Assistant Teaching Professor Dr. Katrina Maggiulli presented their paper “Containing Hybrid Threat & Controlling Genetic Futures: Policing Species Borders in Threatened & Endangered Conservation” at the 2023 Society for Literature Science and the Arts “Alien” conference in Tempe, Arizona.
While scientists will typically agree that species boundaries and definitions are difficult (if not impossible) to definitively mark—the processes of evolution producing inherent flux which problematizes their discernibility—nevertheless conservation will often treat species as if they are clearly delineated and actively work to maintain their separation. Policy such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA) support such static and bounded views on species by building legal demarcations around species boundaries to shore up protections—for if we don’t know what a species is, how do we know what we are protecting? These static views are thus taken up in conservation practice, managing organismal agency by policing the boundaries between species and thereby creating materially specific species realities motivated by human-derived frameworks. The paper examined two cases of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) management of hybrids in Threatened & Endangered species conservation: the red wolf and the Florida panther, two flagship species of the ESA. She demonstrated how the USFWS variously controls, directs, and contains hybridity to maintain essentialist, purist, species ideals. Dr. Maggiulli argued that conservation is a fundamentally creative practice of worldmaking that brings materially specific species futures into being while preventing others. Attentiveness to who nonhuman animals themselves identify as kin (through processes of mating and reproduction), rather than merely using human-structured frameworks of species-being is therefore paramount to account for nonhuman agency in conservation practice. Such attention will force us to rethink the place of hybrid individuals in conservation practice.
