Peer-reviewed by Jeffrey V Martin
Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2021
In resource management, new terms are frequently introduced, reflecting ongoing evolution in the ... more In resource management, new terms are frequently introduced, reflecting ongoing evolution in the theory and practice of ecology and governance. Yet understandings of what new concepts mean, for whom, and what they imply for management on the ground can vary widely. Coexistence—a prominent concept within the literature and practices around human-wildlife conflict and predator management—is one such term: widely invoked and yet poorly defined. While for some coexistence is the latest paradigm in improving human-wildlife relations, the concept remains debated and indeed even hotly contested by others—particularly on the multiple-use public lands of the American West, where gray wolf conservation, livestock production, and the claims of diverse stakeholders share space.
The multiple meanings of coexistence present serious challenges for conservation practice, as what the concept implies or requires can be contested by those most central to its implementation. In this study we examine wolf-livestock management—a classic case of human-wildlife conflict—by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managers. We reviewed coexistence’s multivalence in the literature, complementing semi-structured interviews conducted with USFS employees on case study forests from across the western states. Through this, we highlight the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the concept, and the unique yet under-explored perspective that resource managers bring to these debates.
This work draws on insights from political ecology to emphasize the situatedness of manager practice—taking place within a broader set of relations and contextual pressures—while extending political ecologists’ traditional focus on the resource user to a concern with the resource manager as a key actor in environmental conflicts. Through our engagement with the experiences and perceptions of USFS managers, who must balance conservation aims with long-established land uses like livestock grazing, we hope to clarify the various dimensions of coexistence. Our hope is that this work thus increases the possibility for empathy and collaboration among managers and stakeholders engaged in this complex socio-ecological challenge.
Conservation Science and Practice, 2021
Threats posed by wild predators to livestock production have too often resulted in human-wildlife... more Threats posed by wild predators to livestock production have too often resulted in human-wildlife conflict, to the detriment of these keystone species and broader biodiversity conservation. Long-standard practices of lethal control are increasingly seen as costly, controversial, and ineffective, however, with nonlethal alternatives ever more prominent. In addition to assessing these tools' ecological effectiveness, there remains a key role for the social sciences, particularly qualitative research, in identifying obstacles to and opportunities for the long-term sustainability and scaling up of these coexistence interventions. The Wood River Wolf Project (WRWP), a collaboration among ranchers, environmental organizations, and government agencies in Blaine County, Idaho, has pursued coexistence between gray wolves and domestic sheep since 2008, demonstrating and developing nonlethal techniques and garnering regional and international attention as a model for collaborative coexistence. Yet the Project has also struggled with changing conditions and internal challenges. Investigation of this prominent effort-its history and practices as well as the broader socio-political and economic context-highlights the challenges of adaptive governance in the face of reduced capacity and hostile legal-political contexts, while providing important insights for practitioners and policymakers promoting wildlife coexistence in shared landscapes.
Geoforum, 2021
In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazar... more In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazards: the six-headed monster Scylla on one side, and the whirlpool Charybdis on the other. This conceit here guides a critical engagement with scientific knowledge and state power, grounded in the positionality and practices of government agents charged with the management of controversial species and processes in the American West. Based in ethnographic and archival research on wolf-livestock conflict and public lands grazing in Central Idaho, I relate how agents with the U.S. Forest Service and Idaho Department of Fish and Game navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Sailing the “choppy seas” of complex systems and multiple-use mandates, with the “whirlpool” of cuts to capacity on one side and the “monster” of political controversy and litigation on the other, agents appear to collect less or more ambiguous information on their charges, resulting in a partial “blindness” or illegibility. Although a rational adaptation to unrealistic expectations, this ignorance is not bliss but rather symptom and source of dysfunction, limiting agents’ ability to carry out monitoring, collaboration, and effectively conduct on-the-ground management. Understanding patterns of illegibility requires that we attend both to broader contextual pressures and situated motivations. In so doing, we might account for the seeming disconnect between agencies’ stated aims and practices, complicate traditional assumptions of evidence-based scientific management and analyses of bureaucratic rationality and state power, and make sense of the apparent dysfunction around environmental governance in the American West today.
