We are the elk:

Ethics and explanation in political ecology

Paul Robbins

Plenary lecture on 'Ethics, Justice and Political Ecology'.

co-sponsored Ethics, Justice and Human Rights Specialty Group

and Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group

National Meeting of the Association of American Geographers Denver, 2005

§1 Sarah and I came across her on a late June morning during a short walk near Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone. She had been busy making her way through the rich growth on the forest floor, the product of the massive fires of 1988. The meeting was short, her head rose from her labors, we locked gazes, and like most such encounters, in an instant it was over. What transpired in that moment? How were we each inconvenienced, startled, or perhaps changed, however incrementally. To a degree not at all, of course; she went back to browsing, we to walking, as if nothing had happened. But something did happen, as it does in all such moments, when intimacy and uncertainty are joined in a nervous encounter and multiple intelligences are at work in constituting the outcome.

Do such encounters matter in political ecology? What I want to suggest is that they do. They do, I argue, in that in every future encounter, we (elk and people both) are positioned by those previous experiences. We are changed, as is our notion of what to do, and under what circumstances to do it. Ethics, to the degree that we experience them, are the product of such material encounters, and do not come prior to them, in some cerebral philosophical moment. We are, in this sense, only the sum of our elk.

§2 In his influential and justifiably lauded essay “the production of nature,” on the other hand, Neil Smith invokes such co-productive intimacies as a risk associated with bourgeois environmentalism. Here, actress Mary Tyler Moore’s efforts to offer a “ransom” for a lobster in Malibu are described as “a symptom of the perverse commodification of nature.” The essay is directed at eschewing such misguided sentiments and bourgeois crusades, which obscure the “real” productive relationship between humans and non-humans.

But is this encounter between lobster and person, along with the anxieties it produces, itself a thing to understand? I think it must be. As even Smith himself points out, Moore’s efforts are also a “visceral emotional response” to the very commodification of nature he insists she instantiates. [i]

Nietzschian Ethical Skepticism

While profoundly flattered and grateful to the organizers, I very nearly turned Jeff and Brad down when they invited me to give this talk, with the intimidating audience it entailed. This is firstly because, and anyone who knows me at all can tell you, I am a pretty lousy philosopher. Perhaps too it is my suspicion that ethics in particular are one of the straightjackets of modernist history, a blueprint rather than an antidote to its self-assured horrors, in so far as the “good” has historically always belonged to the elite who are solely allowed to narrate its form. Maybe it’s too much time spent with Nietzsche, who instructs us against the coercive elitism of ethics and morals §3:

“it was “the good” themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values…” [ii]

Beyond good and evil then; ethics is elitism; no reason to waste 40 minutes of your time.

Happily for me, though perhaps not for you, I did decide to join this discussion, because in considering the question, I have come to understand better and to treasure more, the ethics of political ecology. Much of this had to do with my reading the powerful and convincing collection of recent essays in the journal Political Geography on ethics and political ecology. For these excellent reflections on the field, following Bryant and Jarosz’ succinct summary, “ethics comprise a set of moral values guiding the conduct and action of individuals and groups” [iii] In keeping with this perspective, Lucy Jarosz inspirationally challenged us to ask, “How do we manifest our ethical positionalities, knowledge and action in scholarship and through teaching?... How do we encourage an ethically informed self-criticality in our research and teaching?” [iv]

If I depart somewhat from this useful reading of ethics, I hope the session organizers and the authors of those excellent papers will forgive me. What I want to argue here, is that ethics as a disembodied logic of knowing how to do the right thing, emerging from philosophy, or at least from thinking really hard, is not the only ethics we might be interested in. That understanding of ethics is largely rooted in the Aristotelian notion (from his Nicomachaen Ethics) that ethics is an order – a science of what ought to be done. The problem presented for people negotiating such an ethics, as Lacan puts it, is basically what is required of a “subject so that [they] will enter that order and submit [themselves] to it?” [v]

§4 This is an important problem but it is not the only one. I want to argue that there is another side to ethics. In a nutshell, one place between political ecology and ethics is not actually about political ecology “having” or “providing,” or “enacting” ethics, a set of cartographic coordinates between right and wrong, between good and evil; a trail, a map, or a compass, in William Bennett’s regrettably geographic phraseology. §5 In part that formulation is misleading because it allows us to postulate that once we have such an ethical compass, to belabor the metaphor, it is merely an empirical question of sorting out our surroundings that leads to the direction of proper action.

