Calvin Benjamin Edward

Wolves were declared extinct in Oregon in the 1940’s after a century-long eradication campaign by the state government. However wolves returned to Oregon in the 1990’s after migrating across state lines from Idaho. The species’ return is heralded as a success story for environmental restoration by many, even as some rural residents see it as an existential threat to strained agrarian economies. Wolves continue to expand territory under the protection of a controversial state management plan. These expansions have shifted the seasonal movement patterns of livestock and wildlife on open-ranges, unsettling long-established property demarcations. This has exacerbated rural concerns that the land is being changed and revalued, opening the door for encroaching government agencies, real estate speculators, developers, and exurbanites making claims to land. In turn, anti-wolf sentiments are being conjoined with anti-state, anti-development, and anti-outsider rhetorics to inform rural Oregonian politics with growing intensity. This project will ethnographically investigate what values wolves, humans, and other animals give to land. By treating land itself as a complex set of practices that are in some ways responsive to the actions of animals, my research will investigate multispecies political alliances as they emerge through territorial disputes and mutual antagonisms.