Forthcoming Publications
Drafts of the below papers have been completed and are awaiting publication. Please get in touch if you’d like to see any of them.
Military Snails: Multispecies Solidarities in Hawai‘i
For Roman Bartosch, Ursula K. Heise, and Kate Rigby (eds) Unsettling Extinction: Biodiversity Loss and the Environmental Humanities.
Mākua Valley on the island of O‘ahu is a place in which snail conservation, the US Army, and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) claims to access land and cultural sites, are all brought into dynamic tension. Over roughly the past 100 years, the Army have used this valley for live-fire and other exercises, excluding people while also blowing up and burning the habitat of critically endangered land snails and other species. Snails and some local people are drawn together here into a powerful multispecies solidarity centered on efforts to conserve the biological and cultural heritage of this place in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of both colonization and militarization. In telling this story, this chapter aims to draw out how the history of struggles over this valley was shaped by a particular snail species, Achatinella mustelina: by its specific evolution, life history, and ecology. In so doing, it aims to highlight the importance of multispecies solidarities, of the particular possibilities that different, other-than-human, beings open up and foreclose as allies in struggles for more livable worlds. The chapter aims to unsettle extinction through both its focus on the agency of non-humans in their own conservation, and through its consideration of possibilities for mobilising conservation in ways that empower, rather than undermining, forms of Indigenous sovereignty.