What I want to argue today instead, is that that place of convergence between political ecology and ethics is in understanding both ethics and political ecology as being produced, both being the result of larger, dynamic, material anxieties. Taking this idea seriously, ethics can’t be something you “have” – a set of guiding and timeless rules for being in the world; rather ethics is a process – or better, a condition produced by friction between the subject and the political economy in which the subject is enmeshed. Ethics emerge and chafe, as subjects constitute and reconstitute the world around them. This is perhaps in closer correspondence to Roderick Neumann’s recent genealogy of violence in African Park management: a history of humanization and dehumanization,[vi] and Matt Turner’s helpful emphasis of “both the material interests but also the moral claims and narratives” that animate resource conflict.[vii]

§6 Seen this way, political ecology is ethical, but not in the sense that bold researchers with the right view on things extend justice to the world by revealing or unmasking how things really are. This is the heroic narrative of modernity, and ultimately its least ethical component (precisely because such heroism can produce no friction and result in no critical politics!). Rather, political ecology is ethical in the sense that political ecologies are those research accounts born of the environmental anxieties produced by material crises – like this oil spill – and the tensions between subjects, their explanatory urges, and the dominant environmental stories around them. In the absence of such friction, there are no ethics, nor any desire to produce a research account of that tension.

Following on that thesis, I would suggest something further. As Marie Cieri reminded me recently, ethics are hard because if you think very much about them, you have to change something you do. In that sense, a serious engagement with the ethics that produce political ecologies might mean changing the way we as a research community do what we do: explanation. Specifically, I would argue that political ecological explanation loses purchase when it is no longer born of anxiety and when, more importantly, it no longer interrogates the origins of that anxiety within the research contexts in which it operates. More than this, I would suggest that a specific tendency to back away from anxieties as they pertain to the situation of non-humans, on the one hand, and their agency, on the other, creates a symmetrical dead end in explanation. Non-human ethics and non-humans in political ecological explanation are concomitant silences.

To demonstrate my point, I want to present two political ecological accounts, or two explanations, of the same event, one more traditional, and one more… anxious.

The rise and fall of game farming in Montana

§7 Consider this graph, which traces the increase and then radical decrease in the number of licenses in the state of Montana over a decade for new and expanded game farms: enclosed commercial farms for the hunting of wild animals. How big a departure in property law does this rise in game farming represent? Really really big.

The tradition of collective control

§8 Historically, wildlife resources in the US were collectively controlled. This despite the history of the western United States since the 18th century of course being one of violent expropriations.[viii] Legally, wild animals in the US belong to the states in which they reside. These rights were established in the Constitution by default, in so far as all responsibilities not claimed by the federal government become those of the states. This claim was eventually clarified in legal precedent for wildlife through Justice Roger Taney’s 1842 decision regarding fishing rights in Martin versus Waddell. Under this ruling, states held the right to wildlife and individuals could not claim private rights to wildlife simply because they held land on which they were found. This decision, extended and further settled in the landmark case of Geer versus Connecticut, established wildlife as part of the “public trust” – collective property of the people. In other words, just because you own the land, it doesn’t mean you own the fish or elk that move through it. This decision, moreover, finds its precedent in Magna Carta – for 800 years or so, the collective community has productively managed rights to fish and elk. This authority hardened in the early twentieth century as states formed agencies and commissions to enforce laws and form policy.

Enclosure of public wildlife is obviously barred by traditional state management regimes, therefore, since state managers control access to wildlife and disperse nontransferable rights to private individuals. This 150 year-old system is codified in laws in all of the fifty states, which though they vary in their details, are similar in their overall structure and priorities. Any enclosure must, therefore, totally transform the institutional structure for the distribution and transfer of access rights at the state level.

