This article takes the case of Scottish wildcats, threatened with extinction through hybridisation with feral domestic cats, as a site for exploring what it means to conserve a species as such. To this end, the article looks at the practices associated with conserving Scottish wildcats as defined by a definite phenotypical, morphological and/or genetic type, abstracted from indefinite, fleshy organisms emplaced and entangled within changing ecologies. The article describes the biopolitical work of taxonomically distinguishing wildcats ( Felis silvestris) from domestic cats ( Felis catus) and their hybrids, exploring the challenges presented to this work by the disorderly agencies of wild-living cats. It then outlines and reflects on the proposed captive breeding programme aimed at preserving the ‘pure’ Scottish wildcat sub-species type. This case highlights the ways in which species-based conservation can conflict with care for individual animals as well as with life’s immanent, generative tendencies.
No abstract
Focusing on two different devices commonly deployed in emergency shelter responses, the emergency family tent and the shelter kit, this paper traces the topological associations of humanitarian spaces as enacted through humanitarian practice. The emergency family tent is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of a network topology by acting as an 'immutable mobile', connecting different places of humanitarian crises with each other through stabilising relationships between them across space and over time and ordering space according to a sequential timeline of action. In contrast, the shelter kit is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of Si fluid topology by acting as a 'mutable mobile', connecting the sites of crisis not through stabilisation but through adapting to a wide variety of local contexts and conditions and ordering space according to an overlapping and partly simultaneous timeline of action. These different 'shelter topologies' are shown to convey different assumptions about, and underlie different topographic renderings of, humanitarian space.
In the spring of 2006 wild flamingos returned to Florida, though not to the places their kind had inhabited 100 years and more ago at the southern edge of the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Instead this group of flamingos alighted 80 miles northward in Palm Beach County’s Stormwater Treatment Area 2 (STA-2), a human-made facility for filtering anthropogenic pollutants from storm runoff. This paper takes the return of wild flamingos to Florida as a case for thinking through haunting, ruination and encounters in what I call ‘the ordinary Anthropocene’: the ongoing, everyday more-than-human relationships, actions and less-than-planetary assemblages through which the Anthropocene is sensed and lived. After setting out a case for thinking with haunting, ruination and encounter as a way of making sense in the ordinary Anthropocene, I trace three interwoven narrative threads that unspool from the encounter with the STA-2 flamingos: First, I trace the transfiguration of living wild flamingos into idealised symbols of tropical dreamworlds over the 20th century. This leads me sideways to the present-absence of flamingos in the mid-century writings of Rachel Carson and through her backwards to John J. Audubon and the genocidal ruinations of the 19th century as they flicker in the margins of his ornithological writings. I end by returning to the present, to the encounter with STA-2 flamingos in the ongoing moment of living with others in the late capitalist ecologies of south Florida. The conclusion considers what might be taken forward, into the uncertain future, from this telling.
This article explores how the rise of new markets for biodiversity has been facilitated by existing, non-market-based valuation practices within the field of biodiversity conservation. Where others have considered biodiversity markets in terms of capitalist and/or neoliberal expansion, I argue that the abstraction of the value of living things in markets is made easier by the existing valuation practices of species-based biodiversity conservation. After briefly contextualising the terms 'species' and 'biodiversity' within the history of Western conservation, the article shows how biodiversity conservation-as science, policy and practice-subordinates the value of individual living organisms and emplaced ecologies to the abstract categories of species and habitat types. This conceptual move performs a condition of ethical commensurability between individual organisms and places, thereby prefiguring the equivalence of value between units of the same category needed to establish new markets for biodiversity. The article considers this link between the valuation practices of species-based biodiversity conservation and new markets for biodiversity as an instance of performative continuity. The article concludes by reflecting on the critical use of attending to the links between existing valuation practices in biodiversity conservation and new biodiversity markets.
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