Reanimate: Political Ecologies of Animals in European Wildlife Conservation

Abstract

This paper develops a political ecology of reanimation as a novel approach to generate a deeper understanding of new directions in wildlife conservation. It highlights the lives of individual nonhuman animals in reanimated forms of nature, not just as species to “save,” but as essential actors in building healthy ecosystems. To do this, the paper integrates political ecology and animal studies. This offers a first step by sketching out how political ecologists can move beyond anthropocentrism to take animal lives seriously. The paper also invites animal studies scholars to engage more fully with the relations of capitalism in conservation which lead to social injustices and ultimately fail to stem rapid biodiversity loss. It focuses on rewilding in Europe to tease out how understanding the role of individual animals can help to uncover and analyze the much deeper dynamics of human-animal relations that drive and sustain continuing biodiversity losses.