This traditionally popular property regime obviously represents a barrier to accumulation for commercial interests. The assurance that all state citizens are guaranteed, as a right, a non-transferable tag (hunting or fishing licenses) by virtue of citizenship, bars the development of viable markets; you can’t sell what everyone one gets for being a citizen, after all. Only consistent and exclusive rights to harvest would allow accumulation. §9 And this is precisely what the rise of game farming represents.

A political ecologist might see a graph like this one, and pursue it as the explanadum, seeking the political and economic explanation of localized landowner behavior, by explaining the “event” of advancing and then dramatically retreating privatization in ascending scales of progressive context. An explanation of this remarkable flow and ebb of property law might look something like this.

“Alternative agriculture” and the marginalization of the ranch economy

These property regimes occur amidst a larger political economic transition in all western states. Ranching has been the dominant land use of the mountain west for the last century (after speculative farming failed). With the intensification of the feedgrain-cattle complex, the emergence of feedlot centered production systems, and the vertical integration of the industry, meatpacking firms now enjoy increasing monopsony power and producer margins in beef have declined dramatically, putting traditional ranch properties in peril. There is a massive and ongoing shift in ownership throughout the west from private productive ranchlands to “amenity” ownership – where land in current production is purchased by wealthy out-of-state buyers, with interests in non-developed landscapes and a good view.

Recreational and amenity use of these lands has also accelerated in recent years. Rural post-industrial “outbacks,” (using Kendra McSweeney’s term) including former ranching and mining land, have begun to draw recreational users and new consumption economies. Thus, a production squeeze on primary production, especially ranching, coupled with a shift of new investment money into both recreation and development, sets the terms under which the control of elk and other animals are conceived as property. The resulting strategy, supported explicitly by the USDA, has been to alter the fundamental property systems attached to the region’s non-humans – to make public wildlife into private livestock.

But, as noted above, a long legal history contradicts this new configuration. There are two ways, therefore, to execute this transformation. First, you can build rights, institutional geographies where animals are transferred from collective to individual control. Or you can build spaces, physical geographies where these rules simply don’t apply, where elk can become property. As it stands, both forms of enclosure have actually been attempted.

Institutional Enclosure

§10 The first approach, “institutional enclosure,” is most prevalent. Variously euphemized as “Wildlife Partnerships” and “Ranching for Wildlife,” these enclosures are many and diverse, though they essentially follow the same model – rights to animals are disseminated from the state to landowners in large numbers (free of charge, based on potential resident herd population), and the income value from sale and transfer are retained by the landowners and professional outfitting firms who broker the transaction.

§11 Such rebundling of property rights has so far been enacted in eight western states. In each case, owing to the statutory restructuring required to transfer rights from the state to the private sector, legislative action has been necessary. The geography of this transition, therefore, follows more generally the commitment of these states to a larger agenda of privatization. Though these efforts vary, all of these enclosures shift the flow of value from public goods to private pockets, largely for the benefit of non-local hunting elites and to landowners who can not otherwise have statutory ownership of public animals.[ix] Much of this is underlain by a broadly market-based view of natural resource management spearheaded by free market think tanks like the Property and Environment Research Center.

Physical Enclosure: Game Farming

While institutional efforts at enclosure are relatively recent and inchoate, physical efforts have a long history. The enclosures of 19^th century Scotland recorded by Marx, it should be remembered, often represented the establishment of private deer forests. State law in the United States, however, has generally retarded the development of such economies, since capture of wild animals by definition represents a theft of state property.

Economic downturns in traditional agricultural sectors and rapid consolidation have, however, increased then incentive to produce and breed nontraditional game animals on land fenced for that purpose. As a result, there has been a marked expansion in game farms in the last several years, with a boom during the 1990s. Game farm operators offer a controlled fee-hunt, and can usually guarantee trophy animals.

§12 Game farms and “canned hunts” have historically been regulated using the same rules and enforcement mechanisms that apply to menageries, private zoos, and animal exhibits. Though these rules vary, farmed game cannot be captured animals, since those are state property and must, therefore, be either be imported from another state (and therefore from another game farm) or bred on site.

§13 It is difficult to determine the number and total acreage of game farms in the US, both because there is no single federal register, and because the market is highly dynamic. In the state of Montana, as of 2003, there were 77 operating game farm facilities, enclosing some 4,000 animals over 11,000 acres. Licenses for new and expanded facilities rose from 3 in 1993 to 30 in 1996.

