Conservation and geography I. Getting into the weeds; the “new” conservation and invasive species management

Abstract

This first progress report in a series on conservation and geography reviews recent work on conservation and invasive species management; scholarship that involves responding to and killing species deemed to be invasive. International and national conservation initiatives characterize invasive species as clear and growing threats to biodiversity that should be controlled. On the other hand, more granular social analyses are challenging the feasibility of such imperatives. Here, I consider three related themes: 1) the new and emergent places that complicate management ideals; 2) how people practice their environmental responsibilities, and the resultant contestations and tensions they face; and 3) how people are considered within analyses, including those living with change and working together collectively and across difference. Neither conservation nor invasive species management can escape their normative framings and the biopolitics of human values, choices, and decision making required to make some die so that others may live. Yet in working with or against the grain of requirements to decide on future life, local people, and their struggles illustrate the social change and actions required of conservation if, as some have argued, conservation must enter a new phase.