Worlding and weirding with beaver: a more-than-human political ecology of ecosystem engineering

Journal article

Abstract:: Scientists and policy-makers promote 'Nature-based Solutions' to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetary-scale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper critically examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12,000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies world-making projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beaver helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of Nature-based Solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a new framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding.

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Publisher:: Wiley
Journal:: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers More from this journal
Volume:: 50
Issue:: 2
Article number:: e12698
Publication date:: 2024-07-11
Acceptance date:: 2024-06-30
DOI:: 10.1111/tran.12698
EISSN:: 1475-5661
ISSN:: 0020-2754

Language:: English
Keywords:: biopolitics

Britain

nature-based solutions

weird

niche construction

beaver
Pubs id:: 2011346
Local pid:: pubs:2011346
Deposit date:: 2024-07-01

Copyright holder:: Jamie Lorimer
Rights statement:: © 2024 The Author(s). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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