Environmental policy is largely patterned on and patterns immigration policy. The xenophobic descriptions of invasive species by definition have refer to pristine natural states—but from when: 20, 100, 200, 2000, 20000 years ago? Which gets to be the natural state to which an environment should be returned? The threat of non-native plants to local organisms follows the same discursive logic as that uses in, on and for immigrant humans. However, animals challenge global containment strategies and their capacity to disregard jurisdictions and borders places them at the front of the post nationalist political discourse. Whose jurisdiction are Canada and Greylag geese under when they traverse many nations? Can one nation issue hunting licenses to shoot them, when another needs them in a tourist attraction, or for grazing back the traffic islands?

Animals rehearse new ideas of political status, even as, and because, they remain subhuman. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel have written on this phenomena in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, showing the direct role that animal inhabitants play in defininng places. For instance, if the complex political status of migratory Roma gypsy were rethought, experience, legislation and international agreements addressing migratory animals, including geese would be drawn upon. Both humans and non-humans depend on preserved commons for example, and the very lands set aside for animals is often used by homeless or propertyless humans.

Although animal models are the basis of the biological sciences, and contemporary medical knowledge, it is the use of animal as social and political models that I make explicit in the OOZ project.

Previous Slide :: Next Slide

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32