Constructed Conflict

Ecological theory has long examined the complexity of human-wildlife interactions. For instance, scholars have spent years examining the myriad social factors—such as perceptions, attitudes, past experiences, gender, socioeconomic status, and beliefs—that determine what a person perceives as conflict (i.e., a negative human-wildlife interaction) (Dickman 2010; Frank 2016; Soulsbury and White 2015). Recently, Nyeema Harris and colleagues (2023) have highlighted that human-wildlife interactions are not static—that is, these interactions cannot necessarily be binned into coexistence and conflict as these terms are incredibly flimsy. And although Beatrice Frank (2016) discusses human-wildlife interactions along a continuum between conflict and coexistence, Harris et al. (2023) extend this idea by noting coexistence is not necessarily devoid of conflict (i.e., human tolerance of what is deemed a “negative” action from a nonhuman animal) and that a lifecycle of interactions occurs between humans and wildlife that is highly dynamic, such that lasting coexistence may rarely occur.

Human-wildlife interactions, generally, can be positive (e.g., ecotourism, local birdwatching), negative (e.g., livestock or pets lost to predation, vehicle mortalities), or neutral (e.g., humans and squirrels coexisting in a park). Negative human-wildlife interactions are typically characterized as human-wildlife conflict, in which humans, infrastructure, or interests are negatively affected by wildlife (Bhatia et al. 2020; Soulsbury and White 2015). Negative interactions with wildlife can be considered a major issue (König et al. 2020; Lozano et al. 2019; Treves and Santiago-Avila 2020), with many studies exploring how to minimize negative human-wildlife interactions via management interventions (e.g., Boycott et al. 2021; Estien et al. 2022; Young et al. 2019). Human-wildlife conflict is especially prevalent in urban spaces due to a high concentration of humans and land-use changes (König et al. 2020) and has even led to evolutionary consequences on wildlife inhabiting these spaces (Schell et al. 2021).

There is no doubt that interspecies interactions can be complex (Pooley et al. 2021), but I ask, is it actually conflict? Conflict, broken down into “together” (con-) and “to strike” (- flict), is defined by Merriam-Webster in several ways: “Noun: (1) competitive or opposing action of incompatibles: antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons);…(2) mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands;…(3) the opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction. Verb: (1): to be different, opposed, or contradictory: to fail to be in agreement or accord;…(2) archaic: to contend in warfare.” Hence, to say there is human-wildlife conflict is to say we as humans are “different, opposed, or contradictory” to wildlife. It’s to say that wildlife are “antagonistic” and have “incompatible needs, drives, wishes, or demands.” Rhetoric as such can often predetermine how we perceive or interact with animals that have been seen as “aggressive” and “dangerous” due to myriad “negative” interactions with humans. But are these negative interactions actually conflict? And is the use of conflict predetermining how we perceive wildlife and assess our interactions with them?

Nils Peterson et al. (2010) began this conversation by reviewing what has been categorized as human-wildlife conflict in the literature. Peterson and colleagues discuss how non-material entities—memories, values, beliefs—are core characteristics of who humans are and influence our very being, including what we feel is conflict. Of the 422 scientific papers reviewed by Peterson et al., only one instance of human-wildlife conflict was found, where magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen) attacked humans (Warne and Jones 2003). The remaining papers found documented instances of human-wildlife conflict such as property or agricultural damage by wildlife and human-human conflict pertaining to management decisions about (problematic) wildlife. This review illustrates, and emphasizes, the importance of language use, as the term conflict is textured and has immense consequences for promoting coexistence between human and nonhuman animals (and the ecosphere as a whole) (Peterson et al. 2010). Peterson et al.’s argument hinges on the material concepts that most reported “conflict” is simply miscategorized, and that the phrase human-wildlife conflict is counterproductive to coexistence because it divides human and nature.

