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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title In the Shadow of the Wolf: Wildlife Conflict and Land Use Politics in the New West Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zk5g54g Author Martin, Jeffrey Vance Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California In the Shadow of the Wolf: Wildlife Conflict and Land Use Politics in the New West By Jeffrey Vance Martin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nathan Sayre, Chair Associate Professor Jake Kosek Professor Nancy Lee Peluso Professor Justin Brashares Summer 2020 Abstract In the Shadow of the Wolf: Wildlife Conflict and Land Use Politics in the New West by Jeffrey Vance Martin Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Professor Nathan Sayre, Chair Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s was widely hailed as one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century, and has become an emblematic touchstone for rewilding – an emerging discourse and set of practices for conservation in the Anthropocene. As wolves have grown in number and range, however, so too has socio-political conflict, particularly around predation as threat to livestock production. Reaction appears to far exceed wolves’ material impacts, however, and persists 25 years after reintroduction despite development and deployment of compensation measures and coexistence strategies. The wolf is thus also an exemplary instance of human-wildlife conflict, an increasingly prominent and intractable concern for megafauna conservation around the world. And while volumes have been written on wolves in Yellowstone, there has been relatively little scholarly attention to Idaho even as it highlights the challenges of shared space across the working landscapes of the American West. Between 2015 and 2018, I conducted a case study of the Wood River Wolf Project (WRWP), a collaboration between sheep ranchers, environmental organizations, and governmental agencies in Blaine County, Idaho that has pursued wolf-livestock coexistence for over a decade. Grazing thousands of sheep on its project area in the Sawtooth Mountains while boasting the lowest depredation loss rates in the state, the WRWP has garnered international attention as a model of nonlethal management, holding out the possibility of a peaceful end to the wolf wars. Based in ethnographic and archival research and drawing insights from political ecology and critical “more- than-human” geography, I ask what we might learn from this critical case, guided by two overarching questions: First, how can we account for the persistence and seemingly disproportionate intensity of conflict surrounding wolves in the American West? And second, what are the necessary preconditions for and obstacles to scaling up and sustaining collaborative coexistence? In the included articles, I explore the Project’s emergence and practices and how these have evolved over time, as partners have contended with political economic pressures and the delisting of wolves from federal protection and transition to Idaho state management. I highlight the value of qualitative research methods for questions of human-wildlife conflict, and the fundamentally situated and relational quality of risk perception and decision-making. I argue that anti-wolf hostility cannot be read simply as cultural-historical animosity, nor as mere biopolitical concern over an agricultural pest, but rather must be understood amid so-called “New West” transitions and ongoing legal- 1 political tensions over the governance and use of public lands. This story stresses the inseparability of political economic, cultural-symbolic, and environmental concerns, connecting the wolf question to regional transformations, divergent land use priorities, and contemporary right-wing populism. I show how the political-symbolic enrollment of wolves by different social actors through a cultural politics of wilderness in fact perpetuates polarization and undermines on-the-ground efforts at coexistence between conservation and rural livelihoods – even as I highlight alternative political possibilities around themes of commoning and convivial conservation. 2 Table of Contents Dedication ii Preface iii Acknowledgements iv 1. Introduction: In the Shadow of the Wolf 1 2. Revisiting and Revitalizing 15 3. Peace in the Valley? 21 4. Between Scylla and Charybdis 38 5. The Dogs of War 57 6. Conclusion: A Time of Monsters 89 Bibliography 97 Appendices 127 i For my partner, Katrina *** “Wolves and people remain cotravelers in American history, and this lingering partnership reminds us humans that our concerns and aspirations exist alongside others. People never monopolized the creation of history.” – Jon T. Coleman (2009, p.14) “These multispecies relations and circulations are subject to and enrolled in a biopolitical calculus: which bodies and lives are fostered; which bodies and lives are threatening and are therefore `killable'; and what actions are undertaken to manage these bodies and lives. Multiple and more-than-human entities are entangled in the production and enforcement of space and power.” – Rosemary-Claire Collard (2012, p.38) “In this actual world there is then not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstractions of Man and Nature. We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out. Except that if we mentally draw back, if we go on with the singular abstractions, we are spared the effort of looking, in any active way, at the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once our product and our activity.” – Raymond Williams (1980, p.83) ii Preface This dissertation is, in many ways, me grappling with my own relationship to American environmentalism – a journey that, off and on, I have been on for much of my life. As a child, my parents took us to Yosemite National Park nearly every summer, where I heard the myths of John Muir and gained an appreciation for the preservation of the wild. At home in the San Francisco Bay Area I visited the California Academy of Sciences as often as I could; it was there that I probably first decided I ought to be a paleontologist (an interest that went beyond the childhood obsession with dinosaurs to picking up texts on evolutionary biology and wildlife ecology). In high school, I helped found and then served as the second president of our school’s “environmental club,” from which I joined a regional youth network (“Earth Team”) and attended workshops and conferences around social and environmental justice – a pattern that would grow into years of activism and organizing during and following my undergraduate degree. When I eventually turned to the social sciences, my admittedly ambitious motivation was to “do conservation better.” I hoped to bring a critical, cross-disciplinary engagement to bear on the environmental challenges of the 21st century – wildlife and habitat loss, environmental conflict, climate change, etc. My undergraduate and graduate education emphasized re-education: challenging the received wisdom and dominant narratives of conservation, training me in the historical, relational analysis of critical geography and political ecology to rethink pillars of American environmentalism like “overpopulation” and the ideology of wilderness. I first became interested in what I call here the “wolf question” after a conversation many years ago with a friend of my mother’s – a college-educated, progressive, environmentally-minded woman who, through the various twists and turns of life, had ended up in Montana raising two small boys and a few sheep. I recall the angry reaction she had at the very mention of wolves, a dramatic and unexpected response given my urban Californian sensibilities, which stuck with me as a sort of puzzle. During my Master’s, a term assignment required we investigate a particular environmental policy, and somewhat on a whim I decided to research the U.S. wolf reintroduction – not then realizing that this would be the beginning of a decade-long engagement with wolf issues. Broadly, my scholarship responds to calls from ecologists and managers for social science attention to the “human dimensions” of environmental issues. Sitting in this space necessitates a committed interdisciplinarity and dedication to cross-cultural communication and collaboration. It requires understanding and incorporating insights from natural scientists and practitioners, and translating critical socio-political analysis into a form comprehensible – and actionable – by others. It is not always easy. I draw on experiences from post-Master’s employment in land management – in which I aided federal agencies and private sector partners navigate the at-times arcane rules and complex requirements of environmental regulation. This is supplemented by years of training, organizing, and collaborative scholarship during the PhD, and by the help of a great many colleagues without whom I would have no doubt floundered more than I did. The dissertation is really only the beginning of this journey, and in the often-heard refrain, “a good dissertation is a done dissertation.” This has perhaps never been truer, amid global pandemic