Rosemary-Claire Collard

A Manifesto for Abundant Futures

The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspiration from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolonial and postcolonial scholars. With decolonization as our principal political sensibility, we offer a manifesto for abundance and outline political strategies to reckon with colonial-capitalist ruins, enact pluriversality rather than universality, and recognize animal autonomy. We advance these strategies to support abundant socioecological futures.

Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commodities Apart

Each year ARCAS Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in northern Guatemala receives 200 to 700 animals: cardboard boxes stuffed with baby parrots, crates full of lizards, monkeys with leashes ringing their necks. Many of these animals were confiscated while being smuggled for the pet trade. Seized animals represent a fraction of overall trade (legal and illegal) in and out of Guatemala and of global trade, worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Forming wild animals into companion commodities in these bio-economic circuits involves severing them from their social, ecological, and familial networks and replacing these systems with human-provided supports: food, shelter, and diversion. Many of these commodities fail because the animals die. For the few animals that are confiscated alive, rehabilitation for return to the wild is a form of decommodification attempted through various misanthropic practices—actions and routines designed to instill in animals fear and even hatred of humans—that aim to divest animals of human ties. This article draws on participant observation and interview fieldwork and socioeconomic scholarship to critically examine the dual processes of making and unmaking lively companion commodities. It suggests that commodification and decommodification are not processes of “denaturing” and “renaturing,” respectively. Rather, following Haraway and Smith, they are both productions of particular natures. This article considers the differential contours and subjects of these natures, as well as their ecological and ethical stakes, concluding by suggesting that the collapse of the culture–nature dualism should not preclude acknowledgment of nonhuman animals’ wildness and the violence that can attend its attrition.

Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities

When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, ‘encounterable’ life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences.

Cougar figures, gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North Americas densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraways conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this articles discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.

Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations

ABSTRACT How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The “or not” of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value’s necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play in the production of value. Accordingly, we present a typology of five orientations – relational, patterned positions – nature can take in relation to capitalist social relations: officially valued, the reserve army, the underground, outcast surplus and threat. What our typology suggests is that to accumulate capital, capitalism needs the diverse materials and creative forces of natures ordered in a variety of positions within society, not just as commodities. No such position is without violence and exploitation. To add some specificity to our initial analysis, we consider how these nonhuman orientations are produced in part through law. We focus on the law because it comprises a prime tool for achieving social order and because the law is a crucial site in which difference is produced and the designations of valued and unvalued are formalized and consolidated.

The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers

1This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering—inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West’s richest countries. In an announcement of Galeano’s death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as “obsessed with remembering” in a “land condemned to amnesia.” 2 Amnesia. If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifesto, this is it. Amnesia. In two registers. First, amnesia about the deeply uneven and violent nature of modernization. And second, about the struggles that have underpinned every effort to alleviate inequality and violence.

Pedagogical Declarations: Feminist Engagements with the Teaching Statement.

To produce a teaching statement, current and aspiring teachers undertake the ostensibly straightforward task of putting their teaching philosophy onto paper. But upon close examination, the teaching statement – a seemingly simple object – is much more complex. The teaching statement is full of dual functions, many of which can be conceived of as working at cross-purposes. This paper draws on the teaching statements history along with a collaborative and feminist mentorship methodology to highlight these dual functions. We discuss how teaching statements can be negotiated and inhabited from our perspective as early career scholars.

If biodiversity offsets are a dead end for conservation, what is the live wire? A response to Apostolopoulou & Adams

Ecofeminist Maria Mies describes capitalist social relations as an iceberg. The visible tip represents the formal economy, where capitalist value emerges from exploited waged labourers and the circulation of monetized goods and assets. Underneath the waterline lurks the rest of the iceberg, and its size dwarfs the tip. Here, Mies points to a much larger world of exploitation on which commodity production and profit-making depend: women, colonies and, at the very base, nature. The bodies, places and materials of the submerged, invisible iceberg supply unwaged labour and unpriced inputs and energies that are productive; capitalism depends on this deeply undervalued work. Let us restate: capitalism exploits, yes, but strangely, it is a mode of organizing society that also relies on this exploitation. As Mies ([1986]1998, p. 200) writes, ‘the exploitation of colonies, as well as that of women and other non-wage workers, is absolutely crucial to the capitalist accumulation process’; this exploitation ‘constitutes the eternal basis for capitalist accumulation’ (Mies, 2007, p. 269).

Politics of devaluation

As Kay and Kenney-Lazar show, the concept of value holds appeal for political ecologists who seek to demystify and politicize the socio-ecological relations underpinning capitalist productions of nature. But there are challenges to using value to understand capitalist natures. Much of nature is not priced, and no nature labours for a wage. This makes the labour theory of value, which tends to be prominent even in discussions of a broadly defined value, difficult to apply to nature. Having wrangled with this ourselves, we turn (as Kay and Kenney-Lazar do) to feminist political economists, who have long theorized the unwaged realm within capitalist social relations. We find that these feminists, while not unconcerned with value, are instead often set on understanding how some work is persistently devalued, or denigrated, seen as worthless – which leads them to centre patriarchy in their analyses. Building from this, we suggest the need to centre anthropocentrism – to historicize and denaturalize devaluations of nature – within work on value and capitalist natures.

The antinomies of nature and space

Maria, Irma, Harvey, Katrina – these have become more than names. They represent several of the most recent hurricanes that have devastated communities across North America and the Caribbean. As nature–society encounters, these massive storms elevated a range of historical, sociocultural, and political economic issues to the fore – from colonialism and race, to growing patterns of inequality, government mismanagement, and the politics of knowledge related to climate change. Media coverage of these events recalls early scholarly interventions by critical disaster studies scholars that highlighted the myriad ways that ‘disasters’ are not only results of climatic or geologic forces, but are connected to historical, sociocultural, and institutional dynamics. It has become increasingly accepted that race, caste, ethnicity, income, and other patterns of inequality must be considered when evaluating the risk and outcomes of storms, earthquakes, droughts or other ‘natural’ events. Indeed, the recent aftermath of hurricanes in the Caribbean cast a spotlight on long-standing political and economic inequalities between the U.S. and its quasi-imperial territories of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands – whether about the pathways and futures of inequality and vulnerability on the islands, or the slow and inadequate governmental response. That ‘there’s no such thing as a natural disaster’ (Smith, 2006) should no longer be a surprise. Rather, the recent headlines highlighting inequalities, histories of colonialism or risk generated by uneven political economies and colonial histories validate long-held insights from political ecology, environmental justice (EJ), and critical disaster studies. Undoubtedly few relish in this validation and would have much preferred to be proven wrong. In this current moment of more general acceptance of some of critical