Nature and the Reproduction of Endangered Space: The Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California

Abstract

Recent efforts to protect biodiversity in the United States often reproduce the literal and figurative divisions of space that have originally endangered target species. Nature as redefined by these efforts is as much a social construction as it is some biophysical entity under siege by humans, We focus on the categorical and spatial distinctions between landscapes prioritized for protection and landscapes given less priority or ignored altogether. These distinctions, we wish to demonstrate, reflect pragmatic considerations of habitat quality and political expediency, but they also are enmeshed in dualist nature–culture ideologies that serve to legitimate and ultimately to reproduce the different practices that occur on these landscapes. We focus on protection of spotted owl habitat, one of the most important cases of biodiversity conservation in the United States since the passage of the Endangered Species Act. We consider recent spotted owl protection efforts in the Pacific Northwest and southern California. In the Pacific Northwest, spotted owl protection plans on public forests have been cited as justification for casing habitat protection on private lands, in spite of the major historical biodiversity role of these forestlands. In California, spotted owl policy deliberations for the urbanized forests of southern California have lagged far behind those in the Sierra Nevada, even though owl populations have declined faster in southern California than anywhere else in the state. These cases are indicative of a nature epistemologically understood and ontologically constructed as separate from culture, of what Latour would call an act of purification set up against the undeniably hybrid character of nature–cultures in late modernity. It is precisely this recognition of nature–culture intertwining, however, that will prove central to the creation of sustaining habitats for nonhuman life.