Even ‘hands off’ approaches to conservation such as rewilding are intimately,
sometimes violently, involved in the lives and deaths of the other-than-human
species they seek to protect. Foucauldian biopolitics, with its exploration of the
regulation of life and death, is increasing being used to examine the control of
other-than-human ...
Even ‘hands off’ approaches to conservation such as rewilding are intimately,
sometimes violently, involved in the lives and deaths of the other-than-human
species they seek to protect. Foucauldian biopolitics, with its exploration of the
regulation of life and death, is increasing being used to examine the control of
other-than-human species. This paper extends the work of other scholars by
applying the concept of biopolitics to rewilding in England. A comparative case
study of two rewilding sites (the Avalon Marshes in Somerset and Wild Ennerdale
in Cumbria) identified common modes of biopolitics operating at both sites. These
modes were animals / species as: expendable objects, machines / human
proxies, analogues, and self-determining agents, all of which ‘allowed’ different
levels of agency for the species concerned. Given that field sites were purposively
selected to display contrasting contexts it is possible to extrapolate from the
Avalon Marshes and Wild Ennerdale and propose that these biopolitical modes
are operating at other English rewilding sites.
