Reanimating and reanimalizing wildlife conservation landscapes

Abstract

An ontological narrative placing humans outside and in control of Nature engenders utilitarian wildlife conservation interventions approached at species scales, with wildlife and environments highly managed. Inattention to individual and collective animal interiors, animal agency, and multi-species relationships has resulted in conservation shortcomings and outright failures. Animal geographies can utilize the Integral Ecology framework to enable conservation institutions, science, and practice to better attend to biopolitical and psycho-cultural entanglements in a multi-species world. Such a framework advances conceptual positioning of humans relative to wildlife and environments, [re]animating conservation; and prompts practices that foreground animals as sentient, complex beings; [re]animalizing conservation. Through a Mexican gray wolf reintroduction case study, this chapter illustrates how Integral Ecology can be used to operationalize animal geographies in wildlife conservation.