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Conducting the wild: biosecurity and wildlife conservation

The Socio-Politcs of Biosecurity Seminar Series: Seminar 3 Implementing Biosecurity

Birkbeck, Friday 26th November 2010

Jamie Lorimer, Geography, Kings College London. jamie.lorimer@kcl.ac.uk

*In this presentation I want to talk about an alternative mode of nonhuman biopolitics to

biosecurity. This is the idea of wilding, or rewilding (depending on your temporal

preference), which is becoming popular amongst theorists and practitioners of wildlife

conservation. In some ways wilding can be understood as the antithesis to biosecurity. Here I

want to use wilding as a foil to biosecurity, to examine similarities and differences, actual and

potential frictions and comprises at the interface of these two ways of living with nonhuman

difference

*For advocates wilding offers an ambitious model of ecological restoration that generates

ecosystem services through autonomous natural processes, rather than the expensive and

deterministic micro-management associated with traditional approaches to conserving

endangered species. A characteristic method is to ‘reintroduce’ keystone species capable of

altering entire ecosystems through the knock-on effects of their behaviour. In some cases this

requires their ‘back-breeding’ and ‘de-domestication’. Wilding claims to offer a laissez-faire

mode of wildlife management that is cheap, inspiring and better equipped to cope with

uncertain futures in a warming planet.

*Existing wilding projects cover a diversity of habitats, species, cultures and economies. In

our research we are only looking at one, albeit well-known, example. This is the rewilding

project that is taking place at Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. This is polder area, just

North of Amsterdam that was reclaimed from the sea, zoned for industrial use, but never

developed. It is owned by the State and managed by Staatsbosbeheer – the Dutch equivalent

of our Forestry Commission. The management of Oostvaardersplassen has been strongly

influenced by Frans Vera, a Dutch ecologist with radical ideas about the paleoecology of

Europe and the imperative of wildlife conservation. Working for Staatsbosbeheer in the late

80’s and through the 90’s as the manager of OVP, Vera sought to demonstrate his hypothesis

that the natural climax ecology for Western Europe was not (and should not now be) a high

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forest – as understood in mainstream ecology – but a shifting mosaic of forest pasture, kept

open by the grazing habits of a guild of large herbivores.

To test this proposal Vera introduced a herd of back-bred cattle and horses to join the deer

and beaver on the reserve and left them to de-domesticate themselves. The aim was to let

these animals breed, graze and generally behave as they pleased. They would die when food

was short and the carcasses would be left to rot. They would not be tagged, tested or

inoculated. Scavengers – including wild boar and raptors – would be encouraged to the site

by the dead meat and help to recycle these nutrients. The reserve would be fenced, but would

be linked to an ecological network cutting across European borders, though which it is hoped

that other animals might arrive – including the missing carnivores. Public access would be

limited by boggy ground and alarming signage. The experiment would be open-ended, with

no targets and minimal management and monitoring. After more than 20 years this

experiment has generated some surprising ecological results and a fair amount of controversy

– with agriculturalists, conservationists, animal welfarists and hunters, to name but a few.

This has necessitated concessions and compromises.

*It is clear, even from this brief outline, that there are also some important differences

between the biopolitics imagined here and those commonly associated with biosecurity.

Before going into these in more detail it might be useful to say something about how I am

theorising biopolitics as this will help to make clear the critical dimension to this analysis. In

short this research seeks to develop a Foucauldian concern with control over human life to an

understanding of biopolitics as multispecies acts of living with. It draws on both Haraway

and Deleuze to explore the ‘ontological choreography’ involved in human-nonhuman

interactions. This approach helps circumvent some of the problems associated with applying

Foucault’s emphasis on self-reflexivity as the mechanism for subjectification to nonhumans.

Instead, it figures biopolitics as vital relations in which lively and permeable human and

nonhuman bodies interact and exchange properties becoming what they are in material

assemblages. Developing musical and performative metaphors biopolitics can be understood

as modes of conduct; conducting a world comprising discordant and surprising harmonies or

rhythms. It is not about the revelation or repetition of transcendent forms and trajectories.

This type of approach has become popular in more-than-human geography, a field which has

expanded in recent years from an interest in the ways in which life is spaced, ordered,

constructed and produced to a vital materialist concern for the lively potentials of nonhuman

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forms and processes to make places and unsettle established orders. As force, form, category,

relation and knowledge practice – life is now centre stage in emerging forms of

biogeography, which seek to offer affirmative models for living with difference.

Foucault, Haraway and Deleuze provide important conceptual resources for this project that

help disentangle contrasting modes of nonhuman biopolitics. Generalising from what was

proposed for OVP – though not eventually realised – we can draw out some important

characteristics of wilding. *These are presented in this table.

