Bordered bioregions: the rhetorical function of characterization in wolf reintroduction and recovery

The management of iconic predatory species such as the gray wolf provides a valuable index of human-nature relations. The wolf is incorporated into discursive constructions of political power in unique ways, and it may function as an ideograph, or an ideological discursive tool. As both a symbolic mobilizer of human sympathies/ antipathies and an influential material presence within ecosystems, the wolf is worthy of study for how its characterization in discourse resonates rhetorically and materially. This study uses discourse analytic tools to examine tensions in the rhetorical discourse of management decisions related to the gray wolf's reintroduction in the United States. The study focuses on the reintroduction and recovery of the gray wolf in the American West and considers broader themes related to the separation between humans and nature, wildlife management, and the ways in which human and nonhuman bodies alike are disciplined by the discourse of political borders. Engaging the concepts of territoriality, power, ideology and human-nature hybridity while working from specific findings regarding wolf characterization, this study explores how the wolf's presence is both enabled and constrained rhetorically by human political discourse regimes that may fragment the species as an ecological presence in bioregions by imposing on it a rhetoric of political borders.

BORDERED BIOREGIONS: THE RHETORICAL FUNCTION OF CHARACTERIZATION IN WOLF REINTRODUCTION AND RECOVERY by Aaron Thomas Phillips A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2015 Copyright © Aaron Thomas Phillips 2015 All Rights Reserved The Univers i ty of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Aaron Thomas Phillips has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Maureen Mathison , Chair April 10, 2015 Date Approved Jennifer Andrus , Member April 10, 2015 Date Approved Danielle Endres , Member April 10, 2015 Date Approved Glen Feighery , Member April 16, 2015 Date Approved Thomas N. Huckin , Member April 10, 2015 Date Approved and by Kent Ono , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of Communication and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT The management of iconic predatory species such as the gray wolf provides a valuable index of human-nature relations. The wolf is incorporated into discursive constructions of political power in unique ways, and it may function as an ideograph, or an ideological discursive tool. As both a symbolic mobilizer of human sympathies/ antipathies and an influential material presence within ecosystems, the wolf is worthy of study for how its characterization in discourse resonates rhetorically and materially. This study uses discourse analytic tools to examine tensions in the rhetorical discourse of management decisions related to the gray wolf's reintroduction in the United States. The study focuses on the reintroduction and recovery of the gray wolf in the American West and considers broader themes related to the separation between humans and nature, wildlife management, and the ways in which human and nonhuman bodies alike are disciplined by the discourse of political borders. Engaging the concepts of territoriality, power, ideology and human-nature hybridity while working from specific findings regarding wolf characterization, this study explores how the wolf's presence is both enabled and constrained rhetorically by human political discourse regimes that may fragment the species as an ecological presence in bioregions by imposing on it a rhetoric of political borders. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. vi LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 Study Goals ..............................................................................................................3 Terminology .............................................................................................................4 Research Questions ..................................................................................................5 Context: Grey Wolf Reintroduction .........................................................................6 The Ideographic and Ecological Wolf .....................................................................8 Theoretical Orientation and Contribution ..............................................................11 Method ...................................................................................................................19 2 CHARACTERIZING WHAT WOLVES ARE .....................................................28 Data Selection ........................................................................................................29 Canis Lupus Indistinctus: Binomial Nomenclature and its Discontents ................32 An Experiment in Nonessentialism: Modifying the Gray Wolf ............................37 Attributing Alien-ness: the Operationalization of a Nonessential Experiment .....46 Visually Characterizing What Wolves Are ............................................................54 Conclusions ............................................................................................................60 3 CHARACTERIZING WHAT WOLVES DO .......................................................63 Theoretical Orientation and Contribution ..............................................................65 Population: Questions of Numbers and a Standard for "Viability" .......................66 Managing for Dispersal and Population: The Case of Wyoming ..........................96 Conclusion .............................................................................................................99 4 CHARACTERIZING WOLF THREATS AND BENEFITS ..............................102 Theoretical Orientation and Contribution ............................................................103 Characterizing Wolves' Effects on Ecosystems: Science Weighs in ..................104 The Idaho Legislature Cries Wolf, and the Echo Resonates in Washington .......113 Mitigating the Threat of Wolves: An Idaho City Speaks Out .............................128 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................141 5 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS ...........................................................147 Summary of Study ...............................................................................................147 Interpretation ........................................................................................................152 Possible Directions for Future Research ..............................................................164 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................166 v LIST OF TABLES 1.1. Chapter 2 Data .......................................................................................................24 1.2 Chapter 3 Data .......................................................................................................25 1.3 Chapter 4 Data .......................................................................................................26 2.1 Concordance Data for "Canadian" .........................................................................40 2.2 Image Type and Features in Official Communications about Wolves ..................55 3.1 Background Usage of the Term "Buffer" ..............................................................93 LIST OF FIGURES 3.1 Wyoming Game and Fish Department's Map of Wolf Management Areas .........98 4.1 Washington Residents Against Wolves Billboard ...............................................123 4.2 Little Red with Gun……………………………………………………... ..........127 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On December 6, 2012, Wolf 832f, a female gray wolf popular among wolf-watchers in Yellowstone National Park (YNP), was legally shot and killed by a hunter in Wyoming after she crossed the Eastern border of YNP and entered a trophy game hunting area (Schweber, 2012). Wolf hunting had only recently become legal in Wyoming, where 66 wolves were taken by "public harvest" between October of 2012 and the end of that year (Wyoming Game and Fish et al., 2013, p. 12). The hunt was controversial. Amid similar controversy, wolf 832f's forebears were reintroduced into YNP and central Idaho in the mid-1990s (Phillips & Smith, 1996) under provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) after having been effectively eliminated from the area early in the 20th century by a government-funded extermination campaign (Coleman, 2004; Lopez, 1978). Today, the controversy is as heated as it has ever been, particularly with respect to hunting wolves, which remains "perhaps the most divisive and potentially explosive issue in the entire wolf debate" (Nie, 2003, p. 68). The reaction to 832f's death was explosive indeed. Media outlets worldwide covered the story (Hull, 2013), documenting the visceral, anthropomorphic response to her death. Wolf 832f was characterized as an "amazing mother" by one wolf advocate (Schweber, 2012). Others hailed her as a "rock star" and a "consummate professional" (Dax, 2013). Although other responses to the wolf's death were more measured, 2 suggesting that "killing wolves has been part of the deal since the beginning" (Dax, 2013), the strong reaction to 832f's death speaks to the intensity of the human relationship with wolves. This relationship is perhaps a uniquely charged one, as wolves are a prominent character in the Western folkloric imagination (Coleman, 2004; Lopez, 1987; Nie, 2001, 2003; Zipes, 1983) and in many indigenous cosmologies (Clarke, 1999; Lopez, 1978). A wolf, like an orangutan (Sowards, 2006), a gorilla (Milstein, 2013), or a large dolphin such as an orca (Milstein, 2008; 2011), is a bridge species, one with which humans often identify as we "polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves" (Haraway, 1978, p. 37). The view of this mirror, though, may often be distorted, as the wolf's symbolic resonance often outstrips its physical presence, rendering the animal subject to both "pathological animosity" (Nie, 2003, p. 4) and the emotional attachment of anthropomorphism that recasts a wolf as a "rock star." A wolf like 832f is a potent and mobile symbol in a potent and mobile body. Just as the animal itself moves through ecosystems with ease, what is said and done about this animal ripples outward into the broader discourse of human-animal relations, the construction of political power, and the configuration of ecology. This study focuses on the rhetoric of territory and political borders, which are important discursive formations in the ongoing debate about the place of wolves in ecosystems and minds. Like that of 832f, the gray wolf's story in the American West is about territory and the crossing of borders. Whereas European colonizers once crossed a figurative border-a frontier-into the wolf's terrain and hunted them to extirpation (extinction within a portion of a species' range), wolves reintroduced by those colonizers' descendants now routinely flow across political borders. As 832f's story attests, the consequences can be lethal for wolves and 3 can mobilize strong human responses. The construction and configuration of borders are discursive practices (Flores, 2003; Ono, 2012) that delimit territory, enact exclusion/inclusion and define material consequences for border-crossing subjects. Borders bring to bear issues of ideology, power, territory, law, ethics, and culture. Wolf 832f's life and death shed light on these issues. At the moment of her death, 832f's body bore the symbolic and material traces of conflicting yet overlapping ideologies: a $4,000 Global Positioning System (GPS) collar placed on her by researchers and a hunter's bullet, worth perhaps half a dollar. Although research and hunting are not the sole human interactions with wolves, the contrast and its enactment by political power structures, particularly borders, is nonetheless notable. Study Goals This research is meant to address problems in human-nature relations by analyzing discourse related to the reintroduction of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and its subsequent recovery. In this process of mapping discursive constructions of the wolf, I consider questions of power and ideology, long a primary concern among scholars of critical cultural theory, discourse analysis, and environmental communication (Bhabha, 1994; Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Demo, 2005; Fairclough, 2001; Flores, 2003; Foucault, 1972, 2007; McKerrow, 1989; Plec, 2007). This analysis will provide valuable insight into how discourses construct characterizations of the gray wolf in particular and, more generally, how these discursive formations configure ecology and arrange social reality. Ultimately, the goals of this study are threefold: First, to further the scholarly conversation on human-nature relations; second, to extend earlier research on the 4 reintroduction of wolves in the American West (Clarke, 1999; Hardy-Short & Short, 2000; Salvador & Clarke, 2011); and third, to build a linkage between theoretical and practical discussions of how human and nonhumans are managed and disciplined by discourses that establish territory and enact inclusion/exclusion. Terminology This study applies discourse analytic tools to identify how discourses construct (and deconstruct) a niche for the species through the process of characterization. For the purposes of this study, a "characterization" is a depiction of a social actor that feeds into narratives across various contexts addressing that social actor's proper place in society (Condit, 1987; Hasian, 2000). Based on the wolf's prominence as a symbol and a "charismatic" (Sergio, 2006, p. 1049) bridge species, it may be considered a social actor (as well as an ecological one) whose place is defined and delimited through discourse. Characterization as an analytic unit includes naming, which in turn encloses "all that has been said in criticism under the rubric of ‘rhetorical discussions,' ‘ideographs,' and ‘condensation symbols'" (McKerrow, 1989, p. 105). By "discourse," I refer broadly to semiotic practices of knowledge construction, with semiosis extending past text and talk and into the drawing of borders on maps and the discursive sanctioning of particular activities (Foucault, 1972; Fairclough, 2001; Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). I take these practices as rhetorical ones: that is, practices with the potential semiotic power to shape social realities of ideology, knowledge, affect and behavior. I analyze for possibilities of rhetorical influence, but I neither trace causation (Condit, 1987) nor fix meaning (McKerrow, 1989; Foucault, 1982). These rhetorical discursive practices can be enacted materially, symbolically, or in amalgams of the two. 5 I take ideology to mean systems of presuppositions that guide the application of power and shape knowledge. By power, I mean the manifold and multidirectional application of rhetorical force both against and by social subjects, a category in which I include animals (Latour, 2005; Davis, 2011; Hawhee, 2011; Kennedy, 1992). Importantly, I do not engage at length the question of animal agency attached to this subjecthood; rather, I identify animals as social subjects based on their interpellation into and discipline by discourse. When I speak of "nature," I refer to "the ecological lifeworld both beyond and inclusive of humans, which is constrained by discourse but retains material character outside discursive formations" (Phillips, 2014, p. 453). I follow the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of bioregion: "a geographical area defined by biological or environmental characteristics rather than by political or administrative boundaries" (OED, 2015). This definition highlights the tension inherent in the research problem I address. Finally, when I discuss sovereignty, I apply the concept simply as complete control over a territory. Research Questions In this study, I am concerned with how discourse characterizes wolves biologically and administratively by establishing what wolves are, what they do and what threats and benefits they present. These general categories structure the study's chapters. There is, of course, substantial drift across these categories: such is the depth and nuance of this complex issue. Nevertheless, isolating the wolf's discursive disciplining in terms of these simple categories can show how discourse establishes ecological and political territories and enacts inclusion/exclusion from social and scientific perspectives. Given the strong symbolic resonance of the wolf, its discursive configurations inevitably feature 6 the sort of "distortions" and "system pathologies" Cox (2007, p. 10) has called scholars of the environment to examine. To that end, I examine discourse surrounding gray wolf management, analyzing discursive characterizations of gray wolves and the possible implications thereof. The analysis is guided by 3 interlocked questions: 1) How are gray wolves characterized in discourse? 