithmic calculation of probability.
While the Red List’s categories and criteria are “one size fits all,” species are, by theirvery nature, diverse. To be listed, this diversity must be identified and measured. IUCN trainers
guide assessors on how to interpret the categories and criteria across taxa so that they meet thethresholds. Hoffmann tells me about the assessors that, “[t]hey might be field biologists,taxonomists, academics, government personnel, park managers, or any one of a number ofpeople.” The process of figuring out whether a species meets the risk thresholds is complicatedand not always clear-cut. Often, the final status depends on the tendencies of the particularassessors. According to Hoffmann, the central challenge facing the Red List’s administration isthat of assessors being either too evidentiary or too precautionary: “You either want perfect data,
and therefore you are less likely to list something as threatened, so everything’s going to go into
Data Deficient—or you’re very precautionary, you think everything’s at risk, and so you throw it
into a threatened category. Ideally, you want somewhere in the middle of those two things”(interview). Since scientists tend to be very evidentiary, Hoffmann continues, they often
experience difficulty when working with the Red List, which is built “to give fuzzy numbers”(interview).

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[Draft before copyedits]“Not all threatened species are created equally,” Hoffmann further explains in a statementthat hints toward the actual impact of a Red List designation, what legal scholars often call “thelaw in action,” in contrast to “the law [here, the list] on the books”—a distinction that rings truein other listing contexts as well, and especially with regard to kill and no-fly lists. Lamoreux
explains, for example, that “even if you list a whole lot of dragonflies on the Red List, they’re
not going to suddenly get as much attention as a panda.” He clarifies, accordingly, that “they’re
not all equal in the eyes of conservation funding or conservation action” (interview). Hoffmannis first to admit that “we have lots of biases,” explaining that the system is “still very muchbiased towards vertebrates” and that “plants, fungi, and invertebrates are underrepresented”(interview).
Watson notes, similarly, that of 1,600 species on the Australian threatened list, only 35
percent receive government funding for conservation. “The things which get money are birds andmammals, and the things which don’t get money are butterflies and plants,” he tells me in aninterview. Even the listing of a species as threatened, then, does not promise this species equal
protection in relation to other listed species. Myriad criteria, as well as other more or less formal
lists, determine which species are politically and legally defined as more or less worth saving.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” Hoffmann says about the current state of the Red List.
Conservation biologist Arne Mooers adds that “the conservation biology community [itself]
mistakenly considers probabilities of extinction as representing worth” (interview). For thisreason, certain conservation biologists have been advocating for alternative or additional lists
that would openly justify the de facto priorities adopted by countries, organizations, andinstitutions, thereby rendering them more scientific and transparent (Possingham et al. 2002).

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Alongside its reliance on fixed standards, the Red List also enables flexibility.
Specifically, the number of species listed in each category changes every time it is updated—on
the books, every five years. This is a result of various factors, including species being assessed
for the first time, species being reassessed and moved into a different category of threat, andtaxonomic revisions. The IUCN distinguishes genuine from non-genuine reasons (in otherwords, “real” from “technical” changes in threat levels that result from error, taxonomic
revisions, or changes in threshold definitions) for revising a listing (IUCN 2013). The everchanging nature of the list makes it even more potent, as no protection, or un-protection, is never
fixed or settled. Thus, scientists increasingly depend on the listing process.
This depiction of the Red List resonates with the general characterization of lists asinherently ambivalent in that “criteria for selection are not fixed at the outset, but evolve during
the list’s use” (Staeheli 2012, 237). Indeed, neither the manifold modifications in status nor the
more radical changes in the overall criteria and its modes of calculation detract from the powerof the Red List. Rather than a weakness, moreover, the Red List’s shifting foundations in factenhance its credibility; such changes also cannot be detected through a simple reading of the list.
As Staeheli argues, “[r]eading a list does not reveal these myriads of small changes, struggles,
and ambivalences . . . the list looks perfect in itself, a homogenized and objectivized collection ofcleanly separated items, in a space out of time” (ibid.). The decisions made in the course of the
Red List’s construction are therefore “forever lost to the historical record. . . . In fact, their
history is considered by most to be boring, trivial, and unworthy of investigation” (Bowker andStar 1999, 17).
The Seductive List
I have already explored the Red list’s biopolitical, global, regulatory, and scientific

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properties. Lastly, I would like to explore the Red List’s contagious, or seductive, qualities. It has
already been acknowledged that lists produce an urge for more lists, highlighting “the contagious
nature of list-making” (Staeheli 2012, 243), apparently classified by the manual of mental
disorders (DSM) as “glazomania” (Cagen 2007; de Goede forthcoming, 8). The obsession withlists is nowhere more apparent than in the conservation context, where threatened lists and otherpriority lists for conservation proliferate by the day, alongside narratives on skyrocketing rates ofextinction. Long explains that in addition to IUCN’s Red List for species, priority lists are
currently being developed by the IUCN for ecosystems and protected areas, essentially creating
three separate lists within the IUCN alone.
More broadly, of the various threatened species lists, some “are designed purely toevaluate risk of extinction, whereas others focus on ranking species to receive priority
conservation attention” (Miller 2013, 194). Accordingly, certain countries produce at minimum
two separate lists, in order “to prevent blurring the line between extinction risk assessment,
which is a scientific endeavor, and conservation priority setting, which is very much a valuebased judgment” (103). Such a dual existence of scientific versus political lists both constructs
and reinforces the ostensibly apolitical nature of the scientific list alongside the social nature of
the political one. Another challenge that arises in this context is intra-list incompatibility.
Although the majority of conservation lists are referred to, generically, as threatened or
endangered species lists, each list’s definition of the level of threat that classifies a species as
endangered or threatened can differ greatly from list to list. This has engendered quite a bit ofconfusion, not only on the part of conservationists but also on the part of policy makers and the
public.
If the Red List focuses on identifying all threatened species from an ever-growing list of