Extending this argument, I suggest that not only is conflict with nonhumans (in the way we have currently come to generally understand it) a construct that bolsters the divide between humans and nonhuman animals, but, moreover, the concept of human-wildlife conflict creates an unbalanced power dynamic that muddles solutions that best blend human and nonhuman ecologies so multiple species can thrive. For example, a quick and immediate solution to beavers (Castor)— habitat engineers that have downstream impacts on habitat biodiversity (e.g., Hood and Larson 2014; Law et al. 2016)—causing flooding in forested or peri-urban areas may be to simply remove the individual(s), either by lethal removal or translocation, or install a fence to exclude beavers from certain areas. However, if a species is translocated from an area, depending on the removal distance, that individual could simply return. If the individual does not return or has been lethally removed, the space and resources used by the individual remain opens, allowing another individual to move into the territory. As for fences, research has highlighted that fences have complex effects on the ecology of a landscape (McInturff et al. 2020), and that fences do not always exclude individuals, regardless of fence maintenance (Wilkinson et al. 2021). Thus, both “solutions” are relatively obsolete, but by centering the human in response to “conflict,” we lose the ability to interrogate strategies for managing landscapes that work best for humans and nonhuman animals. Notably, for beavers, actions such as deploying pond-leveling devices can be placed near or in their dams to keep them from flooding a nearby area, creating a cost-effective, ecology-conscious approach that reduces flooding while not relying on extermination of the beaver, or other disruptions to its ecology (Hood, Manaloor, and Dzioba 2018; Hood, McIntosh, and Hvenegaard 2021). However, Glynnis Hood and colleagues note that flow devices are not a popular approach to beaver management (employed by 5% of municipalities in Alberta, Canada), unlike trapping and shooting (employed by 74% of municipalities in Alberta) (2018, 10).

Western societies have generally constructed nonhuman animals as beings with no rights or agency. They are seen as beings that respond to external stimuli, whether it be anthropogenic or natural, but do not fully understand the world. For example, urban wildlife can often be perceived as ecological accidents. They are seen as animals that must have been struggling in their natural habitat and have accidently wandered into urban spaces, where they have now found resources to consume. They are animals that belong in a “natural” habitat. The creation of urban spaces (i.e., cities) as something solely to be human and distant and separate from nature further upholds this notion that wildlife do not belong in these spaces and must be in cities by accident. Rather than seeing cities as trans-species spaces where urban wildlife participates in social life (Hubbard and Brooks 2021), cities are often fictitiously constructed as human spaces where wildlife invade and forcibly make their own home. This militarization of urban wildlife, as animals that invade or colonize spaces, rather than beings that move through borderless lands, further invites the potential for conflict. It is no wonder society finds conflict with wildlife in human-dominated landscapes, especially in cities—a concrete jungle that was built only for human animals in mind. This division and demarcation from nature that humans have built with cities pushes humans to further construct urban wildlife, specifically wildlife that refuse to exist in cities as humans deem appropriate, as pests, vermin, and nuisance beings. These terms for urban wildlife further construct these animals as beings to be controlled and dominated, and since conflict invites scenarios where there is a winner and loser or a dominator and a submissive, humans find themselves continually constructing conflict with many urban species to reassert their dominance over nonhuman animals. Conflict with nonhuman animals is easy to have when cities are seen as incompatible with the animal—a being constructed with no rights or agency—and the animal is seen as something to dominate or control under the Western society.

In urban spaces specifically, human-wildlife conflict typically stems from wildlife “misbehaving” and interfering with capital, property, and aesthetics. In these cases, the use of conflict often invites militaristic actions against the animal that is the deemed the perpetrator, rather than against the oppressive system that underpins the negative interaction with wildlife. Conflict here reinforces the taxonomical hierarchy and pushes wildlife into a social category that (dis)allows them existence in human-dominated landscapes and access to resources. For example, New York City has declared a war against rats. Although the conflict with rats can be argued as reasonable, due to potential human exposure to zoonotic diseases, conflict here constructs rat issues as human-wildlife issues, inherently overlooking the capitalistic system that continues to value capital over people. Rather than interrogate the oppressive and violent system that has created poor housing conditions and other environmental conditions that have created favorable habitats for rats, leading to dense rat populations and human exposure to zoonotic disease, the city is spending millions of dollars on the extermination of rats. Thus, conflict, as a structure and process, often ignores the societal processes that degrade environments and push (marginalized) humans to have negative interactions with wildlife. I argue that on a large scale, the use of conflict prevents an interrogation of a system that invites negative interactions with wildlife due to notions of, for example, aesthetics, property, and capital. Simultaneously, the usage of human-wildlife conflict inadvertently maps conscious antagonism onto wildlife, constructing a villainous and dark figure that eclipses who the animal is and invites violence towards wildlife.