And yet by the year 2000, no new licenses were being offered in the state.

A Political Ecological Explanation

One can reasonably and empirically ask how a property configuration, so in-step with hegemonic neoliberal ideology, could burn so brightly, only to expire so quickly? A traditional and laudable political ecology approach to explaining this remarkable shift might (indeed must) assert that 1) such a transformation represents a strategy of accumulation, and that 2) it may likely be opposed by the disenfranchised. Much data exists to support both assertions.

§14 Firstly, this enclosure can be taken to represent an only barely legal extension of the primitive accumulation, as per Marx V. 1. We are again reminded that the original Scottish enclosures of common lands created deer farms. As Somers further described, via Marx, as early as 1847 deer had become captured as an organism of profit, a form of “demurely domesticated cattle.” Likewise, hunting, a prehistoric subsistence practice of the Scottish Highlands, had been turned into an elite sport of accumulation. Displacing smallholders, enclosed deer forests in Somers’ words, were private hunting estates containing “not a single tree” that sprouted “like mushrooms,” and “supplanted sheep.”

§15 The classed and capitalized nature of this relationship is by no means lost on contemporary observers. Local hunters went to tremendous lengths to oppose these efforts. Consider this nicely parallel materialist quote from the sports page of the Rocky Mountain news. Indeed resistance to enclosure is a paramount concern of hunting groups (working class and otherwise), despite a regional devotion to private property rights. §16 “Privatization” of elk is understood to be occurring; their words, not mine. This is coupled with the response of traditional state mangers who are themselves threatened by the reform in property rights, which effectively sideline them in favor of the market. §17 They too oppose institutional reform and articulate their grievances in terms of rights, one prominent Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks officer explained to me that “access is central to democracy… both doctors and ditch diggers should have rights to nature.” The eventual decline in such operations and the continued frustration of institutional reforms might be credited to such opposition – hunter ecopopulism and ecomanagerial defensiveness.

In the end then, if the rise of elk privatization is a form of enclosure, its fall must be the product of labor and value process, a resistance to control of resources, a struggle over access. These are the hallmark of political ecological explanation. The story is convincing and defensible. It benefits from symmetry and has other welcome narrative elements, including resistance by working people.

An alternative story

§18 There is another way to tell the story, however, starting from the elk themselves.

Who are the elk? Elk (Cervus elaphus), sometimes known as red deer or wapiti (from the Shawnee for “white rump”), are large, hoofed, noisy, and social members of the deer family, found throughout both mountain forests and valleys in western North America. They have a life span of about 8 to 12 years in the wild, can be wide-ranging and migratory, and as ruminants, live on grasses, shrubs, and tree leaves.

For our purposes, two things about the species are worth noting. First, elk tend to be extremely uncooperative in confinement. Indeed, they have a remarkable capacity for escape. Between 1994 and 2000, some 79 elk escaped from confinement operations in Montana, with an increasing number of escapes in the last part of the decade. The number of cases of “ingress,” where elk from the outside enter a confined area is less well known, but many cases are reported, as individuals commonly seek out other groups and herds.

§19 Secondly, elk have neurological systems similar to most mammals, and so their cells produce and house Cellular PrP (also called PrPC) a glycoprotein made of about 250 amino acids, with no associated DNA, normally found at the cell surface inserted in the plasma membrane. PrPC production is encoded by a gene, which is shared with humans, (PRNP) located on our chromosome #20. Together, these two factors combine to produce a condition of anxiety that fundamentally undermines efforts at enclosure, through the possibility or perception of transmission and communication of Chronic Wasting Disease.

