On nonnative species (aka "invasive" species)

I am currently trying to finish an article on nonnative species. What follows is a small blog post about some of the issues around nonnative species. However, I have been provoked to write this article/post by conversations with (and resources shared), by Kevin C, Vasile S, and Matthew R (I didn't get their permission, so I am not including last names right now).

"Human beings shorten all food chains in the web, eliminate most intermediaries and focus all biomass flows on themselves. Whenever an outside species tries to insert itself into one of these chains, to start the process of complexification again, it is ruthlessly expunged as a 'weed' (a term that includes 'animal weeds' such as rats and mice)." --Manuel Delanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, p.108. Emphasis in the original.

(1) Issues surrounding nonnative species (both plants and animals), is one of the perennial questions in environmental ethics, environmental studies, resource and animal management, and a variety of other fields concerned with the environment. I will also be the first to admit that the issue is complex. However, despite the complexity, it is also an issue that is often spoken of in the most apocalyptic tones and terminology. We can get this in the more common term of invasive species.  Tim Low has argued, "As any invasion biologist will tell you it’s a threat more ominous than the greenhouse effect, indus- trial pollution or ozone depletion" (Feral Futures, p. 295. Cited in Nigel Clark's "The Demon-Seed"). And as Chew and Carroll have pointed out in their op-ed in The Scientist, "invasion biology, like epidemiology, is a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies.  This necessarily constrains its research program and colors its communications, both internal and external, in very particular ways." In other words, the hyperbolic communication around nonnative species allows us only hyperbolic reactions. We can have a relationship to nonnative species that is only permanent war or total eradication.

(2) A lot needs to be unpacked when we talk about nonnative species being a problem. What makes a nonnative species a problem? A lot of lip service gets paid to ecological balance, but that isn't really a thing (ecology not having much to do with balance, hippies be damned). Sometimes by problems we mean problems for humans -- that certain species eat our gardens, run onto our roads, or attack our pets. These are issues, but are they really issues of nonnative species? So, when we say that an animal species is negatively impacting the ecosystem, what does that mean? Are we complaining about, for example, a decrease in species richness?  Mark Sagoff does a good job on the complexity of talking about harm when we talk about nonnative species, especially with the question begging that certain definitions of harm are used.

(3) This is why the issue of nonnative speices is often overstated. For the most part what we see is the occasional issue of nonnative species being used to justify a vaster belief in the problem of nonnative species. It is a little like pointing to the European colonization of the Americas as reasons to oppose immigration. There are certainly studies exploring the broader question species richness and nonnative species. Which isn't to say this is a settled question in the environmental science literature, but at the same time these are not cranks, there are real debates around species richness and nonnative species.

(4) Also, just as we know that immigration does not usually hurt jobs and resources, it usually helps it (again, not universally), we are just now beginning to explore the ways that nonnative species can be used for conservation techniques, something that has been routinely ignored in most studies of nonnative species. For more on this, see this debate: "The Potential Conservation Value of Non-Native Species," "Revisiting, etc", and "Toward a More Balanced View of Non-Native Species."

(5) Why do we tend to focus on the destructive aspects of certain nonnative species, rather than the overall issue around nonnative species? It is here that I find Banu Subramaniam's work particularly on point: there really is something about the language and desire around nonnative species that is rooted in a broader xenophobia.  This isn't anti-realism, but the sort of basic situated knowledge questions that an early Donna Haraway raises. There are really good reasons to look at the ways that this stuff gets framed in order to understand research programs and policies, particularly to understand which ones get attention, funding, and support. On that last point in particular, see Helmreich's "How Scientists Think; About 'Natives,' for Example."

(6) If everything of 1-5 is correct, then I think we can agree with Paul Robbins that "It is not
species, but sociobiological networks that are invasive."  That is to say that nonnative species are not only questions of ethics, but also politics and policy. You know, constructivist political ecology. Not that ethics will not be a part of those issues, but we could in the short term engage in management systems that are not principally non-lethal, and in the long term target sociobiological networks as opposed to individual species. But, of course, that is not where we are in terms of political will. There is no real desire to discover, spend money on, and implement these sorts of management systems.

One of the reasons that we do not spend time on developing non-lethal management techniques, and one of the reasons we spend a lot of time publicizing the problems of nonnative species, is that people like hunting, they like killing, and they like eating meat. While Chamayou's work is horribly anthropocentric, I think his arguments about a cynegetic power (hunting power), is right on. Likewise, if you look into MacKenzie's The Nature of Empire, you see the strong connection that hunting has to conservation. Conservation has been stapled to hunting for a long time. And what we need now is not conservation. We need ecological or ecofeminist constructivism, not more natural conservationism. One that can honor and respond to what Lori Gruen has called the wild dignity of nonnative species.