Getting Dirty with Wildlife to (Re)Construct the Ecological Home

To fully deteriorate this myth of conflict between human and nonhuman animals, we must dissolve the human and nonhuman boundary and surgically remove human exceptionalism such that “boundaries between human and nonhuman melt” (Jones 2002, 93), recognizing that “nature cannot be posited as other than or prior to humans” (Luciano and Chen 2015, 185). Once we dissolve this boundary between human and nonhuman beings, we can begin creating a foundation to (re)construct ecology as a home and repair the connections between humans and nonhuman animals.

If we as ecologists rupture the concepts of individualism and human exceptionalism, as suggested in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016, 30), what can be produced? To rupture and appropriately dismantle human exceptionalism, ecologists must flatten the imagined and constructed hierarchical taxonomic ladder, which places humans at the top and “lesser” beings towards the bottom. Moving in this direction necessarily means we, as ecologists, must get dirty with wildlife: “Getting dirty means we become fully human by remembering and embodying our trans-human animalness. This requires a decolonization process, because we must question and shed the conditioned beliefs that say we are more intelligent than, different from, or better than our animal nature and other natural beings (i.e., human exceptionalism)” (Nelson 2017, 255).

Instead of being viewed as an individual with autonomy, decision-making abilities, and other traits we place on a pedestal and have been socialized to understand as synonymous with “human,” wildlife are reduced to “just an animal.” This constructed and infantilized “animal” warrants different societal perceptions and understandings of it when it appears on a human landscape, depending on the positionality of the human observing it. For instance, if the human observing the animal views nature as an entity that should be removed from humans, then any move that animal makes may become “conflict.” On the other end, a human may experience endearment, resentment, or lack of excitement for an animal simply based on its biology and positionality within human society (e.g., a pigeon or rat compared to a falcon or puma). What contributes to the transposition and maintenance of these dynamic feelings towards the nonhuman animal? A brief glimpse reveals that any being existing on a landscape where racialized tension continues to stem from colonial roots, is incredibly porous, sliding up and down the animacy hierarchy (see Chen 2012).

We can dig into these ideas by examining the domestic dog, for example, who can become very (in)human. Domestic dogs are porous in their image and, because of their positionality to humans, can reap the benefits and consequences of the arbitrary and troubled hierarchy humans have constructed. On the one hand, some dogs are demonized and ostracized with anthropocentric personalities such as “aggressive” sticking to them because of their proximity to Black and Brown communities and thus, seen as “below” other dogs (similar to how Black and Brown individuals and other marginalized groups [disabled folks, trans folks, etc.] have been seen as “subspecies” to humans/humanness) while other dogs hold higher statute as classy, safer dogs because of their prevalence in white communities, and can often become familial and above other nonhuman animals and even other humans (Weaver 2021). Mel Chen (2012) notes that the language we use around nonhuman animals situates and isolates them lower on this conceptual taxonomic hierarchy—hence the phrase “treated me like a dog.” This fixed taxonomical hierarchy stems from the colonial gaze, which suppresses and hides entities deemed invaluable in a submerged world.

In The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) pries open the submerged world and reveals a complex and interactive space teeming with perspectives. By entering this submerged world and moving beyond the Western scientific perspective, we can interact with the world in a new fashion. Going into what Gómez-Barris deems the “fish-eye” allows us to connect deeper to the environment and be enveloped by what extractivism (i.e., the colonial gaze) dismisses and moves beyond (2017, 94–100). Moving into and employing this submerged perspective allows us to get dirty with wildlife and reconstruct ecology as a home where intimate interactions are seen and heard. In this submerged perspective, “protecting nature means protecting ourselves” (Anderson and Samudzi 2018, 33). It’s in this intimate space where we are able to feel the emotions and pain of wildlife when they are subjected to violent acts, such as polluted landscapes. Getting dirty allows us to attend to the unseen, or even dismissed, interactions between wildlife and the landscape they operate on and are engulfed in.

