Before the Conservation Fix: Ecological Displacement and the Making of Nature as Regulatory Subject

Abstract

Liberal states must reconcile extraction-driven economic growth with environmental protection. While literature on environmental fixes documents how conservation measures can ease this tension, it has yet to fully explore the conditions, which normalise the transformation of overexploitation into an ecological, rather than economic, problem. Using the entanglement of British Columbia's wolf cull, resource industries and endangered caribou as a case study, I draw from conservation archives, economic data and theories of liberal environmental governance to show how balancing calls for both extraction and environmental protection allows for the state to engage in ‘ecological displacement’, where regulation is shifted from economy to ecology. Further, I argue that this displacement is dependent on pre-existing domination of animal life. These findings suggest that understanding the proliferation of what geographers call conservation fixes requires engagement with conditions of the liberal state that make lethal ecological intervention more available than regulation of extractive interests.