The precarity of nonhuman livelihoods: rethinking speciesism in a genocidal state

• Main Author: Thomsen, TB
• Other Authors: Gosler, A, Cousins, T
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Science > Social aspects; Environmental Anthropology; Multispecies Justice; Gray wolf; Canis lupus; gray wolf
• Online Access: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f27283bc-079b-4ecd-beaf-b4030e50e44d

This thesis explores wildlife-human relations in the United States during the years of the Trump Administration. It is a multispecies, multi-sited ethnography that focuses on the gray wolf (Canis lupus), which repatriated much of the western U.S. after 66 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in 1995-6. I chose the wolf for its ability to evoke strong reactions from most humans. This provided insight into wildlife-human relations in a myriad of legal, social, economic, and political settings. Discourse about wolves was rarely about a particular individual, or pack. Wolf (as a species) was commonly reduced to Euro-American symbolic portrayals of myth, warrior, or villain in popular discourse. Euro-American culture and folklore dating back 500 plus years continue to permeate wolf discourse, media, and ecosystem governance today, and are intertwined with the colonization of the western U.S. in the mid-1800s. I explicate how human exceptionalist views, where ideals of ‘Nature’, or ‘wild’ materialized in the subjugation of subaltern wildlife. The key theoretical frameworks that informed this study include social-ecological systems, posthumanism, postcolonial studies (particularly subaltern and decolonial ecology), environmental anthropology, biopower, historical ecology, Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, compassionate conservation, and multispecies justice. Methods included common multispecies ethnography approaches (e.g., participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival data, etc.), as well as a unique choice to leverage my position as a tenure-track faculty to train my students as research assistants (see Chapter 3). Primary research questions included: what are humans’ moral obligations to nonhumans (flora and fauna), and how do we coexist with nonhuman ‘Others’ given the contemporary ecological crisis? Interviews were conducted over 15 months from 2019-2021. The primary study site location was the Cascadia Bioregion (present-day Oregon and Washington). ...