Managing Life's Future: Species Essentialism and Evolutionary Normativity in Conservation Policy, Practice, and Imaginaries
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Maggiulli, Katrina
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Folk essentialist and normative understandings of species are not only prevalent in popular layperson communities, but also end up undergirding United States conservation policy and practice due to the simplistic clarity they afford the notoriously knotty scientific debate of “the Species Problem” that recognizes over 26 in-use species definitions. Popular views of species typically see species as static and clearly bounded entities, a view reinforced by the need for species clarity in the legal frameworks of powerful conservation policy such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). These static views are thus taken up into conservation policy and practice and species in the field are managed as such—a circumstance that not only fails to protect species as the constantly evolving entities they are, but also manages organismal agency by policing the boundaries between species and thereby creating materially specific species realities motivated by human-derived frameworks. This dissertation tracks normative views on species in conservation policy (e.g., the ESA) and practice, through contemporary debates over the place of biotechnology in threatened and endangered species conservation, and into speculative future imaginaries. It draws on a wide range of primary materials including U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and non-governmental organization management plans; policy documents; scientist op-eds and studies; and speculative bestiaries for its interpretive and historical analysis of the development, integration, and actualization of normative, essentialist species concepts in U.S. conservation. I argue that conservation is a fundamentally creative practice of worldmaking that brings materially specific species futures into being while preventing others. Attentiveness to who nonhuman animals and plants themselves identify as kin (through processes of mating and reproduction), rather than merely using human-structured frameworks of species-being is therefore paramount to account for nonhuman agency in conservation practice. Such attention will force us to rethink the place of hybrid individuals and processual, evolutionary models in our conservation practice. Deploying a further speculative method in the form of entries into a Speculative Field Notes on the Pacific Northwest, this project asks: What unexpected evolutionary possibilities and species agency might emerge at the margins, in spite of “command and control” conservation methods?
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Keywords
Biotechnology, Conservation, Species Concepts, Speculative, Threatened and Endangered Species, Worldmaking