Rewilding Scotland's Highlands: Life, death and the labour of nonhumans

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Juxtaposed with the harm of the Anthropocene, rewilding offers hope for intervening in the ongoing processes of ecological loss which have come to define our present, forwarded as a form of conservation capable of redressing denuded and damaged natures and a set of actions for returning freedom and autonomy to nonhuman worlds. 'Rewilding Scotland's Highlands: Life, Death and the Labour of Nonhumans' is based on 12-months of ethnographic research with conservationists and rewilders in the Scottish Highlands. In attending to the work of rewilding and the daily labour of conservationists in this region, this study develops an understanding of rewilding's emergent relationships with the plants and animals made a part of its project. This thesis contributes to a nascent ethnographic understanding of rewilding and its analogous forms of conservation action. It is attentive to the work of rewilding in relation to political and ethical questions regarding the lives of nonhuman beings. It makes the case for a nonhuman anthropology that attends to the structure and organisation of rewilding in the Highlands, examining the production of wild habitats through infrastructural interventions, the management and culling of deer, the wild labour of nonhuman beings and disturbance regimes - and how these interventions, and the development of rewilding, are tied up with the region's particular arrangement of land management and geographical history. The study suggests that rewilding transforms natures through complex and novel relationships with nonhuman beings. These nonhumans are both acted on - for example by being scared by 'human-wolves' or killed as part of culls - and are folded into the work of rewilding - for example through the translocation of beavers and pine marten to perform certain tasks in the landscape, or the planting of trees as infrastructure. Thus, wildness is being brought into being through the moderation, exclusion and contribution of different forms of work - both human and nonhuman. Approached in this way, this study offers an analysis of (a) how rewilding is being enacted in the region and (b) how natures are being (re)made in the Anthropocene. In doing so, it describes the human-nonhuman relationships which are being worked, and grown, into the new wilds of Scotland's Highlands.This research is an in-depth empirical and ethnographic study of rewilding in a region made subject to significant historical and contemporary changes to the governance of its nature and land. It is pertinent at a moment when we find ourselves not only tangled up with processes of loss and destruction, but also with attempts to restore and produce natures: the (re)production of nonhuman worlds. In interrogating these works, this research examines the potential and the limits of rewilding, in its present form, for new liberatory assemblages of nature, contesting rewilding as its being enacted and raising a set of questions presently novel and largely absent from public discourse.