Elden on Chamayou's Manhunts

Stuart Elden has a short article on Chamayou's Manhunts. It is both interesting in terms the explicating Chamayou's work (where Elden quickly ties together Manhunts, with the later work on drones), but also connecting Chamayou's work to Elden's work on territory. Which is a good time to tell you all to read Elden's The Birth of Territory, if you haven't already.

I earlier reviewed Chamayou's Manhunts, and discussed it's relationship to critical animal studies, here.

Hunting power, a correlate to pastoral power. On Grégorie Chamayou's Manhunts.

Jason Read has an interesting and smart post on Grégorie Chamayou's book Manhunts: A Philosophical History. I have been meaning to do a post on that book for a while, and this is a good opportunity. So, make sure to go read Jason Read's post first, then come read this post. Don't worry, we'll wait for you.

First, a couple of quick additions to the feel of the book. It is relatively short--I read it in two afternoons. As Jason Read points out, there is a slightly disjointed feel to the book, as we move from one historical point of the manhunt to another. However, Chamayou does an excellent job coming in reminding us of how this all links up (and if we don't get it the first time, it has a well done conclusion tying it all together). The disjointedness has a theoretical point. Chamayou specifically contrasts his project to Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat, because for Girard the scapegoat has an ahistorical character. Chamayou wants to try to ground his work in specificity (one can see this also being a critique of Agamben, that Chamayou also contrasts his work with).
Despite the contrast, Manhunts has the feel of a book by Agamben, or Daniel Heller-Roazen, and I mean that in the best sense. Whatever problems I have had with Agamben, I have always enjoyed reading his books, and Manhunts has that remarkable pacing I have always found satisfying in Agamben's books. Now, it is pretty clear that Chamayou is both anthropocentric and a humanist (the book ends with a cry for universal humanism, and the ambivalent nature of humanism with its possibilities for universalism are alluded to more than once), but I still think this is an excellent book for those of us working in posthumanism and critical animal studies.

The nature of this book is to distill and explain the logics and diagrams of a particular form of power--cynegetic (hunting) power. This is exciting because the rise of analysis of biopolitics has taken a problematic direction. In the thanatopolitical understanding of the biopolitical, the Nazi Lager comes to have an almost platonic form of evil, so that analysis of biopolitics come to (a) see everything as an extension of the camp, and (b) all other evils come to be understood only in how close they come to reflecting Auschwitz. While a thorough understanding of the diagrams of power that made the Holocaust possible seems utterly necessary, this platonic evil comes to make analysis of power nearly impossible. The cure is to do something like Chamayou has done, and instead develop genealogies of power that is not just biopolitics (Foucault, I feel, would be the first to agree). So, back to cynegetic power.

As Chamayou notes (and I have elsewhere) in both Plato and Aristotle hunting is seen as an essential part of political theory and philosophical anthropology.

In the Sophist, Plato emphasizes the fact that hunting cannot be reduced to tracking wild animals. Among the different branches of the cynegetic art there is also an art of manhunting, which is in turn subdivided into several categories: “Let us define piracy, manstealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name, as hunting with violence.” Although not all these forms are equally tolerated—for example, Plato condemns piracy, “the chasing of men on the high seas,” because it transforms those who practice it into “cruel and lawless hunters”—war appears, by contrast, to be a form of legitimate hunting that is worthy of citizens. Aristotle says much the same: “the art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit.” Greek philosophers conceive manhunting as an “art” or technology of power. There is an “art of acquiring slaves.” From the outset, domination is examined in a technological perspective: what must masters do to be masters? On what procedures does their power depend? (p.5)

Chamayou is particularly interested in charting this cynegetic power, particularly as a correlate to Foucault's pastoral power.
There are several of us in animal studies who are engaging with Foucault's understanding of pastoral power in thinking through human domination of other animals. In particular, you should read Anand Pandian's "Pastoral Power in the Postcolony" in Animals and the Human Imagination, and read Nicole Shukin's "Tense Animals: On Other Species in Pastoral Power." They are both, actually, really good article, and you should actually read them. Chamayou, however, is not just interested in pastoral power, but its correlate or opposition. Here, another long quotation:

Michel Foucault located, on the basis of Hebrew tradition, the emergence of a pastoral power. But I think this genealogy is missing an essential component. To what, in fact, is the pastorate opposed? In the Old Testament, Foucault explains, “the bad kings, those who are denounced for having betrayed their task, are designated as bad shepherds, not in relation to individuals, but always in reference the whole.” But the figure of the bad king cannot be reduced to the case of the failed shepherd. The real counterpoint to pastoral power, what is opposed to it not simply as a defective form of itself but as its true antithesis, its inverted double and at the same time its foil, is Nimrod, the hunter of men. In the long history of the thematization of power that began in Hebrew tradition, there are in fact two opposing terms: Abraham and Nimrod, pastoral power and cynegetic power. What are the characteristics of this opposition? The first principle of pastoral power is its transcendence. God is the supreme shepherd, but he entrusts his flock to subordinate shepherds. The schema is that of the human shepherds’ entire dependency and complete submission to divine authority. With Nimrod the opposite is true: far rom receiving his people from the hand of God, he captures it by force, with his own hands. The reign of the hunter-king is not only the first power on Earth but also the first power that is specifically terrestrial, whose authority is not inherited from a transcendent source. Nimrod is the first figure of the immanence of power. His rationality is that of a physics rather than a theology of power. This is the first major characteristic of the opposition between cynegetic power and pastoral power: the immanence of the power relationship or the transcendence of the divine law as the foundation of political authority. (pp. 14-15)

While Chamayou will frequently disturb this easy division in his book, it still basically functions throughout. Cynegetic power is fundamentally concerned with accumulation (particularly primitive accumulation) and massification. Pastoral power is concerned with growth and good government. It is concerned with the individual health and life of those in its sway. Cynegetic power is none of these things. It is the logic of the levy and raid. It divides, but does not individualize. Abraham grew a flock, Nimrod conquered an empire.
Chamayou's book is concerned with following the historical development of the concept of cynegetic power. We spend time with colonization and the hunt of indigenous people, hunting of enslaved people, the hunt of the poor in Europe, the hunting of lynching gangs, the police hunt, the hunt of foreigners, the hunt of Jewish people, and the current hunt for undocumented workers. The concern for questions of capital, race, and colonization is a nice corrective to certain texts of current biopolitics that finds within the Nazi Lager the entirety of modern political thought (yes, I mean Agamben and Esposito). One could wish that Chamayou did not take the man of the Manhunt so literally, and take seriously some of the more obviously gendered manhunts. In particular, the withhunt seems glaringly obvious in its omission. Luckily, Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch has us taken care of on that front. One could also wish he had taken a serious consideration in the ways that hunting of nonhuman animals have contributed to some of these problems, like the connection between hunting and colonial imperialism. Luckily, John M. MacKenzie's The Empire of Nature has us covered on that front. Let us, though, continue on charting the characteristics of cynegetic power.
Chamayou further argues:

manhunting becomes a means of waging cynegetic war—a kind of war that has the following characteristics: (l) it does not take the form of a direct confrontation, but of a process of tracking down; (2) the power relationship is marked by a radical dissymmetry in weapons; (3) its structure is not that of a duel: a third term is mobilized as a mediation; (4) the enemy is not recognized as such, that is, as an equal—he is only a prey; (5) use is made of nonnoble means related to policing or hunting rather than to the classical military register. (p. 73)

Several important points here. A cynegetic war is not a traditional war. Clausewitz famously compared war to a dual, however the entire point of hunting is to never engage in a dual. This is why, for Chamayou's latest book The Theory of the Drone (not yet translated), he explains that the drone turned the battlefield into a global hunting ground. Also, Chamayou's opposition to the view of the hunt as being opposed to a dual is part, as Jason Read pointed out above, his opposition to Hegel's master/slave dialectic.

Cynegetic power is seeks to accumulate, it seeks to capture, it takes territory, it divides and massifies. It sees the other not as an equal or a foe, but as prey, and seeks the subjugation and/or eradication of this prey. I am sure you can see that even though Chamayou is horribly humanist and anthropocentric, I see potential in the concept of cynegetic power. This is something I hope to take up in another post, but the question of non-native ("invasive") species is one that is rooted in cynegetic power. Or at least, one we will have trouble understanding if we only have recourse to pastoral power. Why, after all, if there are non-lethal alternatives to dealing with non-native species (assuming we even do), do we so often turn to hunting? To policies of "contain, control, and eradicate"? Or, as the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy once put it, a "mega kill, poison, and burn" plan? As I said, I hope to come back to this, but I think we will need recourse to cynegetic power to understand such moves.