“No-otter zone”: Endangered species in spaces of conservation

• In Event: The politics of non-fungibility

Abstract

Nearly exterminated in the fur trade in earlier centuries, the southern (“California”) sea otter was listed as endangered in 1977. Concerned about the vulnerability to an oil spill of the small remaining population on the central California coast, around 1990, wildlife managers attempted to relocate nearly one-tenth of these otters to an island controlled by the US Navy in the Channel Islands archipelago, over sixty miles away across open ocean. This was a failure; otters disappeared from the island. Wildlife managers were perplexed because they believed the site possessed ideal habitat (kelp forest) within otters’ historical range. They next tried releasing “ecologically naïve” young otters into the Elkhorn Slough, an estuarial area south of Santa Cruz; here otter numbers increased. Meanwhile, managers also tried to concentrate otters in a specific portion of the central coast, declaring a “no-otter zone” elsewhere along the coast; this too was a failure and the ban was lifted in 2012.

Using documentary research, this paper evaluates these projects’ rationalities in their practices of conservation. The arc of otter conservation strategies revealed the willfulness of otters in terms of attachment to spaces, and a need for scientists to reevaluate their assumptions about the fungibility of space, i.e. whether habitats that seemed equivalent to humans would be received that way by otters. Though slough release strategy seemed to suit otters better, there are ongoing tensions between efforts to conserve or restore animals at the species level versus habitat/ecosystem levels, which the spatial politics of conservation help illuminate.

Author

• Christina Dunbar-Hester, University of Southern California