Mode Wilding

Aim Restore / enhance ecological

processes

Target Grazing ecology

Logic Evolution/ biodiversity

Expertise (Paleo-)ecology

Epistemology Experimental

Temporality Future

Spatial ontology Hybridity / fluidity

The biopolitics of wilding comprises: i) a desire to restore and enhance ecological processes

in degraded landscapes; ii) in which present forms like cows and horses are enrolled as

ecological agents – living grazers and dead bodies of nutrients – to target grazing ecology; iii)

these interventions are guided by a logic of evolution/biodiversity; iv) informed by a

revisionist model of (paleo-) ecology and an experimental epistemology not tied to targets or

outcomes; vi) that takes reference from the past but is largely orientated towards the future;

vii) and informed by a hybrid, relational ontology comprising fluid forms and spatialities.

Biosecurity

To understand the similarities and differences between wildling and biosecurity it is useful to

map out the biopolitics of biosecurity in relation to wildlife, using these same categories*:

Mode Wilding Biosecurity

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Aim Restore / enhance

ecological processes

Prevent disease and

public risk

Target Grazing ecology, nutrient

cycle

Microbes, assemblages,

organisms, practices

Logic Evolution/ biodiversity Hygiene / security

Expertise (Paleo-) ecology Microbiology /

administration

Epistemology Experimental Precaution / Anticipation

Temporality Future Present/

Future

Spatial ontology Hybridity / fluidity Stability, division

In contrast to wilding the aim of biosecurity in relation to wildlife is: i) to prevent endemic

but expensive animal and zoonotic diseases and to confine risky bodies; ii) it is targeted at

infectious microbes and transgressive organisms and the practices and assemblages through

which they spread; iii) according to a logic of hygiene and an anticipatory governance regime

designed to foreclose risky movements; iv) expertise is provided by an interdisciplinary

network of microbiologists, statisticians and administrators; v) this is geared as much towards

possible futures as existing presents; vi) it involves a spatial ontology based on division –

shoring up the human and the animal.

Wilding and biosecurity

The differences between the imperatives of wilding and biosecurity give rise to a number of

frictions. Wilding as performed in the OVP example and elsewhere poses a number of actual

and potential biosecurity concerns, of which three are perhaps most significant:

1. *The first is a perceived increased risk to agriculture from infectious pathogens – like

viruses and parasites – that might reside in live wild animals and their decaying dead

bodies – especially those with proximal domesticated kin. These pathogens could be

spread by direct contact, as well as by the wild and domestic predators and carnivores –

like wild boar and domestic dogs – that use the site. In practice there has been little cause

for alarm. Indeed we might question the direction of causation in this powerful and

prevalent discourse about the relationship between wildlife and biosecurity. Often it is

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agriculture that threatens wildlife, rather than wildlife threatening agriculture (not just

through habitat change) but also in the case of disease – e.g. cattle and badgers, forest

cultivators and elephants TB, swine flu and wild birds, etc. Nonetheless, the notion of

wild places as reservoirs of disease is an important imagination in this story.

2. *The second potential biosecurity risk relates to the potential that unwanted plants and

animals will range outside of designated wild areas and damage people and property.

Concerns are raised about weedy plants like ragwort as well as mobile animals who

transgress the reserve’s boundaries when the water on the polder freezes. However,

actual escapes have been infrequent.

3. *Third, the idea and practice of rewilding seems to threaten forms of human ontological

security, or perceptions of the place, dynamics and character of life. Potential exposure to

the suffering of large charismatic animals (especially horses) and the visible presence of

their carcasses seem to discomfort people with reminders of their own mortality.

Similarly, the prospect of formerly domesticated animals dying of starvation challenges

humanist models of animal rights which equate human and animal suffering.

Furthermore, the messiness of wildlife gone to seed threatens deep-seated Western

European ideas of responsible landscape management and animal husbandry.

In the remainder of this paper I want to explore these frictions in a bit more detail and

critically examine the compromises they have resulted in. The first theme relates to questions

of ontology; the second epistemology:

Ontology

In contrast to the traditional biopolitics of nature conservation – in which pure, wild forms are

paramount and efforts are made to render the present eternal (to quote Bowker) – both

wilding and biosecurity share a hybrid, process-based ontology. For Vera and those charged

with regulating biosecurity in the Netherlands hybridity is the default; humans and animals

interact and exchange properties. Although rewilding advocates might claim to seek a return

to a pre-modern epoch, in practice their interventions are happening in the anthropocene in

ecological and climatological conditions strongly configured by human activity. Furthermore,

the organisms that they depend upon for their interventions are characterised by long histories

of human companionship, adaptation and selective breeding. Similarly, for those theorising

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and governing biosecurity, it is the shared evolutionary and agricultural history of humans,

herbivores and birds, for example, that creates the risks of zoonotic contamination – or what

Diprose calls their corporeal generosity.

