Sanctuary Natures: Provoking Wildlife with Conservation Fencing

Abstract

Ecosanctuaries or wildlife sanctuaries are protected areas almost exclusively found in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, in which nature conservation and ecological restoration practices are undertaken for wildlife recovery objectives. A subset of these sanctuaries are bordered by predator-proof fences to prevent the incursion of introduced predatory and feral species, such as foxes, stoats, rats, and cats, and protect threatened indigenous wildlife inside, including marsupials and birds. This is a unique purpose for conservation fencing, which is most commonly used around the world to keep predatory animals within protected areas and away from agricultural lands and human settlements. In this thesis I focus on two specific predator-proof fenced sanctuaries: Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary in Canberra, Australia, and Zealandia Ecosanctuary in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

I draw on literature in the environmental humanities and social sciences, as well as science and technology studies, to argue that sanctuaries and their fences actively provoke the emergence of new natures, which I refer to as sanctuary natures. Sanctuaries do not simply restore ecosystems and conserve wildlife within their boundaries, as if they were passive safe havens. Rather, releasing wildlife into sanctuaries, containing species within such sites, as well as subjecting these animals to a range of other interventions, are all acts which provoke non-human life. By provoking wildlife these actions do not anger animals and incite aggressive reactions from them, but more generally, they prompt such species to respond to them in certain ways, including through their movements or interactions with other species.

I focus in particular on how sanctuaries sometimes provoke the movement of wildlife from within them to beyond their fenced boundaries. This spillover effect, or beyond-the-fence phenomenon, involves birds flying over sanctuary fences and into the surrounding areas on their own accord. Here the restricted space of sanctuaries, the limited resources within them, and their novel environments, prompt birds to explore and even inhabit the world on the other side of the fence. In some cases this forms a halo; or a zone abundant in birds from a sanctuary in the neighboring landscape. Spillover from sanctuaries has a range of effects, as beyond-the-fence species become entangled with other animals, infrastructure, people, and plants. These multispecies relations often emerge unexpectedly, without being planned or predicted, and disrupt normative ecological knowledge.

I ask what kinds of multispecies futures these emergent sanctuary natures might offer in the context of the Anthropocene and the ongoing extinction crisis in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Sanctuaries are achieving success in protecting wildlife, but they often do so in new ways, including by increasing indigenous biodiversity within cities rather than in remote wilderness areas, or within traditional protected areas such as national parks. I argue sanctuaries have the potential to transform how people live with wildlife in suburban landscapes. However, this requires not just bringing threatened species into cities, but more broadly reconfiguring non-human life to enable reconciliation and co-existence between people and multiple natures. I conclude by questioning whether sanctuaries can shift from a beyond-the-fence present to a post-fence future. Show more