2) What might these characterizations imply about the dynamics of socio-political power struggles? 3) How might these implications affect theoretical and practical conversations about human-nature relations and wildlife management? Context: Gray Wolf Reintroduction In the study's various chapters, I provide specifically contextualized answers to the research questions across the categories of what wolves are, what they do and the threats and/or benefits they present; in this introduction, then, the context is general. For excellent histories of wolves in the American West, see Coleman (2004), Mech (1970), Lopez (1978), Nie (2003), and Steinhart (1995). For general context, it is useful to know that section 10(j) of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) allows for the reintroduction of endangered species into parts of their historic range from which they had previously been removed through human intervention or natural decline. Since reintroduction of animals such as native predators by the federal government typically met with considerable resistance from state and local agencies and concerned publics, section 10(j) was amended in 1982 to facilitate the reintroduction and recovery of endangered species. The amendment introduced the concept of an "experimental" population, a label that reduced an endangered species' status to "threatened" in the 7 portion of its historic range in which it was reintroduced (ESA, 1973, p. 33-34). This legal designation, later combined with concept of a "nonessential population" of a species, presents a case rife with implications regarding the discursive and rhetorical construction of ecology, territory and "populations" of endangered species. These implications in turn ripple outward into general discussions of environmental problems, adding to the significance of a study such as this. In 1995 and 1996, gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho under the provisions of section 10(j) of the ESA, as amended in 1982 (Phillips & Smith, 1996). The animal had historically occupied this territory for around 750,000 years prior to its extirpation by colonizers of the American West by about 1930 (Lopez, 1978; Coleman, 2004). For the purposes of the 1995 reintroduction, the newly revitalized Rocky Mountain population of the gray wolf was labeled "nonessential experimental," allowing for greater management flexibility through reduced protection outside the borders of Yellowstone National Park and other designated areas (ESA, 1973, p. 33-34). From a practical perspective, such a designation may have facilitated reintroduction by offering anti-wolf stakeholders such as ranching and hunting groups the promise of eventual control over the reintroduced population after recovery goals were met and management thus passed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to state wildlife management agencies. Nevertheless, the "nonessential experimental" designation highlights a paradox endemic to the human relationship with this particular predator: the very idea of reintroducing the gray wolf to the Rocky Mountain region of Idaho and Wyoming is predicated on ecological science, a budding branch of inquiry at the time of the ESA's codification, which would suggest the wolf is essential to the 8 ecosystem into which it was introduced (Mech, 1970; Murie, 1944; Ripple & Beschta, 2003, 2006, 2007; Sergio et al., 2006). The tension of this paradox animates discussions about the presence of wolves and motivates this study. Decisions about wolves are made in four primary (if never mutually exclusive) disciplinary arenas that form a discursive system: politics, law, science, and commerce. This system is often fragmented by ideologically-inflected practices: politics can trump science through the use of law, for example (Hardy-Short & Short, 2000), thereby limiting the coherence of discursive constructions of the wolf's role. At all turns, vernacular discourses (most notably those, present across many cultures, that involve the wolf as a character in myth) may feed into these ostensibly more formal and logical discourses (Lopez, 1978). This limited discursive coherence carries material implications: if the species is discursively fragmented, its ecological presence may be similarly fragmented because discourse meaningfully characterizes wolves, alternately enabling and constraining the species' ecological role. Wolves' discursive status-and hence their ecological role-moves between the poles of protection and persecution (and a spectrum of positions in between) in the manner of a pendulum, one whose rhetorical aspects are worthy of study because of the social prominence of this issue as a "synecdoche" (Clarke, 1999; Moore, 1994) for broader environmental issues. The Ideographic and Ecological Wolf The symbolic significance of the wolf has been firmly established in literature addressing the rhetoric of wolf reintroduction (Clarke, 1999; Hardy-Short & Short, 2000; Salvador & Clarke, 2011) and the general social resonance of the animal (Fritts et al., 1994; Jones, 2010; Mech, 1995; Nie, 2001, 2003). Polysemous and polarizing, the word 9 <wolf> may function as an ideograph (McGee, 1980) in contemporary culture, synecdochal shorthand for limits on industry on the one hand and ecosystem restoration on the other (Clarke, 1999), much like other species such as the spotted owl (Moore, 1993). I am concerned less with the particular rhetorical tropes associated with the wolf's symbolic resonance, such as synecdoche, and more with how the animal's symbolic resonance may be manifest in legal/official characterizations of it. These manifestations of a key cultural character may take various rhetorical forms, from metaphor to synecdoche to a recontextualization of knowledge (and with it, power) from science to politics. Such is the breadth and polysemy of the wolf ideograph. If the wolf's symbolic presence is outsize, so too is its ecological presence: the preponderance of scientific studies on the subject support the notion that wolves stabilize ecosystems and increase biodiversity (Eisenberg, 2010; Ripple & Beschta, 2003, 2006, 2007). This insight had early manifestations in Leopold's (1949) account of the regret he felt upon shooting a female wolf and watching the "green fire" (p. 130) fade from her eyes and in Murie's (1944) and Mech's (1970) exhaustive studies of wolves' influence on ecosystems. Wolves are a key part of a "trophic cascade" (Fortin et al., 2005; Estes et al., 2011) through which they distribute energy across food webs, benefiting the "scavenger guild" (Wilmers et al, 2003, p. 909) of eagles, bears, ravens, magpies, red fox and many other fauna and, in turn, flora such as willows and aspen (Eisenberg, 2010). The wolf's symbolic resonance, though, informs even the most staid scientific literature, wherein characterizations of the wolf's role tend toward the figurative, as terms such as "apex consumer" (Estes et al., 2011) or "keystone predator" (Beschta, 2003) attest. In a sense, such metaphoric characterization is entirely practical, as it efficiently communicates the 10 wolf's ecological role. Yet it also configures the species in a particular way by emphasizing its importance: just as an arch is impossible without a keystone, these metaphors imply, an intact ecosystem is impossible without the presence of this predator. As Nie (2003) has argued in reference to the wolf, metaphors package environmental problems and organize particular orientations toward them. As a testament to this symbolic process, most parties associated with gray wolf reintroduction have noted that the wolf's symbolic resonance factors into gray wolf management (Fritts et al., 1994; Phillips & Smith, 1996; Niemeyer, 2010). Recent research on the role of rhetoric in the management of other large, charismatic predators such as grizzly bears (Parker & Feldpausch-Parker, 2013) has confirmed rhetoric's role in shaping policy. In the case of wildlife management, then, rhetoric is particularly active as a structuring mechanism for decisions and their material consequences. If the rhetorical construction of discourse affects management decisions, then interrogating policies that discursively define the place of animals may reveal how coercive human power over animals is "justified, reinforced, resisted and transformed in minds and institutions through discourse" (Milstein, 2013, p. 163). This discursive process is motivated by ideologies that select aspects of experience and knowledge and repress others, producing naturalized understandings regarding the place of animals. In the case of the gray wolf, ideologies that characterize the wolf as a worthy ecological presence and those that cast it as an unwanted predatory presence coexist alongside one another in paradox, sanctioning the use of disciplinary power to allow wolves' presence while at the same time militating against it. 11 Theoretical Orientation and Contribution This study is theoretically founded on critical social theory in general and in environmental communication more specifically. The critical lens can be described as critical rhetorical, which interfaces effectively with the method of discourse analysis. In this section, I briefly review relevant literature and identify the particular concepts and theories I hope to interact with and modify. In pursuing the analysis of discursive discipline, this study takes cues from 3 important theoretical bodies, which are not single texts but groups of practices and concepts explored across a network of critical theory. First, the general orientation toward critique owes much to McKerrow's (1989) description of the critical act, which in turn developed in large part as a response to Foucault (1980) and a host of other theorists, notably for this analysis Condit (1987). The shared pillars of McKerrow's articulation of a critical rhetoric and Foucault's analysis of discursive power-the critique of domination and the critique of freedom-provide the impetus for this study and inform its analysis and conclusions. In particular, the impetus of this study is to demystify the discursive "conditions of domination" (McKerrow, 1989, p. 91) in the case of the gray wolf. Conflicted attitudes and policy seem to extend the right to exist to this species while simultaneously marking that right as contingent and revocable; I aim to analyze this disconnect and draw conclusions. This critique of domination leads the study to interact with postcolonial and anticolonial theory, not just because domination is present in each case or to offer a simplistic analogy between the domination of people and animals, but because this body of theory offers powerful insights with respect to the rhetorical functioning of the domination of subaltern (Spivak, 1988) bodies through discourse. In particular, such 12 studies have offered robust theorizations of how political borders function rhetorically as discursive devices of control that discipline and alienize subjects while enacting security over mobile populations (Cisneros, 2008, 2011; Dechaine, 2009; Flores, 2003; Ono, 2012). Analyzing the application of disciplinary power through discourse, Foucault (2007) considered how the modern concepts of territory and population affect social realities. For Foucault, the epistemological modes of governmental structures exercise a "very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument" (2007, p. 108). Borders are an important apparatus of security by which to control the movement of populations within territories, whether those territories are delineated politically or bioregionally and whether the population in question is Homo sapiens or Canis lupus. The assertion of sovereignty over a territory, particularly on the part of state governments, is a consistent feature of discourse on wolves, as is the notion of security. Population, too, has become an extremely thorny issue in assessments of the health of the wolf population; I examine the development of this concept in depth. Second, I proceed from the notion that environmental communication is a "crisis discipline" (Cox, 2007, p. 5) As such, appraisals of the power dynamics endemic to discursive and material interactions between humans and our imperiled world are a foundational concern for the study and for my scholarship in general. Such an appraisal does not just meet the needs of walled-off scholarship, but it also engages concerns related to wildlife management policy, the practice of law, and the production, dissemination and facticity of scientific practices. The performance of a rhetorical 13 critique of domination is an act I approach with an eye to material consequences: critique resonates materially as well as rhetorically. The most prominent outcome of this orientation in this study is the occasional embrace of the facticity of scientific results. I do so not out of a misunderstanding of the way science is conducted and the instability of "fact" as both a fact and a concept, but because crisis demands the use of a pan-disciplinary toolkit, including science (Latour, 2004; Ceccarelli, 2011). Third, I answer a call to consider the divide, or border, between nature and culture (Rogers, 1998; Latour, 1987). The border between animal and human is a subset of this foundational divide. This bifurcation is a foundational element of Western epistemology generally, and it is as persistent as it is problematic. Descartes' cogito ergo sum provides apt shorthand: that which can manifestly think, which is to say that which can speak and be understood (how else to prove thought?), is. All else is suspect and may not be. Even outside the hyper-subjective episteme of a Cartesian worldview, as in the skeptical empiricism that partially eclipsed Cartesian rationalism in the enlightenment and thereafter, we humans often separate ourselves from the animate world that surrounds us. Scholars have recently interrogated this divide and its associated "othering" of animals (Sowards, 2006). Environmental communication scholars studying human domination over nature have noted a persistent divide between humans and nonhumans (Milstein, 2008, 2011; Rogers, 