Conservation Biology, 2020
Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet is also intrin... more Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet is also intrinsically an ecological interaction between predators and prey. Human-wildlife interactions occur in socio-ecological systems, in which human and environmental processes are closely linked. However, underlying human-wildlife conflict and key to unpacking its complexity are concrete and identifiable ecological mechanisms that lead to predation events. To better understand how known ecological theories map onto the interactions between wild predators and domestic prey, we developed a framework describing ecological drivers of predation on livestock. We used this framework to examine ecological mechanisms through which specific management interventions operate, and we analyzed the ecological determinants of failure and success of management interventions in three case studies on snow leopards (Panthera uncia), wolves (Canis lupus), and cougars (Puma concolor). Our analysis demonstrates that mitigation of human-wildlife conflict ultimately requires an understanding of how fundamental ecological theories work within domestic predator-prey systems.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2019
Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoct... more Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty engaged in a collective practice of political ecology grounded in strong connection to the "Left Coast" of North America. In this manifesto, we build on successful 2015 and 2018 workshops on the practice and value of political ecology today to communicate our origins, efforts, and ideas towards building a community of praxis amid the urgencies and uncertainties of our time. We first articulate those organizing and theoretical lineages that influence and inform our work. We trace the evolution of LCPE through diverse genealogies and cross-pollinations-from the "Berkeley School" to Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial studies, through political struggles within and beyond the academy. In grappling with the challenges of our institutional histories of settler-colonial, capitalist, and racist dispossession, we then propose a "coastal epistemology", one that troubles the notion of a settler-colonial or neoliberal "frontier" while finding value in encounter, conversation, and emergence. We seek to make transparent our positions of relative privilege as well as the precarious contexts in which we work and live, while mobilizing and embodying political ecology's long-standing normative and liberatory aims. Next we share some of the diverse methodological approaches employed by our members and collective, with the aim of providing inspiration and solidarity to others contending with similar challenges. Ultimately, we suggest a vision for what a political ecology adequate to our moment might look like and require: a necessarily collective and hopeful project, amid processes of colonial violence, capitalist inequity, and climate catastrophe. The Left Coast Political Ecology network invites you to dream and organize with us, to share resources, experiences, and community, and to help push our field and our institutions toward more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.
Non-peer reviewed by Jeffrey V Martin
Literary Geographies, 2020
Ecología Política, 2013
Critical engagements with the governance of biodiversity have focused on the implications of mark... more Critical engagements with the governance of biodiversity have focused on the implications of market-based forms of conservation and corporate bioprospecting as a form of enclosure and accumulation by dispossession. Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP) was founded in 2000 in the context of sociopolitical backlash against these moves, and a broader impasse over the conservation and governance of plant genetic resources. Today it claims to be the largest ex situ plant conservation project in the world, and presents an alternative model based in negotiated international partnership and public seed science. However, given Kew’s imperial past, ongoing contestation over germplasm control, and the immense potential economic value of banked material, the MSBP’s practices and relationship to capital accumulation must be interrogated.
This paper situates the MSBP within a context of broader ecological and socio-political crises and the history of corporate bioprospecting. Drawing on the work of James O’Connor (1998) and Jack Kloppenburg (2005), it argues that the MSBP is indicative of a re-alignment of state and capital, an instance of de-commodification and a “socialized bioprospecting” that serves the continued provision of plant biodiversity as both human need and necessary condition of capitalist production. Such an analysis complicates critical analyses of capitalism and nature: moving us beyond strict concern with commodification toward a broader political economy of plant biodiversity while pointing to new tensions and emergent opportunities for political engagement.
Geoforum, 2019
Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in manag... more Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came “home” to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long typified by tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority. Since first touching down in the West, however, the “big tent” of political ecology has only grown bigger, incorporating new perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies. At the same time, the nexus of environment and society is perhaps even more salient today, amid a regional conjuncture of populist revolt, climate change, and rapid political economic transformation. Here we reflect on three longstanding regional concerns – energy development, wolf reintroduction, and participatory governance – leveraging the pluralism of contemporary political ecology to better understand their contemporary incarnations. In so doing, we highlight the need to bring together insights from both “traditional” approaches and newer directions to better understand and engage contemporary challenges, with their heightened stakes and complexity. Such an approach demonstrates what we might learn about global processes in this place, as well as what insights regional praxis (often woefully provincial) might gain from elsewhere – new ways of seeing and doing political ecology. Our goal is to generate discussion among and between political ecologists and regional critical scholars, initiating new collaborative engagements that might serve the next wave of political ecology in the 21st century American West.
Dissertations by Jeffrey V Martin
In the Shadow of the Wolf: Wildlife Conflict and Land Use Politics in the New West, 2020
Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idah... more 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-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.