Chronic Wasting Disease

§20 Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), a neurological disease in wild cervids (deer, elk, etc.). The effects of the disease, seen especially though not exclusively amongst captive herds, are devastating. Infected animals are emaciated, have a wide stance, a lowered head, droopy ears, excessive salivation, display “depression,” increased thirst and urination, and later paralysis and a slow and painful death. §21 The causes of these unpleasant outcomes can be seen in immunohistochemisty examination of the brainstem, which reveals that the disease produces countless small but fatal lesions in brains of infected animals. §22

Though debate remains strong in the scientific literature, the disease is believed to be caused by abnormal infectious proteins (bent versions of PrPC). Amino acid strings like PrPC do not always retain a linear form, and as it turns out these proteins fold into differing shapes. Animals infected with prions make abnormal strings. §23

Such abnormal PrP is common in a number of TSEs including scrapie in sheep. [x] So too, in TSEs, the occurrence of these prions increases through a complex reaction. The abnormal protein itself directs the conversion of the normal host protein to the abnormal form. In scrapie for example, PrPSc converts PrPC into PrPSc. Most importantly, these prions, because they are not alive in any sense, can persist for decades outside of infected bodies. Unlike PrPC, which is easily soluble and digested by proteases, infectious prions can persist for decades in soil, and resist almost any form of cleaning or sterilization, even fire. These latent prions can then re-infect new hosts, setting off the chain reaction of conversion again, potentially across species boundaries.

Other prion diseases are believed to include Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or Mad cow disease), though no record of transmission between the two diseases has been yet demonstrated. Nor has any direct connection yet been established between CWD and Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease, the form of TSE fatal to humans, although risks to those who hunt or consume deer or elk meat are increasingly being touted.

The origins of the disease are unclear, but it is largely believed to have been transmitted from domesticated sheep carrying scrapie to wild herds perhaps as early as the 1960s. The disease spread through wild deer and elk herds throughout the United States and Canada in the past two decades, resulting in massive infection rates amongst wild animal populations.[xi] §24 More critical observers have linked the emergence of CWD specifically to animal research institutions in Northern Colorado, where penned sheep may have left infectious prions behind in soil to later contaminate captive penned wild cervid herds. In other words, CWD has been claimed to be a product of human experimental management science.

§25 We’ll probably never know where it came from, nor its status as a “natural” or anthropogenic reality, but it is clear that the rapid spread of the disease is linked to the wild game industry and the practice of enclosure. The known key transmission vectors are 1) the confinement of animals in close proximity, and 2) the interstate transfer of animals. In other words, the private wildlife market, made more complicated by elk’s insistence on not staying put in confinement.

Responding to CWD

Since the exact rate and cause of the disease’s spread is unclear, control methods for the disease remain varied. While some states in the US continue to seek confinement and control of the disease, many have resorted to mass slaughter of wild animal herds within quarantine zones. The state of Wisconsin has slaughtered tens of thousands of wild deer in an effort to control the spread of the disease. After an outbreak of CWD in Saskatchewan in 2001, more than 8,000 elk from game farms were destroyed.[xii]

§26 Montana acted to largely eliminate the game farm industry altogether in the wake of CWD outbreaks in other states during the mid-1990s. Ballot Initiative I-143, approved by Montana voters in 2000, and enacted as Montana Code 87-4-414 (2), states that: “…the licensee (of a game farm) may not allow the shooting of game animals or alternative livestock,… or of any exotic big game species for a fee or other remuneration on an alternative livestock facility (game farm).” This decision is born at least in part by increasing disease-related concerns and sounded the death-knell for captive herds in the state, since in the absence of fee-hunting the only source of profit from game farming is the sale of animals between states, itself an increasingly reduced and controlled transaction, owing again to disease spread risks.

Thus, the decline and fall of a previously embraced accumulation strategy has a great deal to do with anxieties, §27 about the condition of elk, the risks to people, and the complex relationship between confined animals and human neurology.

Animal Anxieties

But these concerns are further tied to other ambivalences that the situation inspires. A further source of anxiety comes from what confinement means inside the hunting community. §28 Whatever ethical problems one might or might not have with hunting – canned hunts are problematic even for hunting advocates and supporters. The hunting organization of Theodore Roosevelt, the Boone and Crockett Club, does not recognize animals taken behind high fences as hunting, because B&C does not consider it fair chase, a complex ideology concerning the relationship of hunter to hunted, that “does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such game animals.”

§29 Ted Kerasote, hunting advocate and author of the book “Blood Ties,” makes an interesting and ardently materialist argument, one really quite typical of good political ecology. "Wildlife,” he insists, “is not livestock… Like so many things in our world, people want to buy the product (the trophy) rather than experience the process (meeting the animal on its own terrain).” [xiii] In other words – canned hunting and game farming are alienated nature reconsumed in the form of a fetishized commodity. Go Ted.

