Swedish hunters sometimes appeal to an inviolate ‘right to exist’ for wolves, apparently rejecting NIMBY. Nevertheless, the conditions existence hunters impose on wolves in practice fundamentally contradict their use of right to exist language. Hunters appeal to this language hoping to gain uptake in a conservation and management discourse demanding appropriately objective ecological language. However, their contradictory use of ‘right to exist' opens them up to the charge that they are being deceptive – indeed, right to exist is a 'disguised (...) NIMBY!' We address this situation by distinguishing hunters’ criticisms of wolves from the procedures for reaching objective policy decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, following the taxonomy developed by Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds of different sources and states of vulnerability, I claim that wild animals are inherently and situationally vulnerable. This is because they can experience suffering as a response to certain internal and external states and have a high exposure to, and a low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. From this it follows that we have a moral obligation to support and assist individuals who are occurrently vulnerable and (...) to reduce the risk of dispositional vulnerabilities becoming occurrent in the future, by endorsing some form of what I call ‘environmental enhancement’. Finally, I pay critical attention to how to prevent interventions aimed at ameliorating vulnerability from paradoxically generating pathogenic vulnerabilities. (shrink)

Rewilding is positioned as ‘post’-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, we argue that the autonomy of nature rhetoric in rewilding is challenged by human interventions. Instead of joining critique toward the ‘managed wilderness’ approach of rewilding, however, we examine the injustices this entails for keystone species. Reintroduction case studies demonstrate how arbitrary standards for wildness are imposed on these animals as they do their assigned duty to rehabilitate ecosystems. These ‘Goldilocks’ standards are (...) predicated on aesthetic values that sanction interventions inconsistent with the premise of animal sovereignty. These include culling, relocations and sterilizations of animals that demonstrate the kind of autonomy championed in rewilding rhetoric. Drawing from Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework for political animal categories, we conclude by arguing that rewilding needs to re-position itself in one of two ways. Either it should align itself more closely to mainstream conservation and embrace full animal sovereignty without Goldilocks conditions, or it should commit to taking full responsibility for reintroduced animals, including supplementary feeding and care. (shrink)

Projects to restore nature inevitably disrupt the plants and animals that inhabit the land to be restored. This essay addresses the significance of feral animals. Can feral animals remain in a restored nature? I argue that an answer depends on what we mean by nature and restoration. I present several different conceptions of nature and discuss what their differences mean for the goals of restoration. While the presence of feral animals is not compatible with the dualist conception of nature as (...) that which is untouched by humans, other conceptions are more accommodating. Restoration to a benchmark of nature prior to human impact is both practically and conceptually implausible, thus more analysis is needed of alternative conceptions and their impacts on domesticated and feral plants and animals. (shrink)