Political ecologies of livestock predation: Agrarian change, farming subjectivities and human-wildlife conflict in the European Uplands

Abstract

The European uplands are undergoing a significant transition towards a post-productive countryside, centred on the provision of socioenvironmental benefits and the consumption of nature through tourism and amenity development. It is in this context that the rewilding of European uplands is being employed as a strategy to revalorise lands rendered marginal by the confluence of increasingly neoliberal agrarian systems and expanding conservation regimes. This paper aligns with a growing seam of research that seeks to develop a political ecology of Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC), offering a productive and critical corrective to the technical rendering of farming practices and strategies in much of the conservation science literature. However, we argue that beyond revealing the political-economic conditions which generate the material realities of livestock predation, a political ecology of HWC should also demonstrate how these conditions are generative of particular emotive and political responses of environmental subjects. We present case studies from Skye in Scotland and Somiedo in Spain, that demonstrate how political-economic transitions to a post-productivist countryside shape material vulnerability to predation, and in doing so draw strong emotional responses from farmers whose subjectivities are constructed through practice-based, everyday, and embodied engagements with landscapes. Drawing on agrarian studies, critical conservation studies, and relational and feminist approaches to subjectivity, our work argues that a political ecology of livestock predation must account for how agrarian change is both shaping farming practices and farmer’s exposure to predations, and the personal, sociocultural and emotive responses of farmers to carnivore presence.