So too, animal confinement and ownership, especially as highlighted under the spread of CWD, raises anxious questions, especially for ranchers, about where wildlife leave off and livestock start. Most cattle ranchers express ambivalence about whether elk can indeed be “ranched.” Operators of game farms are more cagey and less anxious and commonly describe themselves as ranchers when they are raising animals, but hunting outfitters when they are arranging them for the hunt. The legal advantages of such a strategy are of course obviously instrumental. State game agencies are unable to regulate game ranches and hunting preserves insofar as these animals are domestic livestock. Whereas, these agencies are unable to regulate them to the degree that they have no authority to regulate hunting. [xiv]

Defining where human natures leave off and non-human natures begin is, arguably, the central task of capitalist modernity. And by monopolizing the right to do so, powerful agents reap both rents and influence. Classical political ecology would be quick to interrogate this kind of discursive battleground. Since by rendering elk as livestock a huge amount of political work is done, this is an excellent place to do critical deconstruction. One might ask, for example, how this discourse emerged? How is it promulgated? How has it been opposed or adopted by opposition? I think of Mansfield’s recent work on “what is organic” and “what is a catfish?” as an example of exactly how to proceed with this sort of complex work.

Non-human ethics and explanation in Political Ecology

But these are not by any means the only questions we can ask. §30 Since these game farms are also basically wildlife concentration camps, in which actual animals live and die, actual prions flow, and exchanges are made between soil, elk, and people, they position their jailors as well as their jailed. In this sense, they play an important role in constituting “us” humans as a specific kind of discreet subject, even while materially undermining that discreet separation from non-humans. That is, while physically separating us from the elk – literally with barbed wire - these institutions potentially reunite us with them, by accelerating and directing the flow of proteins through the ecosystem between us.

What further material influences do being “wildlife” or being “livestock” relationally have upon our politics, and our economy, even our identity? How does making something livestock materially domesticate us? How does our socialization change as we interact with animals either through a fence-line or rather out in the open? The way these questions are answered has a bearing both on ethics (what are the rights and standing of elk?) as well as explanation (what agency do elk and prions have in explaining political economy)?

Yet these forms of explanation, concerning the role of non-humans in constituting the human (the anxious explanation) are altogether rare and the silence is symmetrical. That is, indifference in research to the role of non-humans as subjects of capital is reproduced in an indifference to the role of non-humans as agents in political economy. Though this is another paper altogether, such indifference is persistent for at least three reasons. Firstly, critical ecologists have a well-earned distrust of ecocentric environmentalism based on its colonial history. Second, there is a traditional anthropocentrism inherent in critical realism, the unacknowledged ontology and epistemology of political ecology, which allows little opportunity to put non-humans at the center of explanation. Thirdly, the traditional mode of explanation, following a “chain,” suffers from a tyranny of scale that consistently renders the non-human always both local and an outcome of regional or global processes, rather than a driver. Together, I think, these tendencies in explanation reduce the explanatorily power of non-human actors and largely discount their experiences as subjects of marginalization, coercion, and exploitation. More than this, they cause us to overlook the role on the Others in making us who we are.

We are not the elk

Of course, we are not the elk. Indeed it is the production of our differences through our porous interactions that produces the lively and ugly politics between us. In this sense, certain forms of animal ethics, as in the case of PETA, those espousing our essential equivalences, are perhaps the least useful. But in examining our mutual interpellation and the political ecological process of producing those differences, it does indeed become increasingly difficult to know where we end and the elk begin.

And I think this is really my point.

We can’t evacuate the elk from the explanation of what happens to us, fundamentally because the prions are in us both. Resident, inevitable, neural proteins. But their form (bent or not) within us may be related to the flow of things outside. And so our political bodies are by no means discreet; they are instead a conglomerated population of other objects, of other living and non-living things. We are non-human metropoli – whose collective constitutions are porous and ever-changing as a result of our political ecological encounters.