Kew Gardens‘ Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP), with its hub at Wakehurst Place in West Sus... more Kew Gardens‘ Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP), with its hub at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, England, is the largest ex situ plant conservation project in the world. Its founding in 2000 took place in the aftermath of a broad backlash against private bioprospecting, an impasse over the governance of plant germplasm, and the establishment of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The MSBP is in many ways at the forefront of plant conservation and environmental governance, working with partner institutions from around the world for the preservation of wild seeds against biodiversity loss. However, given Kew‘s history of state-funded seed science for imperial and economic ends, the ongoing contestation over the governance of plant genetic resources, and the immense potential value of MSBP collections, the nature of the seed bank and its relationship to capital accumulation must be interrogated.
This project seeks to establish and situate the MSBP‘s history, practice and aims within a broader context in order to provide a preliminary critical examination of this crucial case study. Based in a combination of qualitative interviews and gray literature review, it argues the need to reject a public-private dichotomy, instead proposing the MSBP as an instance of ―socialized bioprospecting‖ for the regulation and provision of plant biodiversity—both a human need and a necessary condition of capitalist production.
Keywords: political ecology, environmental governance, biological diversity, plant biodiversity, germplasm, networks, conditions of production, capital accumulation, ecological crisis, seed wars
Presentations by Jeffrey V Martin
A talk given as part of the "Historical Geographies of Human-Animal Entanglements" panel at the I... more A talk given as part of the "Historical Geographies of Human-Animal Entanglements" panel at the International Conference of Historical Geographers in 2015, with the aim of workshopping theoretical framing work done following qualifying examinations and in preparation for dissertation field research.
CFPs by Jeffrey V Martin
Conflicts between humans and nonhuman species have seen growing attention among scholars concerne... more Conflicts between humans and nonhuman species have seen growing attention among scholars concerned with the knotty and interdisciplinary questions of coexistence. Work within
wildlife ecology and management increasingly recognizes the need to look beyond the biophysical, with calls for social science attention to the “human dimensions” of these conflicts (Dickman 2010; Treves & Karanth 2003). At the same time, scholarship around philosophical posthumanism, critical animal studies, and new animal geographies has brought to bear radically different perspectives on relationships between human and nonhuman species
(Haraway 2008; Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Wolch & Emel 1998). This session provides an intervention into these conversations by examining the production of multispecies spaces and boundaries through the lens of political ecology.
Papers by Jeffrey V Martin
Canadian Geographer, Sep 29, 2022
Animal fear can be an important driver of ecological community structure: predators affect prey n... more Animal fear can be an important driver of ecological community structure: predators affect prey not only through predation, but also by inducing changes in behaviour and distribution—a phenomenon evocatively called the “ecology of fear.” The return of wolves to the western United States is a notable instance of such dynamics, yet plays out in a complex socioecological system where efforts to mitigate impacts on livestock rely on manipulating wolves' fear of people. Examining Washington state's efforts to affect wolf behaviour to reduce livestock predation, we argue that this approach to coexistence with wolves is predicated on relations of fear: people, livestock, and wolves can arguably share landscapes with minimal conflict, as long as wolves are adequately afraid. We introduce the “socioecology of fear” as an interdisciplinary framework for examining the interwoven social and ecological processes of human‐wildlife conflict management. Beyond frequently voiced ideas about wolves' “innate” fear, we examine how fear is (re)produced through human‐wolf interactions and deeply shaped by human social processes. We contribute to the critical physical geography project by integrating critical social analysis with ecological theory, conducted through collaborative interdisciplinary dialogue. Such integrative practice is essential for understanding the complex challenges of managing wildlife in the Anthropocene.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2019
Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoct... more Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty engaged in a collective practice of political ecology grounded in strong connection to the "Left Coast" of North America. In this manifesto, we build on successful 2015 and 2018 workshops on the practice and value of political ecology today to communicate our origins, efforts, and ideas towards building a community of praxis amid the urgencies and uncertainties of our time. We first articulate those organizing and theoretical lineages that influence and inform our work. We trace the evolution of LCPE through diverse genealogies and cross-pollinations – from the "Berkeley School" to Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial studies, through political struggles within and beyond the academy. In grappling with the challenges of our institutional histories of settler-colonial, capitalist, and racist dispossession, we then propose a "coasta...
