The precarity of nonhuman livelihoods: rethinking speciesism in a genocidal state

Keywords: Democratizing Conservation
Ecological Rehabilitation
Precarity
Subaltern
Environmental Anthropology
Multispecies Justice
Science Society &amp; Technology Studies
Grey Wolf
Gray Wolf

This thesis explores wildlife-human relations in the United States during the years of the Trump Administration. It is a multispecies, multi-sited ethnography that focuses on the gray wolf (Canis lupus), which repatriated much of the western U.S. after 66 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in 1995-6. I chose the wolf for its ability to evoke strong reactions from most humans. This provided insight into wildlife-human relations in a myriad of legal, social, economic, and political settings. Discourse about wolves was rarely about a particular individual, or pack. Wolf (as a species) was commonly reduced to Euro-American symbolic portrayals of myth, warrior, or villain in popular discourse. Euro-American culture and folklore dating back 500 plus years continue to permeate wolf discourse, media, and ecosystem governance today, and are intertwined with the colonization of the western U.S. in the mid-1800s. I explicate how human exceptionalist views, where ideals of ‘Nature’, or ‘wild’ materialized in the subjugation of subaltern wildlife.
The key theoretical frameworks that informed this study include social-ecological systems, posthumanism, postcolonial studies (particularly subaltern and decolonial ecology), environmental anthropology, biopower, historical ecology, Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, compassionate conservation, and multispecies justice. Methods included common multispecies ethnography approaches (e.g., participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival data, etc.), as well as a unique choice to leverage my position as a tenure-track faculty to train my students as research assistants (see Chapter 3). Primary research questions included: what are humans’ moral obligations to nonhumans (flora and fauna), and how do we coexist with nonhuman ‘Others’ given the contemporary ecological crisis? Interviews were conducted over 15 months from 2019-2021. The primary study site location was the Cascadia Bioregion (present-day Oregon and Washington). Due to Colorado Proposition #114, a ballot initiative to reintroduce wolves to the State by the end of 2023, I moved to Colorado to conduct the second half of the study. Wolf discourse proliferated leading up to the vote, which passed on 2 November 2020.
Nearly all interlocutors discriminated against at least one species (what I call speciesism), where Euro-American sociocultural dynamics affected how humans speak for and about nonhumans in the abstract. This actualized in several key themes that emerged from the study and included nonhuman animal genocide, that biopower relations reproduce colonial dominion over subalterns, and how the ethical decisions of scientists have implicit and explicit consequences for nonhumans. These findings, coupled with my positionality that all nonhumans are deserving of rights, welfare, and agency, situate this study as one of deconstructing biopower relations in multispecies relations. I build on the emerging fields of compassionate conservation and multispecies justice to challenge how knowledge is produced, particularly in conservation biology, and how that knowledge reinforces biopower relations over nonhumans, where billions of nonhumans are killed worldwide annually. Throughout the thesis, I develop the core argument: all nonhumans deserve equal rights, welfare, and agency as humans – legally, and ideally socially. My argument culminations in Chapter 9, where I call for nonhuman legal personhood and a new paradigm of ecological rehabilitation.