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The Politics of Species and Spaces in Scottish Conservation

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The Politics of Species and Spaces in Scottish Conservation Saving the wild, wilding the nation: the politics of species and spaces in Scottish conservation Shona McCombes Main supervisor: Magdalena Górska Support supervisor: Hadley Renkin Submitted to the Department of Gender Studies, Utrecht University August 15th 2018 1 Abstract: This thesis aims to understand discursive and material connections between wild nature and Scottish nationhood through an analysis of contemporary conservation. Drawing on theories of biopolitics, necropolitics and affect, I investigate four key case studies – the species conservation of pandas and wildcats, the culling of deer to protect native woodland, and the proposed reintroduction of the wolf – through readings of a wide range of media and literary texts. Focusing on the period before and after the 2014 independence referendum, I argue that wild nature is not simply constructed by or incorporated into Scottish nationalism, but is a site of contestation between different national identities and political positionalities, as well as a space of nonhuman agency where animal others are both active participants in and disruptors of conservation practices. I track conflicts, contradictions and tensions in conservation discourse and practice, excavating resonances and dissonances between the wild and the domestic, nature and the nation, the modern and the primitive, and examining the gendered, racialized, and class- based histories that inflect these dichotomies. In particular, I show how the Highlands as a space of (post)colonial “wildness” has been involved in competing nationalisms and claims for power, as well as conflicting ideas about what a healthy national nature should look like. I argue that the wild is mobilized in three different registers, often overlapping and intermingling: the wild as a modern project of progress, rationalism and independent nation-building; the wild as an expression of authentic heritage, purity, and continuity across time; and the wild as a disruptive, unpredictable, feral force for radical change. 2 Contents 1. The Wild and the Nation ................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 4 Into the wild: ways of seeing the Anthropocene ................................................................................. 8 Making the nation: narratives of (post)coloniality, difference and democracy ................................ 10 Theoretical tools: biopolitical animals, necropolitical landscapes, affective economies .................. 16 Methodological tools: on reading stories and telling stories ............................................................. 20 2. The Panda and the Wildcat: Impotence, Promiscuity, and the Biopolitics of Species .................. 22 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 22 The native and the alien: managing migratory bodies ...................................................................... 23 Commodities, migrants and mythologies: animals in and out of place ............................................ 26 Sexing the species: authenticity and artifice, vulnerability and threat .............................................. 31 Extinction by reproduction: colonial hybridities and hybrid nationalisms ....................................... 36 Conclusion: resignations and rebirths ............................................................................................... 40 3. The deer and the wolf: killing and restoring in necropolitical ecologies ...................................... 43 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 43 Bring back the trees: hunting and culling in threatened landscapes ................................................. 46 The sovereign stag and the slaughtered herd: affective economies of death .................................... 49 Bring back the wolf: rewilding the nation ........................................................................................ 53 Narrating wild affect: safety, fear and feral masculinity ................................................................... 57 Crossing wild borders: the privatized wild and the modernized nation ............................................ 61 Conclusion: ecological power and ecological democracy ................................................................ 66 Conclusions: contested territories, wild futurities ................................................................................. 68 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................................... 71 3 1. The Wild and the Nation Introduction Each year, the tourist agency Visit Scotland runs a themed marketing campaign that promotes a particular mode of national identity. 2013 was the Year of Natural Scotland, celebrating the country’s “great outdoors,” its “surprising wildlife” and its “outstanding natural beauty” (‘Scotland’s Themed Years’). Promotional clips featured panning shots of dramatic landscapes, time-lapse footage of shifting skies, and close-ups of oblivious animals. The campaign’s audiovisual centrepiece was an eight-minute film titled ‘Wild Scotland’, which puts forth a narrative appropriate to this time that we are calling the Anthropocene – a time when the status of the human within and against our environment becomes ever more fraught and ever more urgent. The film takes up the increasingly ubiquitous refrain that people are “not separate from nature, but part of nature,” and its voiceover articulates a shifting, multi-layered set of relations between people, animals and land. Nature is introduced as a provider of “free services” – the forest an “air conditioner,” the mountains a “workout zone,” the sea a “larder,” the peat bog a “history classroom.” It is a “bank” to be invested in, an economic asset, as well as something to be treasured for its own sake. And it is invoked as “our home,” a shared space of multispecies belonging and mutual care: “we all need to care for Scotland’s nature, to allow Scotland’s nature to care for us.” The project of restoring ecologies, the film emphasises, is “not only about protecting a rare bird or a threatened wetland”, but about “us” – about “protecting our future.” 2013 was also the year that the Scottish National Party announced a referendum on Scotland’s independence, and the question of who counts as “us”, what “our future” means, became a matter of intense and wide-ranging public debate. “Scotland’s nature is on the march,” announces the video, and although independence is never mentioned it simmers under its surface, a whisper of a suggestion that Scotland’s people, too, are on the march, that nature and nation are on a shared trajectory of change. Ursula Heise writes that conservation efforts “become part of the stories that human communities tell themselves: stories about their origins, their development, their identity, and their future horizons” (5), and in Scotland in 2013 those stories were in a state of flux, its politics infused with a simultaneous sense of intense excitement and deep anxiety. This thesis asks: what is the relation between “wild” and “Scotland”? What material and discursive connections are woven between these two poles of meaning – nature and the nation, the wild and the domestic – in conservation projects that claim to act in the name of an undomesticated other? How does the signifier wild negotiate shifting relationships between human and nonhuman, between meaning and affect, between identity and community, between the deep inaccessible past and the infinitely imagined future? And what can the anxieties of endangerment, extinction and restoration tell us about the anxieties of modernity, as part of its ongoing projects of progress, knowledge and human mastery? I answer these questions by tracking tensions, contradictions, 4 slippages and excesses, unarticulated histories and reworked narratives, that structure the practices and politics of conservation in Scotland today. The Year of Natural Scotland video, according to its YouTube description, “conveys the Scottish Government's vision for Scotland's natural heritage” and its “forward thinking approach to nature conservation.” This is one mode of wildness that I will explore: the protection and production of the wild as part of official nation-building strategy, a marker of progress, modernity and change as well as heritage, continuity and restoration. This wildness is involved with biopolitical strategies of governing both human and nonhuman bodies, making-live at the level of population and ecosystem (“Healthy nature equals healthy people,” the film’s voiceover tells us). It is also involved with a less- publicised necropolitics in which killing becomes an integral part of saving, and the threat of death is part of valued landscapes. Many forms of life are at stake here, but I build my arguments by following a motley collection of what the video calls “wildlife superstars” – iconic species around which the affective force of the wild tends to coalesce. They are animals that participate in both preservation and restoration conservation projects, traditional species-centred campaigns
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