Conservation Biology, 2020
Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet it is also int... more Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet it is also intrinsically an ecological interaction between predators and prey. Human–wildlife interactions occur in socioecological systems in which human and environmental processes are closely linked. However, underlying human–wildlife conflict and key to unpacking its complexity are concrete and identifiable ecological mechanisms that lead to predation events. To better understand how ecological theory accords with interactions between wild predators and domestic prey, we developed a framework to describe ecological drivers of predation on livestock. We based this framework on foundational ecological theory and current research on interactions between predators and domestic prey. We used this framework to examine ecological mechanisms (e.g., density‐mediated effects, behaviorally mediated effects, and optimal foraging theory) through which specific management interventions operate, and we analyzed ...
Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2021
In resource management, new terms are frequently introduced, reflecting ongoing evolution in the ... more In resource management, new terms are frequently introduced, reflecting ongoing evolution in the theory and practice of ecology and governance. Yet understandings of what new concepts mean, for whom, and what they imply for management on the ground can vary widely. Coexistence—a prominent concept within the literature and practices around human-wildlife conflict and predator management—is one such term: widely invoked and yet poorly defined. While for some coexistence is the latest paradigm in improving human-wildlife relations, the concept remains debated and indeed even hotly contested by others—particularly on the multiple-use public lands of the American West, where gray wolf conservation, livestock production, and the claims of diverse stakeholders share space.The multiple meanings of coexistence present serious challenges for conservation practice, as what the concept implies or requires can be contested by those most central to its implementation. In this study we examine wol...
Geoforum, 2019
In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazar... more In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazards: the six-headed monster Scylla on one side, and the whirlpool Charybdis on the other. This conceit here guides a critical engagement with scientific knowledge and state power, grounded in the positionality and practices of government agents charged with the management of controversial species and processes in the American West. Based in ethnographic and archival research on wolflivestock conflict and public lands grazing in Central Idaho, I relate how agents with the U.S. Forest Service and Idaho Department of Fish and Game navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Sailing the "choppy seas" of complex systems and multiple-use mandates, with the "whirlpool" of cuts to capacity on one side and the "monster" of political controversy and litigation on the other, agents appear to collect less or more ambiguous information on their charges, resulting in a partial "blindness" or illegibility. Although a rational adaptation to unrealistic expectations, this ignorance is not bliss but rather symptom and source of dysfunction, limiting agents' ability to carry out monitoring, collaboration, and effectively conduct on-the-ground management. Understanding patterns of illegibility requires that we attend both to broader contextual pressures and situated motivations. In so doing, we might account for the seeming disconnect between agencies' stated aims and practices, complicate traditional assumptions of evidence-based scientific management and analyses of bureaucratic rationality and state power, and make sense of the apparent dysfunction around environmental governance in the American West today.
Geoforum, 2019
Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in manag... more Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came "home" to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long typified by tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority. Since first touching down in the West, however, the "big tent" of political ecology has only grown bigger, incorporating new perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies. At the same time, the nexus of environment and society is perhaps even more salient today, amid a regional conjuncture of populist revolt, climate change, and rapid political economic transformation. Here we reflect on three longstanding regional concerns-energy development, wolf reintroduction, and participatory governance-leveraging the pluralism of contemporary political ecology to better understand their contemporary incarnations. In so doing, we highlight the need to bring together insights from both "traditional" approaches and newer directions to better understand and engage contemporary challenges, with their heightened stakes and complexity. Such an approach demonstrates what we might learn about global processes in this place, as well as what insights regional praxis (often woefully provincial) might gain from elsewhere-new ways of seeing and doing political ecology. Our goal is to generate discussion among and between political ecologists and regional critical scholars, initiating new collaborative engagements that might serve the next wave of political ecology in the 21st century American West.
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Peer-reviewed by Jeffrey V Martin
The multiple meanings of coexistence present serious challenges for conservation practice, as what the concept implies or requires can be contested by those most central to its implementation. In this study we examine wolf-livestock management—a classic case of human-wildlife conflict—by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managers. We reviewed coexistence’s multivalence in the literature, complementing semi-structured interviews conducted with USFS employees on case study forests from across the western states. Through this, we highlight the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the concept, and the unique yet under-explored perspective that resource managers bring to these debates.
This work draws on insights from political ecology to emphasize the situatedness of manager practice—taking place within a broader set of relations and contextual pressures—while extending political ecologists’ traditional focus on the resource user to a concern with the resource manager as a key actor in environmental conflicts. Through our engagement with the experiences and perceptions of USFS managers, who must balance conservation aims with long-established land uses like livestock grazing, we hope to clarify the various dimensions of coexistence. Our hope is that this work thus increases the possibility for empathy and collaboration among managers and stakeholders engaged in this complex socio-ecological challenge.