1998). Fielding terms such as "humanimal" (Milstein, 2013, p. 162) in an attempt to vitiate human/nonhuman divides, environmental communication scholars have analyzed how humans identify with charismatic wild animals by naming them (Milstein, 2011) and by identifying shared characteristics across species (Sowards, 2006). Charismatic species, these scholars have argued, are "icons that 14 illuminate problematic human-nature relations" (Milstein, 2008, p. 173). Recent studies addressing animals and communication have drawn from discourse analytic discussions of power and ideology, shedding light on how humans exert material power over nonhumans through coercion (Milstein, 2013; Stibbe, 2001). This study shares these scholars' focus on the functioning of power in humans' discursive and material manipulation of the animal world. The Hybridized Wolf Central to this analysis and subsequent theorization is the way in which the wolf attaches as a character to the human social experience. This attachment is not just central to fairy tales, folklore and tales of origin; rather, the wolf is used as a key concept in the organization of political power in Western society. So intimate is this association that I term it a hybridity. A wolf-human hybrid is not an anomaly; it is a naturalized norm of how humans mark what belongs and what/who does not in a territory. This claim is foundational to the way I develop and modify the concept of hybridity. To illustrate the way in which the Western social and juridical order incorporates the wolf and hybridizes it with the human, I turn to Agamben. Agamben (1998) operationalized Foucault's theory of territorial power by discussing a key juridico-political concept: the "ban" (p. 104), or the ability to banish a subject from a territory. The banned subject is, for Agamben, a version of "Homo sacer" (p. 71), a Roman juridical term for a person unprotected by law who can be killed with impunity. In a chapter entitled "The Ban and the Wolf" (p. 104), Agamben critically examines how the sovereign state's "natural right to punish" (p 106) flows from the identification of danger and threat, which are etymologically and substantively related to 15 the wolf. The banned person or "bandit," exiled from the sovereign's territory and subject to death without repercussions, is a liminal character defined in Germanic and Anglo- Saxon languages as a "wolf-man (wargus, werewolf, the Latin garulphus, from which the French loup garou, ‘werewolf,' is derived)" (p. 105). The separateness of the bandit is thus paradoxically inscribed into the character at the center of the political order: the sovereign. Power therefore fuses with the subject that it will completely strip of power. This results in a curious interdependence wherein the most politically central subject incorporates and uses the banned subject, yet needs the banned subject tin order to define sovereign power. That powerless banned subject-the bandit-is characterized as a wolf-human. The legal system in the Western tradition thus incorporates the wolf as always within and yet always outside the social order. The wolf may be seen in the Western political tradition as a keystone other, a beyond-human bandit that merges with the human in circumstances where the power to kill and exile within a territory is exercised. The bandit "is precisely neither man nor beast [sic, emphasis in original]," a character that "dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither" (p. 105). At the conceptual center of the Euro-American political order, then, is a wolf-human hybrid, an ideologically and discursively constructed liminal character. This notion of the wolf as interpellated into human political discourse at its core structures the analysis and theory construction of this study. In Chapter 2, I specifically apply this notion of the wolf's association with a liminal character to the way in which the prototypical Western American individual, the cowboy, is implicitly and explicitly incorporated in discourse on the wolf. 16 Operationalizing Hybridity: The Study's Contribution The theory of hybridity I develop is distinct from earlier versions of it in the conversations into which this research enters. It is a modification of and complement to existing theories that also owes its genesis to them. In each chapter, I offer conclusions that add to the general theoretical skeleton identified in this section. In the concluding chapter, I yoke together these theoretical conclusions in the service of the study's broader claims. Here, I lay the foundation for this contribution, noting the roots of the concept in modern critical theory. Latour (1993) noted the contemporary social proliferation of hybrids, or "mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture" (p. 10). Latour argued that this hybridity exists in paradox: it is simultaneously a controlling condition of technosocial modernity and an unacknowledged phenomenon masked by social reality. In response to this perceptual gap, Latour enrolls both humans and nonhumans as "actants" (2005) in networks of activity, argues for the recognition of hybrids, and asks whether a "democracy extended to things" might be necessary (1993, p. 12). If this "different democracy" emerged, human society and nature would not be separated by bright lines. Notions of who and what can act on the world would be concomitantly expanded. The reintroduction of gray wolves into an area from which they were extirpated only decades earlier under legislation that manifestly values the lives of wild animals ostensibly mimics this "different democracy." The ecologically-attuned ethics and systems-based ecological thinking that undergird the ESA seem to enact an inclusive notion-which I associate with but do not solely attribute to Latour-of what has the right to exist and act. I argue, however, that current wolf management policies 17 and the broader discussions around them indicate a circumscription of this inclusive vision. Instead, hybridity in the case of the wolf-human relationship seems to undo this systems thinking: the wolf's symbolicity as part of the human social experience may fatally constraint its material presence. Latour's different democracy is thus both promised by the reintroduction of the gray wolf and fatally circumscribed by post-reintroduction policy and politics. Hybridity has been identified as a persistent and problematic both/and (Bhabha 1994), a state in which the subaltern human subject is possessed of and by a series of possible identities, never inhabiting a coherent self. In postcolonial theory, hybridity has been seen as a complex "strategy for domination" (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 14; see also Anzaldúa, 1999; Cisneros, 2008, 2011; DeChaine, 2009; Santa Ana, 2002). In these formulations, hybridity is a double-sided coin involving the assignment of liminal discursive and bodily status to subjugated population and affirmative (re)appropriation of the mixed both/and/neither identity wrought by dominant cultures' refusal of linguistic/racial otherness. I focus on the mixed characterization that precedes this appropriative move: one is hybridized by hegemonic power before one re-appropriates that hybridized identity to lay claim to belonging or citizenship (Cisneros, 2011; Moreman, 2008). Since wolves cannot language their way into appropriating particular identities, hybridity is something done to them rather than something they do. This is a significant difference, and it highlights an ineluctable distinction between humans and other animals, even if some theory has productively questioned this distinction (see, e.g., Kennedy, 1992; Spiegel, 1998). This study both respects and seeks to complicate differences between humans and animals. I do not seek a simple analogy 18 between human subjugation and that of animals. The study means no devaluation of the stories and suffering of people. In addition to its use in theories of the sociality of science and colonial domination, environmental communication scholars have also used the concept of hybridity. For example, Mariafote and Plec (2006) have thoughtfully applied the notion of Bahktin's "organic hybridity," or unintentional polyvocality in human identification with nature. My use of this concept is complementary to but distinct from this formulation. In particular, my development of the concept of hybridity stems from Cox's (2007) call to examine "system pathologies" in environmental communication and Nie's (2003) claim that human-wolf relations display "pathological animosity" (p. 4). The study uses the term pathological in the sense of "related to or dealing with disease" (OED, 2015). The disease is exacerbated by its appearance as a cure: while reintroducing the gray wolf looks like an extension of the right to exist, the process is fraught with constraint. The wolf becomes a political pen, a way of drawing borders around territories, rather than a deserving denizen of its native range. Ultimately, this system pathology is a threat to the health of the human relationship with wolves both materially and discursively and, more practically, it may ultimately threaten the health of the species by denying it genetic exchange across a metapopulation (Liberg et al., 2004). Although I identify this relationship as pathological, I do not discount the potential for communicative practices between humans and animals to productively question the human-nature divide. Indeed, this research is an attempt to do just that. 19 Method The basic analytic method employed in this study is the close reading of public texts, contexts and social/discursive practices regarding gray wolves. To that end, I use discourse analytic tools. Seeing these tools in action, as the reader will in the following chapters, provides the best explanation of what they are and how they function, including how I adapt the analytic method to discursive genres and rhetorical situations in their complexity. In general, the analysis is intended to enact a critical rhetorical approach focused on ideology and rhetoric (McKerrow, 1989; McGee, 1980; see also Foucault, 1972). I accomplish this by grounding in linguistic particularity the study's contextualized descriptions of and claims about the rhetorical function of discourse, which is a fundamental tenet of discourse analysis (Huckin, Andrus & Clary-Lemon, 2012). My analysis adopts the general approach of discourse analysis, particularly those iterations of it that focus on matters of ideology and power (see, e.g., Blommaert, 2005; Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 1989, Huckin, 2002; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Van Leeuwen, 2008). More specifically, I practice what Huckin (2002) has termed context-sensitive discourse analysis. Huckin (2002) identified 3 primary strains of discourse analysis-critical discourse analysis, social linguistics and social semiotics-and linked them under the rubric of context sensitive discourse analysis by showing how they all "embody the general features that any critical rhetoric, according to McKerrow, must satisfy" (p. 156). Context-sensitive discourse analysis, following McKerrow (1989) brings to bear the "same ‘critical spirit' that is held in common among the divergent perspectives of Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Foucault" while serving "a demystifying function . . . by demonstrating the silent and often non- 20 deliberate ways in which rhetoric conceals as much as it reveals through its relationship with power/knowledge" (McKerrow, 1989, p. 92, qtd. in Huckin, 2002, p. 156). Huckin outlined 10 prominent features of context-sensitive discourse analysis; this study seeks to embody six of them. They are therefore paraphrased below. For Huckin (2002), Context-sensitive discourse analysis should: 1. Focus on contemporary social issues, showing how people (in the present study, people and nonhumans alike) are manipulated by regimes of power through discourse. 2. Consider the operations of power, resistance and ideology. 3. Connect the analysis of text with those of discursive practices and broader social contexts. 4. Mix social and rhetorical theory. 5. Emphasize omission, presuppositions, implicature and other discursive ambiguities, recognizing their potential power. 6. Ground analysis in detailed textual and intertextual analysis. I am committed to these principles of context-sensitive discourse analysis in this study. Geographical and Temporal Bounds of the Study The case I examine in detail is that of the reintroduction and subsequent management of the gray wolf in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States from 1987 to the present day. I do not analyze every communication in that time period; rather, I select those with the force of policy and law (administrative discourse) and complement this analysis with selected characterizations in a vernacular vein. I explain the data 21 selection process in specific detail in the various chapters, and I outline data selection criteria in the next section of this introduction. I have chosen this case because it allows a focus on the application of section 10(j) of the ESA through the reintroduction of a species. In addition, it shows how discourse disciplines a particularly fertile symbol and a social, adaptable, wide-ranging and territorial animal. In that sense, this study maps the process of one such animal disciplining another such animal, namely the wild shadow of our domestic "best friend," Canis lupus familiaris. A further benefit to examining this area is the way in which it shows how state and federal power interact. While the geographic and temporal range and domain of the study are bounded, then, the case is roughly generalizable as a key conflict in human-wildlife interaction. In the next 3 chapters, I analyze discourse emanating from four Western states affected to varying degrees by wolf reintroduction: Idaho and Wyoming, which are the areas into which wolves were introduced in the 1990s, and Utah and Washington, bordering states of these points of origin for reintroduction that share contiguous wolf habitat with these states. We thus see how discourse disciplines the species when its presence is a certainty, as with Idaho and Wyoming, and when its presence is an increasing possibility, as in the case of Utah and Washington. Data Selection Selecting data based on the geographic and temporal parameters described above builds a coherent case study bound to a reasonable scale yet still representative of human/animal divides and conflicts worldwide. In addition, I further winnowed the field of potential data by adopting and applying specific selection criteria. All discursive data I 22 analyze fit at least two of 3 primary selection criteria: 1) rhetorical influence, 2) visibility, and 3) conflict. All data analyzed in detail is publicly available on the World Wide Web. As to the first criterion, I identify rhetorical influence in functional terms: the influential discursive artifacts I analyze are official communications such as statutes, legal decisions, environmental impact statements, agency wolf management plans, official correspondence, and resolutions on state and local levels. Such artifacts guide decision making and compel particular action. I purposefully adopted the concept of rhetorical influence when screening potential data for analysis so as to gain insight into the functioning of powerful discourses that consequentially shape the wolf's role in ecosystems and societies. To say a discursive artifact may wield influence is not, importantly, to say it is necessarily causative of this or that outcome. As Condit (1987) has noted, this critical move of analyzing discursive influence rather than causation "eschews the determinism latent in the term ‘cause'" (p. 2). Although each chapter presents and analyzes data, I avoid decontextualizing the data from the historical moments and scenes implicated in discourse. Thus, chapter discussions often bring in discursive artifacts that move the analysis forward but are not systematically analyzed for discursive content. The second criterion for data selection, visibility, is a simple category motivated by my desire to ensure the multimodality of the analysis and its relevance to theoretical and practical discussions of human-wildlife interactions. These data take the form of images, and they emanate from official as well as vernacular sources. As Van Leeuwen (2008) has noted, analyzing images in partnership with written semiotic artifacts strengthens discourse analysis. As Barthes (1973, 1977) and many others (e.g., DeLuca, 23 1999; Hariman & Lucaites, 2011; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Van Leeuwen, 2008) have argued, images stimulate viewer interpretation and call up associations about the social and cultural position of what or whom is imaged. As potentially powerful political statements, images can organize particular orientations toward what is represented (Hariman & Lucaites, 2011). Since unofficial visual communications often get wide circulation on the World Wide Web and through other means, such as billboards receiving millions of views by passing motorists, I include selected unofficial communications. I further detail rationales for their relevance as I introduce them in their respective chapters. The third criterion, conflict, is a broad category that I tighten up by considering particularly consequential discursive flash points regarding wolf biology and behavior. Wolf biologists, for example, vary greatly in opinion about what constitutes a "recovered" or "viable" population of gray wolves; this instability is reflected in the data. I analyze this and other consequential conflicts that have often been the source of legal opinions, revisions in management schemes, and the like. Tables 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 provide exhaustive chapter-by-chapter lists of data selected, along with their alignment with the selection criteria. Study Outline and Data by Chapter Each chapter contextualizes and analyzes conflicts around wolves across the categories of what a wolf is, what a wolf does, and the threats and benefits presented by wolves. This study proceeds in four parts as follows: In Chapter 2, I discuss characterizations of what a wolf is. The chapter presents detailed context regarding how 24 Table 1.1. Chapter 2 Data Date Title Selection Criteria 1973 ESA C I 1980 Wolf Recovery Plan C I 1987 Wolf Recovery Plan CI 1994 Final wolf Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) C I V 1997 Wyoming Farm Bureau v. Babbitt C I 2000 Wyoming Farm Bureau v. Babbitt (appeal) C I 2002 Idaho State Wolf Plan C I 2005 Utah State Wolf Plan C I V 2010 Idaho Governor's letter to Secretary of Interior C I 2011 Wyoming State Wolf Plan C I V 2012 Wyoming State Solf Plan addendum C I V 2013 Big Game Forever (lobbying group) report to Utah Legislature C I 2014 Big Game Forever (lobbying group) report to Utah Legislature C I V Arranged by date of publication, artifact title, and selection criteria, where C=conflict, I=rhetorical influence, and V=visibility. 25 Table 1.2. Chapter 3 Data Date Title Selection Criteria 1973 ESA C I 1980 Wolf Recovery Plan C I 1987 Wolf Recovery Plan C I V 1994 EIS C I V 2000 FWS Wolf Population Rule C I 2001 FWS Peer Review of 1994 EIS C I 2002 FWS Wolf Report C I 2003 FWS Wolf Population Rule C I 2006 FWS Wolf Report C I 2007 FWS Wolf Report C I 2008 FWS Wolf Population Rule C I 2008 Defenders of Wildlife v. Hall C I 2009 FWS Wolf Population Rule C I 2010 Defenders of Wildlife v. Salazar C I 2011 Federal budget bill rider delisting wolves under ESA C I 2011 Wyoming Wolf Plan C I 2012 FWS Rule Delisting Wolves C I 2012 Wyoming Wolf Plan addendum C I 2012 Wyoming Wolf Management Map C I V 2012- Wyoming Game and Fish website C I V 2014 Defenders of Wildlife v. Jewell C I C=conflict, I=rhetorical influence, and V=visibility. 26 Table 1.3: Chapter 4 Data Date Title Selection Criteria 2011 Idaho Legislature disaster emergency declaration C I 2014 Washington Residents Against Wolves billboards C I V 2014- Washington Residents Against Wolves Facebook site C V 2014 City of Ketchum, Idaho's resolution on wildlife coexistence C I Arranged by date of publication, artifact title, and selection criteria, where C=conflict, I=rhetorical influence, and V=visibility. the species is scientifically named and how it has been rhetorically associated with both the federal government and with foreignness since its 1995 reintroduction to the Rocky Mountain region. I discuss the species/subspecies taxonomic classification of the gray wolf and various ways in which the wolf is modified on lexicogrammatical levels of adjectival modification and attributive modification of gray wolves. Modification is discussed in terms of written texts and images. I argue that these modifications in many cases associate the wolf with foreignness and place it outside the category of wildlife, hybridizing the wolf with an oppressive federal government and encapsulating the animal within discourse. In Chapter 3, I discuss characterizations of wolves that address what a wolf does. I focus the discussion on two key elements of what wolves do that drive management decisions and sculpt opinions on wolves. These elements are 1) breeding and forming populations; and 2) moving, or dispersing across territories and from pack to pack. Both elements relate to the genetic health of the species and hence its viability as an ecological presence. Both elements are complicated in their definitions, as these characterizations 27 span the disciplinary divides of politics, science and law. In this chapter, I offer an explanation and analysis of the process whereby population and its corollary, genetic health, have become not just markers for wolf recovery, but also discursive flash points in the ongoing wolf debate. In the following section, I analyze a key application of numbers-based population assessment in the case of Wyoming's management for a "buffer" population of gray wolves to ensure continued state management. Finally, I briefly consider the implications of the constraint on wolf populations characteristic of management discourse. In Chapter 4, I present a contextualized discussion of how discourses characterize wolves according to perceptions of the threats and/or benefits they present. I examine discursive statements from scientific and lay sources that make claims regarding the risks and benefits to human health, ecosystems, big game and livestock posed by wolves. I focus the analysis by examining tensions in gray wolf management in the state of Idaho in particular, where in one portion of the state, livestock operations are coexisting with wolves by limiting their predation on livestock, while in a nearby area, a "predator derby" was recently held, awarding prizes to the person who killed the most wolves. In Chapter 5, I synthesize the theoretical contribution of this original research by discussing how theories of discursive domination and the human-nature divide interact with and are modified by my study. In addition to considering the implications of this study for rhetorical theory, I explore implications with respect to environmental communication theory/praxis and the practice of wildlife management. CHAPTER 2 CHARACTERIZING WHAT WOLVES ARE The simplicity of the question "what is a wolf?" belies the complexity of its many possible answers. For the purposes of this analysis, there are two primary features in the answer to this question. The first is the question of nomenclature, in particular the Linnaean taxonomic classification of genus, species, and subspecies. While biologists tend to agree that a gray wolf is Canis lupus, questions linger regarding subspecies classification for the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf as Canis lupus irremotus. This distinction remains a notable feature in the conversation about wolves, as it is mobilized rhetorically in divergent ways, which I describe and analyze below. The second component of establishing what a wolf is involves modification, where modification is both adjectival and generally attributive. On a lexicogrammatical level, adjectives describing wolves are plentiful in the data. Under this analysis, 3 adjectival modifications of gray wolves stand out as consequential: 1) gray wolves as nonessential experimental 2) gray wolves as reintroduced 3) gray wolves as Canadian These adjectival modifications of gray wolves correlate to meaningful attributive/associative modification of what a wolf is, which I argue are present in both written text and images. The associative properties of modifiers 1-3 seem to enable the 29 "othering" of gray wolves as foreign-a general category that has multiple manifestations-and outside the category of wildlife. This othering is most prominent on the level of state management, particularly the discourse of state political leaders rather than wildlife managers. Data Selection I selected data for this portion of the analysis by examining influential/visible/conflicting (see Table 1.1) discursive artifacts for instances of classification that fell into the categories of nomenclature or modification (either or both of the two classes of modification: adjectival and generally attributive). I isolated discursive artifacts that have the force of policy and/or law; this is not to privilege administrative discourse, but to analyze how administrative discourse regimes characterize the wolf and, in turn, how these characterizations sculpt ecosystems and human-nature relations with political, disciplinary force. Given the study's orientation toward discourse as generally semiotic, I included images in the category of modification. The data I present and analyze for this chapter have been influential, to be sure, but I neither analyze for nor claim particular causation based on these discursive artifacts. To be sure, environmental impact statements, state management plans and official correspondence all exert effects, but the power they wield is at times subtle and diffuse. I present and discuss discursive data in multiple ways in this chapter in an effort to ground the analysis in "both quantitative and qualitative attention to linguistic details" (Huckin et al., 2012, p. 109). For example, I quantify occurrences in a number of wolf management planning documents of the modifier "Canadian" and I construct a fine- 30 grained discourse analysis of an influential letter from Idaho's governor repudiating the state's role in wolf management. This mix of methods responds to the need for discourse analysis to be "interpretive and explanatory" (Huckin et al., 2012, p. 108). For the purposes of this chapter, I ensure the rigor of this interpretation and explanation by coupling numerical accounts of modifiers characterizing the wolf (in particular, "Canadian") with more qualitative analysis of a particular influential statement: a letter from the Governor of Idaho to the Secretary of the Interior repudiating his state's cooperation with federal wildlife managers. This fine-grained analysis of a letter from a state official shows how modification of the gray wolf as a foreign presence (a phenomenon I initially analyze numerically) is functionally operationalized in discourse by those opposed to wolf presence, thereby shedding light on how discourse disciplines the species in ways that are not strictly countable. To be sure, my selection of these discursive statements is simultaneously an exclusion of others. Yet the statements analyzed here that characterize wolves do so with consequence, thereby shaping the human relationship with this animal through the exercise of political power. Below, I discuss these classification-based and modification-based characterizations of what a wolf is. I organize the discussion thus: first, I present and analyze data regarding the species/subspecies taxonomic classification of the gray wolf; second, I present and analyze data regarding the adjectival modification of the gray wolf; third, I present and analyze data regarding the attributive modification of gray wolves in writing; fourth, I analyze data regarding the attributive modification of gray wolves through visual characterization. First, however, I provide a brief synopsis of the chapter's contribution to the study in theoretical terms. 31 The interpretive element of this analysis feeds into the study's overarching claims regarding the superimposition of political borders onto habitat-based bioregions, the disciplining of mobile bodies by enactments of territoriality, and the sustained liminality of the wolf in ecosystems and discursive regimes alike. This chapter describes wolf characterization via a chronological and archaeological (Foucault, 1972) description and interpretation of discursive data. The pattern of characterization across time shows a cascade of effects associated with instability in administrative and scientific characterizations, which correlate to discursive operationalizations of this instability that mark the species as an invading, border-crossing other. The scientific practice of taxonomy is notably unstable in this case, which destabilizes the species as a deserving ecological presence. The administrative labeling of the species as nonessential experimental may further this instability. Adding to this rather crooked baseline of characterization, the species is othered or cast outside its native territory by its labeling as "Canadian" and "reintroduced." Taken together, this instability is correlated to the marking of the species as a foreign, invading presence. Political and administrative discourse regimes mobilize this characterization of foreignness as they establish sovereignty over territory. In such characterizations, the wolf's very rhetorical mobility as a symbol of otherness may render the wolf more symbol than material presence. The material manifestation of the wolf is ultimately constrained by its very discursive power. A rhetorical mobility born of scientific and administrative imprecision, then, becomes an instrument of territoriality that encases the rhetorically mobile signified body (that of the wolf, in this case) within discourse. The effect is a disciplining of the species 32 away from ecological presence and toward a symbolic significance whose potency is a function of its very impotence as a bordered body. This disciplining, as I show, is primarily a feature of state sovereignty-focused discourse that grafts the wolf onto a narrative of federal overreach. This cascade of discursive phenomena that border the species as a symbolic object rather than a rhetorical-ecological subject may be catalyzed by the actions of the technosocial network that manages the species. That is, while on the one hand the wolf has been reintroduced-or enrolled in an (ecosystemic) network in Latourian terms-on the other hand, its role is discursively circumscribed from the beginning by its characterization as a nonessential experimental population: an experiment in nonessentialism. This argument about the rhetorical function of characterizations of what a wolf is leads me to examine the human-nature interface by considering human and non-human others alike as discursively and materially bordered subjects. I expand on these implications in the various sections below and in this chapter's conclusion. Canis Lupus Indistinctus: Binomial Nomenclature and its Discontents The data analyzed here are largely uniform in treating the gray wolf as simply genus Canis and species lupus with no subspecies classification. Yet a significant seam appears upon scrutiny: whereas the 1987 Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf Recovery Plan (Plan) and its 1980 predecessor describe the gray wolf as C.l. irremotus, the 1994 Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) drops the subspecies designation. This is not an uncommon problem among taxonomists; as Mech (1970) describes, there are "splitters" and "lumpers" among biologists, the former of which tend to name multiple 33 subspecies and the latter of which tend to lump species together despite morphological and behavioral differences. Discursively and legally, the sometimes-imprecise practice of taxonomy carries significant implications. For the sake of economy, I offer this compressed timeline of gray wolf taxonomy before analyzing this discursive disjuncture and the controversy surrounding it: 1) 1959: Hall and Kelson identify 24 subspecies of wolves in North America. 