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known species, other lists supplement this by identifying alternative targets for maintaining
biodiversity. In this way, despite the terminological challenges, “lists intersect, feed each other,become consolidated, disseminated and translated” (de Goede forthcoming, 11). For example,
the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE) aims to identify all sites around the globe that serve as
the single remaining location for a species that is listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered
under the IUCN Red List (AZE 2013). Of 20,934 of such species, the AZE has mapped 920
species in 588 sites, implying that these are the world’s most threatened species (AZE 2013).
Mike Hoffmann explains that, “These are the places where, if you don’t do something here, now,
for this species, you’re going to lose a species” (interview).
Despite their common origin in and their immense drawing on the Red List, the various
conservation lists differ in their perspective on what is most important about life and thus onwhat is most worth saving—whether rarity in numbers, unique territorial configurations, or
evolutionary (phylogenetic) variation. Rather than a bifurcated understanding of life versus
death, then, conservation lists parse the life of species into complex orderings according to their
extinction risks, effectively establishing a gradation of animal bodies according to the perceived
worthiness of their living and grieving. Even among those species who are deemed threatened,categories and criteria prioritize the ones who are perceived to be the most threatened of all:those whose lives are even more, and finally most, worth saving (Braverman 2015a; 2015b;
2015c).
Alongside the staggering proliferation of lists, a critique of existing listing processes as
the exclusive metrics of conservation is currently emerging among scientists. In the words ofJames Watson of the World Conservation Society: “The conservation field is dominated byecologists who really like to make lists.” But “conservation is also not just about listing

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something,” he continues, “it is about doing something.” “This is not a failure of the list itself,
it’s the failure of the conservation community to develop other metrics beyond the list” (Watson,interview). Joseph et al. (2009, 328) argue along these lines that the existing listing approach inconservation typically “ignore[s] two crucial factors: the cost of management and the likelihoodthat the management will succeed” (Bottrill et al. 2011; Possingham et al. 2002; Walsh et al.
2012). Such critiques merely hint at the vast possibilities for problematizing, challenging, and“torquing” (Bowker and Star 1999, 27; 190) the politics of threatened species lists in ways that
resist their authority and their seemingly automatic applications. “The trick is to question every
apparently natural easiness in the world around us and look for the work involved in making it
easy,” suggest Bowker and Star (1999, 39).
Conclusion
Foucault contends that, “Order is at one and the same time, that which is given in things
as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, andalso that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, alanguage; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as
though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression” (1970, xx). Listing athreatened species provides such a grid over the animal and plant kingdoms, giving particularforms of life a name, a number, a map, a database, and a threat rank—all establishing their “innerlaw” and uniqueness, and thereby elevating them from the listless abstraction of other, unknown,
forms of life. The threatened species list is thus a biopolitical technology par excellence.
As part of its prominent biopolitical features, this chapter has illuminated the global,
regulatory, scientific, and seductive dimensions of the threatened species list. Although my list of
the list’s dimensions is not exhaustive by any means, it nonetheless provides a sense of why the

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Red List and other threatened species lists carry such immense regulatory force in global
conservation narratives. Conservationists typically believe that life—embodied in species units—
must be assessed, calculated, and ranked if it is to be protected and saved. And whileconservation is about saving life, it is also about sorting out and regulating which life should be
privileged in this endeavor. Life that is worth conserving obtains meaning through an infinite
calculus and through a proliferating number of lists.
Interviews
Bennett, Elizabeth. Vice President for Species Conservation, Wildlife Conservation Society. Onsite, New York City, NY, December 20, 2013.
Brooks, Tom. Head, Science and Knowledge Unit, IUCN. Skype, January 25, 2014.
Hoffmann, Michael. Senior Scientific Officer. Species Survival Commission, IUCN. Skype,
January 9, 2014; e-mail communication June 26, 2015.
Horne, Brian. Turtle Conservation Coordinator, Wildlife Conservation Society. Skype, January
9, 2014.
Lamoreux, John. Biodiversity Analyst, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Telephone,
January 7, 2014.
Long, Barney. Director, Species Protection and Asian Species Conservation, World Wildlife
Fund. Skype, January 9, 2014.
Mooers, Arne. Professor of Conservation Biology, Simon Fraser University. Skype, January 6,
2014.
Watson, James. President-elect, Society of Conservation Biology; Head, Climate Change
Program, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Skype, January 27, 2014.
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