Multi-Species Cities for the Anthropocene: Narrativizing Human-Wildlife Relations in an Urban Organizational Niche

Amidst academic debates about how wildlife conservation should adapt in a postnatural world, big conservation NGOs have shown an increasing interest in cities as the kind of humanized landscapes that may define conservation for the Anthropocene. This research explores the ways that their emerging focus on urban natures represents a potential friction point with organizations who navigate the urban/wild relationship at close range through direct interventions with everyday human-wildlife encounters. I look at the work of four organizations involved in narrativizing ethical relations with wildlife in a large Canadian city: three urban wildlife organizations (UWOs) defined by their on-the-ground responses to encounters with wildlife and their involvement in urban coexistence education and, comparatively, a branch of an international conservation organization located in the same city. Through a series of staff and volunteer interviews and a qualitative analysis of organizational grey literature, I consider the evolution of an urban wildlife field, the organizations different engagements with affective wildlife encounters, and the way ideas of nature and postnature are mobilized in their practice and discourse about human-wildlife relations. I find that 1. Urban wildlife organizations are under-recognized as part of the institutional infrastructure of cities and their practice is characterized by struggles over funding and identity; 2. The big conservation organizations engagement with the city as a site of connection to nature evades the costs and complications of affective encounters that shape UWO practice ; and 3. The communications of the big conservation organization reflect in some ways the new human-centred conservation, posing explicit challenge to the fields historical attachment to a human/nature divide. The UWOs in this study, in contrast, remained invested in this division as a guideline for a harm-reduced coexistence. I conclude by exploring how UWOs fidelity to the human/nature divide speaks to relational theories about urban multispecies cosmopolitics, and how an appreciation of their interventionist niche might inform the aspirational project of the more-than-human city.