2) 1968: Kelsall describes differences between the major groups timber wolves and tundra wolves. Significant differences between these groups, such as ear shape and depth/ thickness of coat make these identifications easier to make in the field. 3) 1973: C.l. irremotus is placed on the U.S. list of Endangered Fish and Wildlife, pursuant to the 1969 Endangered Species Conservation Act. 4) 1974: C.l. irremotus is listed under the ESA of 1973. 5) 1978: FWS publishes a rule (43 FR 9607, March 9, 1978) reclassifying the gray wolf at the species level (C. lupus). 6) 1980: Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf Recovery Plan issued. The plan specifies that "taxonomic questions will have to be settled prior to specific plans for re-establishment by re-introduction" (p. iii). The plan calls for the recovery of C. l. irremotus, noting "the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf is still considered a distinct species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1973, p. 1)" (p. 3). 7) 1987: Revised Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan issued. Taxonomy remains the same as in the 1980 plan, C. l. irremotus. The document's title, as with the 1980 plan, does not identify the species as a gray wolf but as a Northern Rocky Mountain wolf. 34 8) 1994: Final EIS issued, paving the way for the reintroduction of gray wolves. The document's title refers to gray wolves. The document's "technical summary" culls subspecific taxonomy from 24 to 5 North American subspecies (p. 4). No literature is cited directly. The final EIS discusses some of the more than 160,284 public comments (Phillips & Smith, 1996) regarding reintroduction, including one that claimed "ignoring subspecific differentiation is not only irresponsible, but also illegal. Reintroducing Canis lupus lycaon [Eastern timber wolf] or any other subspecies except Canis lupus irremotus into Canis lupus irremotus [sic] range would not be legal. This reintroduction lacks scientific integrity" (p. 56). 9) 1995-1996: Gray wolves sourced from packs in Alberta, Canada are introduced into Yellowstone National Park (YNP) and Central Idaho (Phillips & Smith, 1996). 10) 1997: U.S. District Court for the district of Wyoming finds in favor of plaintiffs Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation et al., James R. and Cat D. Urbigkit, and National Audubon Society et al. (Wyoming Farm Bureau v. Babbitt). Notably for this analysis, the Urbigkits, amateur wolf enthusiasts, contend that "Wyoming" wolves, C.l. irremotus, would be adversely affected by the reintroduction of what they identify in their pro se (written by laypeople rather than legal practitioners) brief as "Canis lupus occidentalis." Plaintiffs were a pastiche of typically competing interests, from Farm Bureau to the Sierra Club, yet, they agreed on the assertion that the wolves FWS reintroduced were not native, among other claims. The managerial trend away from subspecies classification for the gray wolf appears to be supported in much the biological literature (Nowak, 2008). The taxonomic 35 discontinuities present in the data are nevertheless a notable discursive feature, even if they may in part be based on semantic rather than substantively biological distinctions. For example, timeline items 7 and 8 above differ in taxonomy, yet the documents are meant to work in tandem to facilitate reintroduction and recovery of the same animal. In a functional sense, the 1994 EIS deftly manages the taxonomic problems foregrounded in the 1980 plan ("taxonomic questions will have to be settled") by eliminating subspecies classification through silence. If FWS issued its rule reclassifying Canis lupus as endangered on the species level (effectively making subspeciation moot) in 1978, though, why did subsequent federal-level documents addressing endangerment and recovery (1980 & 1987) continue to use the subspecies classification? Far from doing so, the 1980 plan, issued 2 years after reclassification of the endangered wolf at the species level, foregrounded the recognition of subspecies C. l. irremotus (see 6 above). The EIS's focus on Canis lupus and the subsequent reintroduction of gray wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) did not end the phenomenon of inconsistent classification of the gray wolf on the part of FWS and other stakeholders. Indeed, the United States Forest Service's online index of species information continues to list 24 North American subspecies of Canis lupus, of which irremotus is one and occidentalis (British Columbia wolf) is another (USFS, 2014). This continuing taxonomic inconsistency is interesting in light of the Urbigkits' (1997, see 10 above) claim regarding the introduction of nonnative gray wolves, which they claimed were Canis lupus occidentalis. These pro se litigants argued that FWS failed to protect naturally occurring wolves in the GYE, which they claimed persisted in significant numbers, by introducing a nonnative species to the area. They claimed FWS violated the ESA, the purpose of 36 which was in part to ensure the survival of subspecies (Urbigkit, 2008, p. 158). Since C. l. irremotus was listed under the ESA because it was "critically close to extinction" (Urbigkit, 2008, p. 158), and since the ESA was meant to preserve listed species, introducing another subspecies in place of a specifically listed subspecies violated the act, the Urbigkits claimed. The continued presence in managerial literature such as USFS's species index, even in 2014, of 24 North American subspecies may tend to support contentions such as that of the Urbigkits et al. in Wyoming Farm Bureau (1997). The district court's decision in favor of the Urbigkits and their co-plaintiffs in Wyoming Farm Bureau (1997) turned on the issue of experimental populations (discussed in the next section of this chapter) rather than classification. That decision, which mandated removal of reintroduced gray wolves from the reintroduction area, was overturned by a federal appellate court in 2000 (Wyoming Farm Bureau v. Babbitt, 2000). No wolves were removed pursuant to the 1997 decision, as litigation to prevent this began immediately after the decision was issued. Ultimately, this taxonomic trouble is perhaps less significant for its biological basis than for its inconsistency and therefore the instability it introduces into the reintroduction and recovery process. This taxonomic instability may position the gray wolf in a liminal space, abetting (re)classifications that work to question the species' right to be in the area in which it was reintroduced. Concerns about the genetic purity of reintroduced wolves, which opponents often claim tend to hybridize with coyotes (Canis latrans), have led to appropriation and recontextualization of taxonomic distinctions. For example, the Idaho Farm Bureau (1990) has dubbed reintroduced wolves "Canis lupus irregularis" or "woyote" (qtd. in Hardy-Short & Short, 2000, p. 70). Statements like this invoke the notion of genetic 37 purity versus mongrelism by appropriating taxonomic language and reformulating it to indicate dilution of genetic purity. Taxonomy is perhaps the most basic feature of characterizing an animal: it is the hallmark of scientific precision. Yet in the case of this animal, the base is unstable. This instability, in turn, may aid the destabilization of claims regarding the animal's proper positioning (proper here in the sense of rights, of property) in the ecosystems to which it is native, which include "nearly all habitats in the Northern hemisphere except true deserts" (FWS, 1994a, p. 4). An Experiment in Nonessentialism: Modifying the Gray Wolf Gray Wolves as Nonessential Experimental As I noted in Chapter 1, section 10(j) of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) allows for the reintroduction of endangered species. Since reintroduction often causes considerable resistance from various stakeholders concerned about property, recreation access and so on (Nie, 2003), section 10(j) was amended in 1982 to facilitate reintroduction (Phillips & Smith, 1996). The amendment introduced the concept of an "experimental" population, a label that reduced an endangered species' status to "threatened" in the portion of its historic range in which it was reintroduced (ESA, 1973, p. 33-34). This legal designation, later combined with concept of a "nonessential population" of a species, was applied to the gray wolf. Rhetorically, labeling a species "experimental," a characterization later coupled with the concept of a "nonessential population," may circumscribe the species' presence as contingent and revocable from the beginning. Functionally, this contingency and revocability is written into the management status of an introduced nonessential experimental population as threatened, not endangered. The former designation allows greater leeway in "take," where "take" is 38 defined as "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, collect or attempt to engage in any such conduct" (ESA, 1973, p. 3). To be sure, wolves were better protected under these guidelines than they were before being protected under the ESA. Yet the fact remains that gray wolf reintroduction recast an endangered species as a threatened one and marked the renewed presence of the species as a nonessential experiment, confined in a bordered bioregion which was "wholly separate" (ESA, 1973, p. 34) from natural populations of wolves to the North in Canada and Montana. This separateness, written into the act, implies foreignness and may enable more direct linguistic marking as foreign. In the end, labeling the species-itself not a stable category, as we have seen-a nonessential experiment may catalyze later discursive constraint by political borders rather than bioregion through establishing the animal's foreignness. A hybrid of authority-vested scientific positivism (experimental) and the designation of foreign origin (nonessential), the nonessential experimental designation may further the instability introduced by taxonomic confusion. Gray Wolves as the Reintroduced Other The potential pathology of the human relationship with the gray wolf may stem not just from its designation as a nonessential experiment separate from its originary bioregion, but also in part from the very notion of reintroduction. The problem with "reintroduction" of wolves is that "introduction" is used in the literature of conservation biology to indicate human-facilitated introduction of a nonnative species. Introduced nonnative species sometimes wreak havoc on native ecosystems, earning them various designations in the conservation biology literature, including "exotic," "alien," "pest" and "invasive" (Boitani, 2001, p. 123). The use of the term "reintroduction," with its close 39 relation to term introduction, may endorse-whether intentionally or not-classification of the gray wolf as an invader, an alien, or a pest. These terms are used often to discuss gray wolves in the West, and the official discourse of "reintroduction" may in some ways facilitate this sometimes dramatic, even hysterical othering (Plumwood, 2005; Sowards, 2006). This othering mirrors many of the discursive moves made in the heated discourse about "illegal aliens" not belonging (Flores, 2003; Martinez, 1999; Santa Ana, 2002). For example, Margaret Dayton, a Utah state senator, has argued that as gray wolves move into her state from Wyoming, they should be managed as an "invasive species" (Loomis, 2011). When her comment drew guffaws from fellow participants in a natural resources committee meeting, she persisted: "it's not really a laughing matter, although I see some chuckles here. It is not really a native species" (Loomis, 2011). Dayton's erroneous insistence on the gray wolf's historic range, limiting it to places outside her state's borders, is reminiscent of the spatial play of colonialism that marks human border-crossers as other, illegal and alien. This spatial play mobilizes the imagined-but no less effective for being so-borders of control and violence mark the criminal, transgressing other and sanction violence against her or him. In this case, Dayton appropriates the language of conservation biology-the term "invasive"-to invoke the authority of science in her determination of the wolf's outsider status and her implicit sanction of violence against it on the grounds of its invasiveness. The term invasive mobilizes the discourse of war (Larson, 2005) in much the same way as does the term alien (DeChaine, 2009; Marciniak, 2006; Nevins, 2002; Ngai, 2003). In both cases, alterity (and with it, alien-ness and invasiveness) is constructed as a threatening force, personified by workers or wolves, whose incursions into colonial territory are militated 40 against by regimes of territorial power. The term "alien" and the term "invasive" invoke, respectively, the authoritative discourses of immigration law and conservation biology; these discourses resonate with martial meaning. Gray Wolves as the Canadian Other The discursive construction of an endemic species as foreign, perhaps enabled by taxonomic instability and the nonessential experimental designation, is perhaps most simply evidenced through the modifier "Canadian." The use of this modifier emphasizes a perception of the gray wolf's foreignness and therefore its outsider status. Table 2.1 displays the use of this modifier. The table shows what the word modifies in selected sources. Sources numbered 1 through 6 in the table have the force of administrative policy or law; sources 7 through 8 Table 2.1. Concordance Data for "Canadian" Artifact (date) Canadian (document occurrences) Concordance cluster 1 (number of occurrences) Cluster 2 (n=) Cluster 3 (n=) 1) EIS (1994) 23 Authorities (5) Populations (5) Wolves (4) 2) Wyo Farm Bureau (1997) 19 Wolves (17) Officials (1) Populations (1) 3) Wyo Farm Bureau (2000) 3 Wolves (3) 4) ID State Wolf Plan (2002) 1 Wolf (1) 5) UT State Wolf Plan (2005) 32 Journal (14) Circumpolar (7) Field (5) 6) WY State Wolf Plan (2011) 4 Population (2) Wildlife (1) Journal (1) 7) BGF 2013 35 Gray (wolves) (19) Wolf (3) Wolves (2) 8) BGF 2014 6 Gray (wolves) (6) The use of "Canadian" as a modifier in influential legal and policy artifacts. Clusters are right side bigrams (the word that appears to the right of "Canadian"). Concordance data generated via AntConc. 