If a transmissible disease can move from the neural tissues of Cervus elaphus to Homo sapiens, this is demonstrably a reckoning call for our elkness. More than this, the disease may very well have found its way into the elk by way of domesticated sheep, and through a vector of animal health science unique to contemporary institutionalized relationships within non-human nature. Ultimately then, if we are not the elk, we are enclosed, here… together with the elk…. Neural proteins flow between us precisely because of our mutual imprisonment across a division of property. §31 As Donna Haraway insists:

“through their reaching into one another, through their “prehensions” or graspings, beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not pre-exist their relatings.” [xv]

What does this mean for explanation in political ecology? It is not enough simply to “do more ‘real’ ecology” – a viable complaint, but one so-often lodged against political ecology to have become somewhat banal. Instead it means identifying the specific non-human actors at work in constituting not only the networks of power we inhabit, but also in constituting who we are. Even more, it means identifying how specific humans and non-humans act in the process of our mutual constitution and our collective political subjection. This does not mean “unconditionally loving” elk, prions, or cattle, nor any other unrealistic modernist romance of the non-human[xvi] predicated on a cartographic ethics that though stable is ultimately inert. Rather it means understanding and respecting their causal power in constituting our mutual relationship, and embracing the anxiety spawned by their vulnerability, like our own, to the capitalized networks we together produce.

§32 One way forward from this follows the inspirational animal geographies of Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel and others, whose critique of anthropocentrism would lead us to understand the elk as subjects and agents. Elk do X, which recreates the political conditions under which people do Y, and so on. In this way of thinking, we are co-inhabitants of our collective zoopolis.[xvii] We, the elk, the prions, we are all enmeshed in a network of power. Starting from here, there are interests, struggles, and outcomes to explain with important non-humans a part of networked explanations. As Whatmore and Thorne aptly put it, wild “animals have long been routinely imagined and organized within multiple circuits of social power, which (re)configure them in important ways.” [xviii]

But to leave it here, with networks, I feel, is to invite a retreat to “stakeholders” and “stakeholding” that is too typical a part of uncritical explanation. This nuance merely extends the courtesy of stakeholding to non-humans, never inquiring into our mutual constitution.

As an extension of this then, there is another way forward. This is to understand how the elk make us who we are – how they become subjects and how we are simultaneously intepellated.

How do cattle herd ranchers who, as Julia Haggerty pointed out to me, are ultimately servants of the animals rather than vice versa?

How do wolves produce biologists?

How do trees grow foresters?

And where do the divergent ethics of each of these communities come from? What parts of their ethics are materially impelled by prions and other things - calves, radio collars, mesquite tress?

What I am advocating then is a kind of hard-headed materialist animism, an anti-humanist phenomenology of power that locks together the things inside us with the things outside. This is to explore what, in his book The Others, Paul Sheppard calls “ontogeny” - a pattern of development in which we come to be ourselves by understanding “that which is unbridgeable between us” [xix] but ontogeny informed by political ecology, which historicizes these very differences, rather than naturalizing them.

None of this is to abandon political ecology as we practice it, of course, since this is exactly where the elk’s experience of the horrors of capitalized wildlife management and our own concerns about equity, power, and economy merge, through a state of anxiety… a discomfort with the realities of the economy born of our desires.

And there is plenty of steam left for more traditional critique. James Kroll, aka “Dr. Deer,” a prominent neoconservative private ranch advocate in Texas, ironically articulates and unites these themes, (although without attendant ethical anxieties): He asserts that wildlife are produced, albeit better off in what could only be called a state of domination, behind eight-foot fences:

§33 “We balance sex and age ratios… we manage habitat. We control the population… I want to leave the deer herd better than it was before we came.”

But as he also admirably asserts, game management is an ideology of economic power.

§34 “[Public] game management,” he insists, “is the last bastion of communism.”[xx]

§35 Well God damn straight it is. And any normative practice becomes political ecology when it emerges from the ethical anxieties that a war on elk and on labor together represent. Political ecologists would therefore do well to make an explanatory stand right there, in a position relative to capital’s enclosure of… everything, on the one hand, but also on the anxious side of explaining our species history, vigorously investigating how elk and all the other non-human parts of ourselves made us who we are.

References

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