Non-peer reviewed by Jeffrey V Martin
This paper situates the MSBP within a context of broader ecological and socio-political crises and the history of corporate bioprospecting. Drawing on the work of James O’Connor (1998) and Jack Kloppenburg (2005), it argues that the MSBP is indicative of a re-alignment of state and capital, an instance of de-commodification and a “socialized bioprospecting” that serves the continued provision of plant biodiversity as both human need and necessary condition of capitalist production. Such an analysis complicates critical analyses of capitalism and nature: moving us beyond strict concern with commodification toward a broader political economy of plant biodiversity while pointing to new tensions and emergent opportunities for political engagement.
Dissertations by Jeffrey V Martin
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-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.
This project seeks to establish and situate the MSBP‘s history, practice and aims within a broader context in order to provide a preliminary critical examination of this crucial case study. Based in a combination of qualitative interviews and gray literature review, it argues the need to reject a public-private dichotomy, instead proposing the MSBP as an instance of ―socialized bioprospecting‖ for the regulation and provision of plant biodiversity—both a human need and a necessary condition of capitalist production.
Keywords: political ecology, environmental governance, biological diversity, plant biodiversity, germplasm, networks, conditions of production, capital accumulation, ecological crisis, seed wars
Presentations by Jeffrey V Martin
CFPs by Jeffrey V Martin
wildlife ecology and management increasingly recognizes the need to look beyond the biophysical, with calls for social science attention to the “human dimensions” of these conflicts (Dickman 2010; Treves & Karanth 2003). At the same time, scholarship around philosophical posthumanism, critical animal studies, and new animal geographies has brought to bear radically different perspectives on relationships between human and nonhuman species
(Haraway 2008; Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Wolch & Emel 1998). This session provides an intervention into these conversations by examining the production of multispecies spaces and boundaries through the lens of political ecology.
Papers by Jeffrey V Martin
The multiple meanings of coexistence present serious challenges for conservation practice, as what the concept implies or requires can be contested by those most central to its implementation. In this study we examine wolf-livestock management—a classic case of human-wildlife conflict—by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managers. We reviewed coexistence’s multivalence in the literature, complementing semi-structured interviews conducted with USFS employees on case study forests from across the western states. Through this, we highlight the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the concept, and the unique yet under-explored perspective that resource managers bring to these debates.
This work draws on insights from political ecology to emphasize the situatedness of manager practice—taking place within a broader set of relations and contextual pressures—while extending political ecologists’ traditional focus on the resource user to a concern with the resource manager as a key actor in environmental conflicts. Through our engagement with the experiences and perceptions of USFS managers, who must balance conservation aims with long-established land uses like livestock grazing, we hope to clarify the various dimensions of coexistence. Our hope is that this work thus increases the possibility for empathy and collaboration among managers and stakeholders engaged in this complex socio-ecological challenge.
This paper situates the MSBP within a context of broader ecological and socio-political crises and the history of corporate bioprospecting. Drawing on the work of James O’Connor (1998) and Jack Kloppenburg (2005), it argues that the MSBP is indicative of a re-alignment of state and capital, an instance of de-commodification and a “socialized bioprospecting” that serves the continued provision of plant biodiversity as both human need and necessary condition of capitalist production. Such an analysis complicates critical analyses of capitalism and nature: moving us beyond strict concern with commodification toward a broader political economy of plant biodiversity while pointing to new tensions and emergent opportunities for political engagement.
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-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.
This project seeks to establish and situate the MSBP‘s history, practice and aims within a broader context in order to provide a preliminary critical examination of this crucial case study. Based in a combination of qualitative interviews and gray literature review, it argues the need to reject a public-private dichotomy, instead proposing the MSBP as an instance of ―socialized bioprospecting‖ for the regulation and provision of plant biodiversity—both a human need and a necessary condition of capitalist production.
Keywords: political ecology, environmental governance, biological diversity, plant biodiversity, germplasm, networks, conditions of production, capital accumulation, ecological crisis, seed wars
wildlife ecology and management increasingly recognizes the need to look beyond the biophysical, with calls for social science attention to the “human dimensions” of these conflicts (Dickman 2010; Treves & Karanth 2003). At the same time, scholarship around philosophical posthumanism, critical animal studies, and new animal geographies has brought to bear radically different perspectives on relationships between human and nonhuman species
(Haraway 2008; Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Wolch & Emel 1998). This session provides an intervention into these conversations by examining the production of multispecies spaces and boundaries through the lens of political ecology.