41 are communications from a private entity contracted with a state government to that state's legislature. For sources 1 through 6, the discursive consequentiality and influence wielded by these documents renders their statements characterizing wolves relevant to this study's investigation. Sources 7 through 8 emanate from a group whose purpose is to stop wolves from moving into the state of Utah; as such, these statements resonate with the study's attention toward "othering" of wolves through discursive characterizations and the implications thereof. Using the application AntConc, I analyzed these discursive artifacts for usages of the word "Canadian." Concordance clusters show words paired (right side bigrams, showing what noun "Canadian" modifies) with "Canadian" and their frequency. I complement this raw information with a discussion of notable discursive features from recent statements by political entities from Idaho and Utah (items 7 and 8 in Table 2.1) that show divergent orientations toward wolves that either accent or mute gray wolves' possible ancestral origin across the Canadian border. Artifacts 1-3 have been discussed in detail above; artifacts 4, 5, and 6 are included because they articulate state wolf management policy and because they evince an increasing use of "Canadian" to modify wolves over time; artifacts 7 and 8 are representative of lobbying groups' relationship with generally antiwolf state legislatures. First, I will briefly interpret the raw data in the table, then I will analyze these notable discursive features. Table 2.1 shows patterns in the usage of the modifier "Canadian" across source type. Source types are state wildlife management agencies, court decisions, and political lobbying/special interest groups. All have been influential in shaping wolf policy. Generally, state wildlife agencies, as evidenced by state wolf 42 management plans, do not foreground the foreign origin of wolves. Utah's wolf plan uses "Canadian" 32 times; Wyoming's plan uses it 4 times, and Idaho's plan uses the modifier only once. Idaho's lone usage refers to wolves located in Canada, not to wolves reintroduced to the United States. Utah's plan uses the modifier most frequently of the 3 states (14 times); it does so when citing literature regarding wolf behavior, morphology, range and the like. Wyoming's plan, like Idaho's, uses the term in relation to wolves located in Canada and in citing sources rather than in discussing the particulars of wolf reintroduction or recovery. Wyoming's plan uses the term in discussing trends in Northern Rocky Mountain wolf populations and to cite sources. Ultimately, state wolf management plans do not appear to foreground to any identifiable extent the Canadian origin of reintroduced wolves. The two court decisions, however, show a marked difference in their use of the modifier. The 1997 decision that called for removal of reintroduced wolves foregrounded the foreignness of reintroduced wolves, suggesting "wolves from Canada are of a distinct subspecies." It foregrounds the presence of extant pocket populations of C l. irremotus and the potential harm done to this population's genetic integrity by reintroduced wolves from Canada. The 2000 circuit court reversal of the 1997 district court decision uses "Canadian" far fewer times, as it aligns with FWS's contentions regarding the morphological and behavioral indistinguishability between subspecies and the ecological irrelevance of any such distinction. The Utah-based lobbying group Big Game Forever, or BGF, uses the modifier extensively, as the table shows. BGF is a lobbying organization that deals with wildlife management. The organization has contracted with the State of Utah for the past 3 years to engage in 43 lobbying activities in Washington, D.C. designed to "wrest control of wolf management from federal hands" (Maffly, 2013a). In particular, the group seeks to stop wolves from being reintroduced in Utah, despite the lack of any federal plans to do so or any substantive movement in that direction. For its efforts, the group has received $800,000 in Utah state dollars (Maffly, 2013b). The mission of Big Game Forever, in its own words, is in part to allow "hunters and fishermen from around the United States to speak with one united voice to promote the protection of abundant wild game and the right of sportsmen to participate in outdoor recreation including hunting, fishing and on-the-ground conservation efforts" (2014, p. 3). The statement compactly identifies the organization's purpose and simultaneously telegraphs ideology through presupposition and implication. The presupposition that participation in outdoor pursuits such as hunting is primarily a masculine endeavor is carried by the term "sportsmen." The statement implies that the primary sports are hunting and fishing, excluding through silence other sports. The frequency of use of the word "united" evinces ideographic association between BGF's mission and values enshrined in national identity, such as "right." With respect to gray wolves, the primary concern of this analysis is BGF's highly visible and consistent use of the phrase "Canadian Gray Wolves," all words of which are capitalized in its 2013 and 2014 communications to the Utah legislature. Such capitalization seems to underscore a strong lexical partnership between these elements; in addition, capitalization explicitly claims the propriety of the name according to the capitalization rules of edited American English. Although the document uses this phrase almost exclusively when discussing wolf reintroduction, the Canadian gray wolf has never been and is not now a recognized subspecies. The closest recognized subspecies to BGF's term is the British 44 Columbia gray wolf (Snyder, 1991). Moving beyond this baseline of BGF's erroneous characterization of gray wolves in lay taxonomic terms, note the parallelism of this statement: The decline of elk, moose, deer and other wildlife populations and the rapid growth of Canadian Gray Wolf populations in the Northern Rockies has been an issue of growing concern in the Western States. This parallelism is notable for 3 reasons. First, the parallelism syntactically links two phenomena that are not necessarily linked. That is, stochastic factors such as climate change and smaller-scale variation in available resources can dramatically affect ungulate populations and predator populations alike, as much as the basic elements of the predator-prey cycle (Bergstrom et al., 2009). Moreover, hunter harvest of elk has increased since wolf reintroduction in Utah's neighboring state of Idaho (Bergstrom et al., 2009, p. 995), indicating elk herds can flourish in the presence of wolves (Idaho has far more wolves than does Utah, where no wolf packs have been confirmed). For BGF, however, correlation masquerades as causation, catalyzing this unsubstantiated claim. Second, the dual subject and singular verb disagree in number. Two grammatical subjects-decline and growth-are treated as one. The ready linkage of events in a causal chain (decline of moose, etc. and the "rapid growth of Canadian Gray wolf populations") is thus strengthened by treating them grammatically as a single subject. Third, and perhaps most significant, is the implicit exclusion of the wolf from the category of wildlife. This is a basic refutation, reinforced grammatically and semantically, of the incontrovertible fact that gray wolves are wildlife. The animal was protected and reintroduced under tenets of the ESA, which calls for the protection of fish, wildlife and plants. Since the gray wolf is neither a fish nor a plant, it is therefore irrefutably wildlife under the ESA. Moreover, the 45 species has been managed in large part by the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife Services since its listing in 1974. Nominal markers of a generally alarmist tone abound in the BGF (2013) report to the Utah legislature. Notable in this respect are "influx" and "failure" from 8.2 and 8.3. the noun "influx" (OED, 2014) describes "the act or fact of flowing in; an inflow, as of a physical fluid." This association with fluid, coupled with the fatalistic, not-if-but-when sense of being overwhelmed by an impending entry into one's territory, is remarkably similar to narratives discussing the threat of immigration into the United States, for example the fear of a "brown tide" (Santa Ana, 2002) of in-migration from South of the U.S. border. The noun "failure" is central to BGF's assessment of the current state of wolf management, alternatively perceived by many biologists and laypeople as a conservation success. This failure, in turn, "has hurt wildlife populations and hard working livestock producers" (2014, p. 3). This phrasing is potent both in its arrangement of groups of people and groups of animals. The human group of federal wildlife managers, who have failed, is placed in opposition to the group of ranchers, who have worked hard and yet still have been hurt by the failure of their counterparts. Animal groups are similarly configured: the failure is linked to wolves; wildlife (a category that excludes wolves in BGF's configuration) has been hurt. This Manichean configuration of opposing groups elides the nuance of a complex ecological situation wherein wolves, as wildlife, perform a vital role in increasing and maintaining biodiversity, the most significant marker of ecosystem health (Fortin et al., 2005). 46 Attributing Alien-ness: the Operationalization of a Nonessential Experiment The modifications of wolves described above-nonessential experimental, reintroduced and/or nonnative, and Canadian and/or foreign-have been operationalized in discourse among state political leaders who use these designations to underscore the foreignness of gray wolves and to associate them with an overreaching federal government. This association ranges across rhetorical tropes and other sociolinguistic practices. I use "attributive" in a general sense rather than a formal grammatical-syntactic sense: for this analysis, attribution is an element of characterization wherein traits and characteristics (both social and biological) are attributed to wolves. In casting this wide net, I follow the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of attribution as an ascribed quality or character (2015). Of particular interest to this analysis is the way ascribed qualities of wolves from a biological perspective, such as their extended presence of 750,000 years in North America prior to human extirpation or their function as a predator, are inverted in political discourse (e.g., 750,000 years of sustained presence in Rocky Mountain ecosystems is compressed to the 20-year period of wolf reintroduction). To show these discursive phenomena, I discuss attributive modification of wolves at a key moment in the wolf debate: the autumn of 2010. The scene is Idaho, where after having had control of wolf populations for just 1 year, 4 months and 3 days, Idaho and neighboring Montana were compelled to step away from wolf management after a federal district court for the district of Montana overturned FWS's 2009 delisting of gray wolves in Idaho and Montana (Defenders of Wildlife v. Salazar, 2010), nodding to plaintiffs' claim that the delisting move had been based on political machinations rather than 47 biological evidence. Delisting wolves enables state management; when they are listed or relisted under the ESA, the federal government becomes the primary manager. State officials often resent the loss of control associated with federal management, particularly when management authority oscillates between state and federal entities, as is the case here. Since 2008, FWS has consistently moved toward turning management over to the several states, citing wolves' satisfactory recovery under the guidelines of the reintroduction plan (FWS, 2009, 2012). (Chapter 3 provides a more detailed account of the several decisions in this process.) The artifact presently under analysis is an October, 2010 letter from Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter to then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in which Otter repudiates his state's continuing cooperation with federal management of the gray wolf under the ESA. The letter was a strong statement of resistance to the ruling's perceived abridgement of states' right to manage wildlife. The authority to allow and/or ban the presence and circulation of wolves through federal and state lands in Idaho appears to be a key marker of state power for Otter. Indeed, Otter recently stressed in a state of the state address the importance of state wolf management in Idaho, lauding the state's ability to "take back control of these predators from our federal landlords" (2014). Assertions of state sovereignty such as Otter's achieved a pinnacle 6 months after Otter's 2010 letter was sent. In May, 2011, Idaho representative Mike Simpson and Montana Senator Jon Tester attached a one-paragraph rider (the term "rider" denotes a provision attached to a bill that is unrelated to the bill's substantive content) to the federal budget bill that mandated enforcement of FWS's 2009 delisting in Idaho and Montana and attempted to forestall any further litigation on the 48 matter (Bruskotter, 2013). The move was unprecedented: never before had congressional action delisted a species. While Otter's letter is perhaps not the proximate cause in the budget bill rider's creation, it is an important artifact in the discourse of wolf management, as it is connected to the current state of wolf management in Idaho, where 466 gray wolves were killed by humans in the past year (FWS, 2013, p. i). Idaho has used hunts to cull wolf populations, and in addition has cooperated with federal agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services to lethally control wolves in the state (FWS, 2013). Ironically, such efforts at control may increase the species' fecundity and fracture pack structures, thereby increasing the odds of wolf depredation on livestock (Wielgus & Peebles, 2014). In another ironic turn, Otter's complaints about federal overreach, articulated in his October, 2010 letter that I analyze below, may have catalyzed federal overreach: Tester and Simpson's manipulation of the political process to delist gray wolves-a one-paragraph statement that does not cite the ESA or other law-has been challenged as an unconstitutional incursion of federal legislative power into the interpretive purview of the judicial branch (Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Salazar, 2012). The rider circumvented the process by which delisting is to take place: not according to legislative fiat, but based "solely on the best scientific and commercial data available" (ESA, 1973, p. 5). As a particularly resonant enunciation in the broader conversation about state versus federal power, Otter's letter is firmly imbedded in the discourse of states' rights to manage wildlife. It operates on an emotional register, closely aligns gray wolves with foreignness and undue incursion by an overreaching political force, and rhetorically 49 inverts key attributions of what wolves are, including predator/prey, invasive/endangered and local/distant. It thus operationalizes the modifications discussed above and extends the discursive practice of "othering" the wolf, marking it as a foreign presence incurring on state territory. This use or "operationalizing" of modifications is generally attributive rather than attached to a particular modifier; it is thus better suited to qualitative discourse analysis for rhetorical features rather than a quantified account of particular usages of a term. Notably, Otter's letter does not characterize gray wolves in his state as "Canadian," which I have advanced as a way to index the association