Title: The wild workforce: Enlisting non-human labor in 'invasive species' management
An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterise 'invasive alien' species (IAS) management. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labour to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these non-human actors are strategically enlisted to counter 'invasive specie's through various methods such as predation, detection, sensing, niche occupation, and infiltration.
This paper critically examines this conscription of non-humans, including sentient animals, to do the dirty work for us, by synthesising ongoing cases from each of these categories or careers of non-human labor. These range from metabolic and ecological labor, performed with relatively little human intervention, to contrived schemes of capturing, sterilising, tagging, and releasing Judas animals to locate conspecifics for culling.
In the IAS management context, most of this is a kind of necro-labor, where non-human workers, wittingly or unwittingly, end up as assassins, snitches, moles, thieves and destroyers of their targets, the undesired 'invasives'.
The authors argue that wild animal labor has been invisibilised insofar as these non-human laborers either are said to perform their “natural” behaviors or relegated to nature/property themselves, that is, the product of labor.
The paper helps de-exceptionalise human labour over nature and make visible the kinds of contracts that we are entering into with non-human labourers and hence also our duties and responsibilities. The paper's focus on labour specifically in 'invasive species' management helps highlight the harms involved in necro-labour that targets undesirable species unreflectively.
von Essen, E., Wanderer, E., Lennon, G., & Ahlberg, K. (2025). The wild workforce: Enlisting non-human labor in invasive species management. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0).