Wilding and biosecurity also share an interest in nonlinear, contingent temporalities and

events. For wilding advocates like Vera it is the potential of the virtual – to use Deleuze’s

terms – that wildlife management should seek to unleash. The novel ecosystem he has

brought into being at OVP is unprecedented and unpredictable. It was never intended to

converge on an archetype but has evolved in ways that he could not have predicted. It is the

feral and unruly character of this ecological assemblage that inspires him, and many other

conservation biologists to do what they do. Spatially this is best enabled through fluid,

rhizomatic geographies of mobile species and dynamic, infectious process in rectilinear

landscapes. In contrast, for those concerned with biosecurity it is precisely this unruly and

contingent character of ecological assemblages that makes them most risky and necessitates

their monitoring and control. Unknown unknowns are to be feared not celebrated, due to the

risks they pose to fragile but established social and ecological orders. Spatially current forms

should be maintained and processes predicted and summoned forth. Territories and networks

should be bounded, stable and secure.

It is this difference in attitudes towards the virtual that distinguishes the ontologies of

biosecurity and rewilding and underpins the ontological politics at their interface. In the

context of OVP this has lead to a number of compromises to the ideal type of wilding:

1. Formerly domesticated animals are subjected to the minimal statutory forms of

tagging and inoculation. They are tagged and monitored.

2. The fences of the reserve are strictly protected to prevent transgression, and at some

wilding sites the margins the border cultivated areas are cut and sprayed to create a

wild-domestic buffer zone

3. A policy of euthanasia has been introduced. Animals close to death are shot – by a

marksman performing the ‘eye-of-the-wolf’ and offending carcasses are removed –

when they are visible

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4. Outside of OVP more amenable species are used – Highland cattle v. Heck cattle.

Reflect on parallel histories – Victorian wild and Nazi wild...

5. *An active programme of public education has been initiated, training citizens on how

to live with wild animals, including spatial practices like walking with dogs

Together these different management interventions seek to anticipate, constrain and channel

future human and nonhuman becomings and interactions. Musically, they can usefully be

understood as an attempt to orchestrate life at OVP, setting and policing the bounds of

possibility for multispecies populations. These compromises establish the anticipatory logic

at play on the reserve and the degree of improvisation that might be permitted.

Epistemology

The second, connected theme I want to briefly discuss relates to question of epistemology.

Both wilding and biosecurity seek to – or have to – make decisions under conditions of

uncertainty. For Vera and others initiating wilding projects, what matters about this model is

that it creates space for nonhuman processes to flourish in ways that could not be predicted or

summoned forth through concerted scientific monitoring and management. Uncertainties

about ecological dynamics and the discordant harmonies that characterise any ecological

assemblage, let alone one that is starting to respond to unprecedented climatic change,

necessitate an experimental epistemology. However, OVP is an anomaly in European nature

conservation due to the absence of an action plan with auditable targets through which

managers can monitor and claim success. There is no archetype here against which emergent

landscapes could be assessed to be representative. The reconstructed paleo-ecology provides

a loose diagram – in a Deleuzian sense – of potential trajectories, but no blueprint.

Monitoring and scientific research has been surprisingly limited.

In contrast for those charged with regulating the biosecurity risks posed by wildlife, it is

imperative to monitor, calculate, anticipate – and ideally foreclose – risky potential

becomings and innovations. This requires a very different epistemology and associated

regime of governance technologies – including an extensive surveillance infrastructure,

precautionary interventions – like inoculation and culling – to target potential risky

emergences – and a representational politics based on conformation to existing archetypes –

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the hygienic human and animal body – and spatial divisions – the body, the reserve and the

nation.

The legal and moral imperatives of conforming to biosecurity (and traditional wildlife

conservation) have resulted in a collection of epistemological compromises at OVP. Expert

committees have been assembled to monitor various forms of risk and to devise associated

management regimes, a regular programme of inspections are carried out and much more

data is now collected to track ecological changes. Inevitably the parameters of the experiment

have been tightened, to predict and stipulate when intervention is required.

Conclusions

In the paper I have sought to contrast two different modes of nonhuman biopolitics – an

emerging mode of nature conservation known as wilding v. regimes for biosecurity in

relation to wildlife. Hopefully, I have demonstrated that these is much to be gained from

theorising human-nonhuman relation as different modes of biopolitics at whose interface we

find frictions and compromises. Here I have found useful conceptual materials in the work of

Foucault, Haraway and Deleuze. Using wilding as a foil to biosecurity and attending to the

frictions between them draws attention to ontological and ethical differences in their

approaches to governing the virtual – or the latitude offered to human-nonhuman

assemblages to becoming otherwise. Connectedly it also highlights contrasting

epistemologies for conditions of uncertainty, between an experimental and open-ended model

for wilding and a probabilistic and precautionary model associated with biosecurity. In

conclusion I would suggest there is much to be gained for an understanding of biosecurity

from mapping typologies of biopolitics and examining frictions at their interface.