of foreignness with the wolf. Yet, as I argue, Otter's letter squarely characterizes the wolf as an intruder and a foreign presence. Including a fine-grained analysis of this discursive artifact, then, complements the data presented and analyzed above by showing how characterizations can perform the work of othering without using a particular modifier such as "Canadian." The length of Otter's letter belies its potential influence as a rhetorical statement: we see here how an official voice with power over one of the states that features prominently in discussions about wolf management characterizes wolves. Butch Otter's Rhetorical Inversions The typical definition of an inversion is simply a turning upside down. For current purposes, an inversion is a radical shift in the respective relations between opposed social actors and the attributions that attach to them. At times, these shifts are radical enough to look like transpositions: local for foreign, for example, or invasive for endangered. As Wolin (2008) has argued, political inversions, such as the silent totalitarianism the author attributes to the purportedly democratic American political system, occur when systems 50 "produce a number of significant actions ordinarily associated with [their] opposite" (p. 46). These inversions attribute actions and characteristics to social actors through association rather than through proof of deed. The first paragraph of Governor Otter's letter is as follows: In Idaho, wolves serve as a constant reminder of how far we have strayed from the Founding Fathers' original intent of a national government with limited, enumerated powers bestowed by the states. Wolves were forced on Idaho in 1994 with no regard for the impacts the species would have on our people, wildlife and livestock. While some herald the introduction of wolves and the current population as a biological triumph, history will show that this program was a tragic example of oppressive, ham-handed ‘conservation' at its worst. Idahoans have suffered this intolerable situation for too long, but starting today at least the State no longer will be complicit (Otter, 2010). The letter begins with an invocation of the constitution, citing the presence of wolves as a mnemonic for federal overreach. Otter suggests the "Founding Fathers' original intent" was a national government with powers "bestowed by the states," and he identifies wolves as a "constant reminder" of how far the nation has strayed from its foundational intention, which he implicitly identifies as the desire to create a scattered pastiche of sovereign states that would imbue the federal government with a limited range of power. There are a number of notable features in this opening paragraph that have an inverting effect. After drawing a typical states' rights distinction between the constitutional moorings of the country's governance and a perceived metastasis of centralized federal power, Otter squarely identifies the wolf, a species endemic to his state (FWS, 1987), with overweening federal power (through the process of wolves' being "forced" on Idaho), aligning a local predator with a disembodied and distant seat of power. Otter later solidifies this alignment when he characterizes gray wolves in Idaho as 51 "your wolves," claiming "we showed, during delisting, that we are responsible stewards of all our wildlife, including your wolves." The wolf's attributive alignment with an oppressive federal government endows the wolf with rhetorical, if not biological, force by inverting the categories of local and distant. That is, through Otter's mnemonic association of the wolf with invasive government power, he grafts the wolf onto the distant and disembodied, yet oppressive and powerful, agent of his state's victimization. In a sense, this is merely a version of the time-honored scapegoating (Frazer, 1951) of wolves, an easy symbolic move. Yet this lamination of a symbolic wolf onto a master narrative of an oppressive federal government does not just draw memory traces from mythic lore. In addition, it foregrounds the wolf's relatively recent reintroduction, identifying it as invasive rather than endemic, just as is the federal government, from Otter's perspective. This rhetorical construction of invasiveness adds to the letter a register of righteous indignation at an undue incursion on Idaho's sovereign rights by a wolf-government hybrid and invokes the martial metaphors associated with determining which species belong in a "native" ecosystem and which do not (Larson, 2005; Rodman, 1993). This symbolic wolf-government hybrid has, of course, material basis: there are wolves in Idaho. For Otter, however, the wolf-government hybrid is his state's oppressor, a hybridized rhetorical actor. The undeniable presence of biological wolves in Idaho, the very impetus for this letter, is symbolically subsumed by the wolf's manifestation as a mnemonic for government oppression, a wolf-government hybrid. Otter's inversion of the wolf's biological status (from a resident of 750,000 years to an invasive transplant) is metonymic: the federal government is a wolf, and Idaho has become prey, ensnared in the insidious wiles of wolf restoration. This inversion also 52 refutes time, collapsing the wolf's millennia of biological presence into the moment of the wolf's reintroduction by humans. The wolf is thus decoupled from its biological context and aligned with the oppressive weight of hegemonic force. Otter's simultaneous elision of biological history and celebration of the "founding fathers'" intent collapses the complex warp and woof of history into an ideologically-inflected construction of humanistic "intent" on the part of the "founding fathers." Although what is happening to the wolf as it is grafted into the context of a hegemonic other has multifaceted rhetorical implications, the Idaho Governor is making a simplistic associative move. The letter characterizes the government-wolf hybrid as a chimerical beast devouring the "founding fathers' intent," transgressing the bounds of space and time just as it transgresses state boundaries: with ease and with purpose. In the letter's second sentence, Otter claims "wolves were forced on Idaho in 1994 with no regard for the impacts the species would have on our people, our wildlife and our livestock." This statement extends the attributive association of the wolf with overweening federal power. It further cements this attribution by leaving the wolf out of the category of wildlife. Using words like "impacts" and "species" objectifies the animal and sends the wolf into the linguistic terrain occupied by discourse on invasive species, with its "militaristic and combative metaphors" (Larson, 2005, p. 495). Further, this attribution appropriates the language of biology, working to foreclose biological discourse as a tool for further wolf protection. This sentence also furthers the identification of Idaho as a victim of the wolf-government hybrid. The letter carries an emotional register, which may contribute to its simple configuration of power alignments wherein Idahoans have fallen prey to "ham-handed ‘conservation' at its worst" and they 53 have "suffered this intolerable situation for too long." The "ham-handed" federal government is violating the constitutionally granted sovereignty of this independent, individualistic Western state, and the instrument of this violation is the wolf. Aligning conservation with ham-handedness and encasing the word conservation in scare quotes frames conservation as a futile and wrongheaded game of misguided ecological thinking. Although Otter demarcates stark and simplistic power dynamics, devoting the entire first paragraph to identifying Idaho as prey to the government and its wolves, the rhetorical upshot of the paragraph has much more complex implications: a symbolic nullification of wolves as a biological presence. The wolf is characterized in purely rhetorical terms. Although it roams Idaho's mountains and valleys, it is not part of the "wildlife" of Idaho. Instead, it is but a "species," a disembodied symbol. Even if Otter is arguing here for the ability to manage the living, biological wolf, the wolf he is addressing in this letter (and he is indeed addressing the wolf as he addresses Salazar, under the letter's pathos-driven rhetoric of victimization) is a dead letter. This elevation or transposition of the local, biological wolf to a distant and purely symbolic wolf sets up a dramatic tension between this treatment of the wolf and the romanticized frontier individualism that forms the letter's emotive core. Further, the collapse of time, the inversion of predator/prey attributions, and the confounding of space implied in the local/distant inversion all signal abdication of state responsibility for wolf management, even while emphasizing the state's ability to "exercise our sovereign right to protect our wildlife" (Otter, 2010). 54 Visually Characterizing What Wolves Are As I have shown, written texts such as Otter's letter, environmental impact statements, and court decisions characterize wolves consequentially: they often influence policy or have the force of law. Images also characterize what wolves are, though they do not shape policy in the same way. Images of wolves, too, are an important link in the complex chain of characterization. In official communications such as wolf population monitoring reports and state wolf management plans, images of wolves are featured; selection and presentation of these images may be inflected with ideology. They may function as visual aids to complement orientations toward wolves' presence described in the documents in which they appear. Their meaning potential may not always originate in their selection, but rather in the way in which they might be interpreted. Hence, their analysis is one way to respond to the research questions with which I began this study. Table 2.2 summarizes the characterization of what wolves are in cover images of official communications about wolves. The data set in Table 2.2. is similar to that of Table 2.1. I only include in this data set documents featuring images of wolves, which removes the Wyoming Farm Bureau court cases from this data set. Here, I include each of the state wolf management plans featured in Table 2.1, and I also include Big Game Forever's legislative reports, as they feature images. For each artifact, the images typically appear at or near the beginning of these documents, visually setting the tone for the written component of each text. As Barthes (1973, 1977) and many others (e.g., Hariman & Lucaites, 2011; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Van Leeuwen, 2008) have argued, images stimulate viewer interpretation and call up associations about the social and cultural position of what or 55 Table 2.2. Image Type and Features in Official Communications about Wolves Artifact (Date), Image Type Color (number of wolves) Viewing Angle H=horizontal angle V=vertical angle Recovery Plan (1987), pen and ink copy Black & white (2) H=frontal V=neutral EIS (1994), photograph White (1) H=frontal V=neutral Idaho Wolf Plan (2002), no image Utah Wolf Plan (2005), photograph White/gray (1) H=frontal V=neutral Wyoming Wolf Plan (2011), photograph Black/dark gray (1) H=side view V=neutral Wyoming Plan addendum (2012), photograph Black (1) H=side view V=above Wyoming Population Monitoring Report (2012), photograph Black (3) H=from behind V=above BGF legislative report (2013), no image BGF legislative report (2014), photograph Black (1) H=frontal V=below whom is imaged. As potentially powerful political statements, images can organize particular orientations toward what is represented (Hariman & Lucaites, 2011). Of the many features of images that might affect characterizations of wolves, I focus on 3 primary elements: the color of wolves in the image, the number of wolves in the image, and the angle of the image horizontal angle (H)=frontal view, side view, or from behind; vertical angle (V)=viewed from above, viewed from below, or neutral). I quantify these in Table 2.2; then, I offer further discussion of these and other important features, such as background. Theorizing Visual Characterizations Analyzing an image often requires the sort of separation of elements I have done here. Yet, we see and process images organically, subconsciously and often 56 instantaneously. This separation for the purposes of analysis, then, may in some ways be artificial. Yet, the separation of various elements allows analysis of images in their particularity (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996). It is possible that presuppositions corresponding to ideologies are written into images by their creators, read from images by their interpreters, or both. Determining whether and how this happens is necessarily selective and interpretive, but as Table 2.1 shows, certain trends-such as a tendency toward using black wolves and wolves in greater number in more recent years and among states/organizations generally hostile toward wolves-are borne out in this visual data, a process that may catalyze the othering of wolves and their ejection from notions of what belongs in ecosystems. Black is the New Gray: Coloring Wolves Mech (1970) identified a wide variation in coat color, or pelage, among gray wolves, from "white through cream-colored, buff, tawny, reddish, and gray to black" (p. 16). Mech (1970) concluded that gray is the most common coat color, as the species' name implies. As Table 2.2 shows, BGF and the state of Wyoming use black wolves to represent the gray wolf. Particularly when a single image is used in a document as a cover photo to set the tone for the document, this choice seems consequential. Black wolves almost certainly exist in the territory of Utah and Wyoming, and gray wolves with a black coat are no different from any other gray wolf from a functional perspective. Yet in images such as these, color may have resonance beyond merely representing a particular specimen as an emblem of a species. Among humans, color is a marker of race and ethnicity (though of course not the exclusive one and not one that operates at all simply). When characterizing others visually, color is an issue, as Van Leeuwen (2008) 57 has described. I do not mean to suggest here a direct link between racism, a complex problem in human societies, and the depiction of animals, though this "dreaded comparison" has been explored productively (e.g., Speigel, 1998). Even if race is not a factor in the visual characterization of wolves, color is one for this analysis. Through choices in coloration of wolves, these images may provide visual evidence of othering, which often sanctions violence and control. The exclusively black coloration of gray wolves in this sample among political entities (the state of Wyoming, whose wolf policy has recently been deemed by a federal court as violating the ESA, and BGF, which minces no words in declaring its enmity toward wolf presence) seems significant in this light. The timeline involved here is also an interesting element: as states seek, yet are often denied control over wolves (as is the case with Wyoming now, where federal control is once again in place after the recent District Court decision), the gray wolves pictured get darker, more numerous, begin participating in predation, and are often shown in a full run, viewed aerially as if from a pursuing helicopter. Many of these, of course, are images that reflect typical wolf behavior. Yet the movement toward darker, more and predating wolves coincides temporally with the denial of state control in the face of rising wolf populations. These shifting orientations that become more bellicose over time based on changing background conditions are strikingly parallel to border discourse involving people. Orientations toward immigrant presence and the labor done by immigrants change with time and according to economic conditions: when the economy booms, the "American Dream" is celebrated as an ideal and cheap transnational labor is welcomed; when the economy wanes, however, dominant attitudes toward immigrant others shifts 58 toward distrust, hatred and occasionally violence (Flores, 2003; Santa Ana, 2002). Considering the placement of these images in time, we can chart a similar shift in orientations, using color and number of wolves as an indicator. As states such as Wyoming (2012) and political organizations such as BGF (2014) become more concerned about wolf population numbers and continued federal control over them in the absence of satisfactory state plans (Wyoming) and sufficient wolf numbers to warrant delisting (Utah), images seem to mark wolves as an object of control and domination. This is in contrast to earlier images that picture white wolves, as in EIS (1994) and Utah (2005), and which feature a single wolf. Indeed, in the Utah wolf management plan cover photo (2005), the single white wolf is in a state of repose, paws resting in front, and the animal occupies the whole frame, facing forward and looking entirely unperturbed. Later, wolves are pictured as pursued, looking over their shoulder (Wyoming, 2012), sprinting through snowy fields as if pursued aerially, or furtively gnawing on an ungulate carcass (Wyoming, 2012). Angle of Attack: Viewing Wolves From on High This apparent urge to assert authority over gray wolves-perhaps symbolized by their increasingly darker color, higher number, running away from the camera and out of the frame-is also evident in the vertical angle (above, below or neutral) from which the image is displayed. Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) interpret the vertical angle in particular as an indicator of power relations. While these scholars consider images of humans, I suggest that the importance of the vertical angle holds in images of other "others," such as animals. For Van Leeuwen (2008), "to look down on someone is to exert imaginary symbolic power over that person" (p. 137). Notably, images 6 and 7, 59 both emanating from Wyoming in the year 2012, picture wolves viewed from a high angle. The year was an eventful one for wolf management in Wyoming: after being denied delisting and therefore state control by the 2009 FWS final rule and the subsequent 2011 congressional rider mandating its enforcement, Wyoming drafted an addendum emphasizing-though not quantifying-its commitment to managing for a "sustainable" population. The addendum was released in March, 2012. Upon reviewing the addendum and deeming it a "satisfactory regulatory mechanism" for state wolf management, FWS delisted the species in Wyoming in October, 2012. The hunt during which wolf 832f was taken (see Chapter 1) began immediately after, and aggressive state wolf control continued through September, 2014, when the delisting was overturned under a "capricious and arbitrary" administrative rules standard by a federal district court. The state of Wyoming's communications about wolves reinforce a sense of control over wolves by picturing them as below the camera and on the run. These wolves are black. In contrast, none of the images of white wolves in this sample show the animal from a high camera angle. Images of white wolves are level with the camera in this sample. Whereas Wyoming's movement toward control of wolves in these documents is associated with down-angle (above the animal) views of wolves, Utah's BGF (2014) takes a different tack, showing a black wolf above the camera, its gaze trained downward. This difference in angle may correspond to a difference in management status: BGF may see wolves as controlling the state rather than the other way around, resulting in a reversal of power relations. The black wolf pictured by BGF is perhaps a visual corollary of Butch Otter's wolf-government metonymic hybrid: just as Uncle Sam fixes an unflinching gaze on the would-be recruit, the black wolf in the BGF image looks down 60 on the audience, impervious to its control. Conclusions Discursive characterizations of the wolf carry implications both rhetorically and in terms of wildlife management. These implications extend to power relations between states, federal agencies and other stakeholders such as wolf advocacy groups. The wolf debate, one of the most intractable issues in wildlife management, is also one of the most prominent markers of states' rights discourse in the study area. As Otter's letter shows, discussions about wolves readily integrate the ideographs such as liberty, freedom and the like. As the instability of wolf taxonomy and the frequent use of "Canadian" as a modifier to refer to wolves that do not originate in Canada tend to show, wolves are often characterized as an invading other whose presence should be militated against. Ultimately, the wolf, as an ideograph that mobilizes passionately felt sympathies and antipathies and as a profound ecological presence, plays a role in the contested terrains of the new West. In this chapter, I have presented and discussed data from the study regarding the characterization of what wolves are, both from the naming standpoint of taxonomy and the adjectival and attributive modification of wolves, present in both written text and image. Doing so has addressed the research questions identified in Chapter 1. I have claimed that destabilized taxonomy, modifiers such as experimental, nonessential and Canadian, along with the operationalization of this taxonomic and modifier-based characterization, combine to confine the wolf within political territory rather than its bioregional range. Characterization present in images adds to the othering of wolves, 61 which in turn may sanction discipline, control and violence exerted along the lines of political borders, whether ideological or physical. Characterizations of gray wolves such as protected, trophy game, predator, or an agent of the federal government exert the disciplinary force of spatial, physical containment as a function of their rhetoricity. For Foucault, discipline is a "specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise" (2007, p. 170). This technique organizes bodies into "small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments" (Foucault, 2007, p. 170). The discursive traces of this process in the gray wolf's case reveal multiple confinements that may work to undo the systems thinking (i.e., the need for predators to balance ecosystems) behind the gray wolf's reintroduction. The concept of an "experimental" population, particularly when coupled with "nonessential," circumscribes the species' presence as contingent and revocable from the beginning. Paradoxically, gray wolf reintroduction down-listed an endangered species into a threatened one and marked the presence of an arguably essential species as a nonessential experiment, confined in a bordered bioregion which was "wholly separate" (ESA, 1973, p. 34) from natural populations of wolves to the North in Canada and Montana. Labeling the species nonessential experimental and separating it "wholly" from its native terrain may catalyze later discursive constraint by political borders rather than bioregion. The experimental-nonessential designation is thus a pathological rhetorical-material discursive confinement of the gray wolf. This pathology is exacerbated by the very notion of reintroduction because the use of the term "reintroduction," derived as it is from the term introduction, may endorse characterization of the gray wolf as an invader, 62 an alien, or a pest. These problematic instabilities in terms of taxonomy and management status coincide with the species' rhetorical mobility as a symbol of invading foreignness (Canadian wolves) and federal government overreach. The material manifestation of the wolf is ultimately constrained by its very discursive power. That is to say, the wolf's ready application to symbolic characterizations of otherness that ultimately have little to do with it as a species render the wolf more symbol than material presence. Paradoxically, the species' persecution as a material presence-coupled of course with its preservation in some areas such as YNP-continues even as its discursive characterizations confine it within symbolicity. The simultaneity of the rhetorical dead-end of discursive characterizations and the material dead-end of wolves such as 832f is noteworthy because it casts into stark relief the possibilities and limitations of this prominent species as a bridge between humans and other animals and between symbol and material. Based on my analysis of characterizations of what wolves are, there remain possibilities for productive challenging of these divides, but they are not generally pursued by the characterizations analyzed here. In the study's concluding chapter, I further explore these implications. CHAPTER 3 CHARACTERIZING WHAT WOLVES DO In November of 2014, visitors to the Kaibab Plateau area of Grand Canyon National Park reported seeing a wolf, the first one in the area for over 70 years (FWS, 2014). DNA analysis of scat samples revealed that this female gray wolf had traveled at least 450 miles from her likely birthplace in the Northern Rocky Mountains (Gannon, 2014). Long-range roaming such as this wolf's journey is a common occurrence among wolves. This process is known as dispersal, and it is a defining feature of this highly mobile species. Dispersal happens for a number of reasons, the most common of which are to locate food or to find a suitable mate (FWS, 2014). Among populations of wolves, movement such as this is vital for ensuring long-term genetic viability (Boyd & Fletscher, 1999). In the absence of effective dispersal, wolf populations wither, as has been the case with the genetically isolated gray wolf population of Isle Royale National Park in the great lakes region of the Northern U.S. (Mlot, 2014). In the study area of the Rocky Mountain region, gray wolf breeding and dispersal figure prominently in decisions regarding the conservation status of the species. The shift from federal to state management is based on the species meeting or exceeding minimum population numbers (under the 1987 recovery plan, 10 breeding pairs and 100 individuals in the 3 recovery zones of YNP, Central Idaho and Montana), thereby warranting removal of this nonessential experimental population from the list of endangered species 64 and justifying state control of the recovered species. State wolf management plans must specify measures to ensure populations above minimum recovery numbers. In addition, state wildlife managers must make clear how their policies will allow wolves to disperse. Since dispersing wolves are more likely to die from human-caused mortality such as hunting (Fletscher et al., 1997), this aspect of state management plans is particularly important, as all state plans call for lethal control of wolves through hunting, trapping, poisoning, aerial pursuit and other means. Once gray wolves were reintroduced to the Rocky Mountain region, their actions were several. These actions were predictable, though the species' success eclipsed the predictions of some (Phillips & Smith, 1996; White & Garrott, 2005). Upon reintroduction, wolves reproduced, formed packs, and expanded into a rangewide, if fragmented, population, termed at times a "metapopulation" (FWS, 2012). Dispersal catalyzed this process. Considering the dynamics of this process and how they have been represented in discourse, this chapter will analyze discourse about what wolves do, focusing on the process of population growth through breeding and the process of dispersal (and with it the distribution of wolf populations across a range). These two categories of action are crucial aspects of what wolves do to persist, and they are prominent features in discourses that characterize the animal. These characterizations of the animal based on population and dispersal vary across stakeholder groups and across time, making them an important feature to consider through analyzing discourse. The predatory habits of wolves, another important and controversial aspect of what they do, will be discussed in Chapter 4. Because dispersal and breeding take place across a wide area, the political, economic and social frictions discussed thus far between 65 various stakeholders are brought to bear as wolves move across territories defined politically by humans. Discourse wields disciplinary force over individual wolves and wolf populations as they breed and disperse; these actions are treated in both biological and social terms-and amalgams thereof-in the data set. The data set for this chapter consists of important policy documents regarding wolf reintroduction and recovery, along with two influential court decisions holding that the delisting of the gray wolf was unlawful under the ESA and/or federal administrative policy. The policy documents extend from 1987, when FWS issued a revised recovery plan for the Rocky Mountain gray wolf (later termed simply gray wolf, as discussed in Chapter 2), to 2009, when FWS issued a final rule delisting the Rocky Mountain population of the gray wolf. A separate 2012 delisting document specific to Wyoming is also included. Further policy documents consist of two separate rules identifying Western and Rocky Mountain Distinct Population Segments (DPS) for the gray wolf, along with yearly monitoring reports establishing wolf numbers, distribution across their range and the like. The court cases both adjudicated disputes regarding the lawfulness under the ESA of the 2009 listing decision and the 2012 delisting decision specific to Wyoming. Theoretical Orientation and Contribution This chapter's goal is to show how a population of a species, a key term in wildlife management and social theory alike, is discursively defined, characterized, and constrained. These discursive processes enforce security over a population. Security mechanisms supervise populations as they pass from the control of one institution into that of another (Foucault, 2007), as was the case with 832f passing from the protection of YNP to an open state hunting area in Wyoming. In the case I examine here, the 66 institutional control and resultant territorial shifts flow from federal to state control over the species, and security mechanisms implicated in this process include state borders and the administratively enforced borders between prime wolf habitat and areas where they are seldom seen and even less welcome. These security mechanisms are at least in part discursive, and they involve "an increasingly huge set of legislative measures, decrees, regulations, and circulars that permit the deployment of these mechanisms of security" (Foucault, 2007, p. 7). This analysis shows how sound science (i.e., the consensus of opinion emanating from wolf biologists) may be suppressed by discourse regimes that superimpose political borders over the ecological bioregions that define habitat. The concept of population, which is increasingly qualified by the modifier "buffer" (a "buffer population"), enable territorial enactments that enforce a security over a species that may manifest as a sterility. The material-rhetorical divide is oddly bridged in this process: discursively-enacted territorial security over a population in the form of controlling the species' numbers may strip ecological viability from the population. This viability is a functi