With an understanding of the porous nature of animals and the perspective that ignores a vibrant network of intimate connections, we can begin rearranging this constructed landscape. What would it look like to rearrange a hierarchy that is rooted in oppression and acts as a barrier for human-nonhuman connections? Instead of a vertical, capitalistic hierarchy that assigns values to bodies, with entities such as insects on the bottom and human at the top, what if we flatten it? When we flatten this ladder, instead of levels, we get to create doors with two-pronged intimacy into a home. First, this two-pronged intimacy allows us to enter spaces that were considered “disparate” before and fully engage with the life behind the door. Behind this door, hierarchical barriers are dissolved—allowing us to see that wildlife are not detached from the human world but incredibly entangled with our systems. We are able to better engage with our research subjects and understand who they are and what their experience is on their respective landscapes, no matter the ecosystem.

Although ecological theory already recognizes the complex interactions between humans and ecosystems (Collins et al. 2000; Des Roches et al. 2021; Ramalho and Hobbs 2012; Schell et al. 2020), in this flattened space, we can better identify the environmental processes that entangle and latch onto our research subjects. For instance, a standard ecological approach recognizes that urban wildlife have various behavioral responses to both social and ecological pressures. Here, social and environmental factors such as urban heat, societal wealth, pollution, transportation infrastructure, and human population density can impact community-level processes (e.g., biodiversity) (Chamberlain et al. 2019; Des Roches et al. 2021; Leong et al. 2018; Saaristo et al. 2018) and feedback to impact aspects of organismal biology (e.g.,behavior, physiology) (Ouyang et al. 2018).Yet these approaches still fail to consider or recognize how systems of oppression and extraction construct different niches for urban wildlife, both social and ecological. Although current ecological thought considers the ecological portion, examining what parts of cities are ecologically hospitable for wildlife (i.e., have the resources to sustain a population) or where wildlife currently occur in cities, ecological theory has yet to critically examine why portions of cities are more socially acceptable than others for certain wildlife (e.g., where perceptions and attitudes of this organism are tolerable). Using these doors will reveal to ecologists that urban wildlife can slip into the racial and capitalistic hierarchies of humans, ultimately shaping the existence of wildlife in urban landscapes. For instance, urban wildlife interfering with capital interests and aesthetics can become pests and are deemed “disposable,” similar to marginalized human bodies (e.g., homeless populations). Simultaneously, wildlife associated with particular human groups become entangled in ethno-racial as well as economic conflict and hierarchies, leading to unfavorable or violent views towards particular animals.

Second, while this two-pronged intimacy allows us to see new perspectives by more intimately engaging with our research subjects and seeing how they function in their ecosystem, it allows for us to erect respectable boundaries between two or more entities. These respectable boundaries allow for us to note and celebrate the differences between the researcher and the research(ed). By recognizing and upholding these differences, we can “love, befriend, and care for another” by “respect[ing] the independent aspect of their being” (Freyne 2020, 178). These differences, whether biological or social, can ultimately be what links the researcher and research subject against a structure that simultaneously subjects them to violence. And in this simultaneous multispecies struggle against neocolonialism and extractive capitalism, both researcher and research subject briefly overlap, spatially and temporally, in an intimate fashion to become one. By being overlaid, both (or more) bodies occupying the space are fluid, and the interactions become more intimate, allowing a subject to become fully known. Behind this door, we prevent pushing apart and devaluing bodies and begin to realize that we, as ecologists, do not hold all the knowledge. Here, our research subject becomes our research partner, revealing what they want to share about the vast adaptations they are equipped with in response to vast social and ecological pressures.

Traditional ecological approaches are built on Western understandings of nature, which do not recognize wildlife as beings with agency, and inevitably reproduce troubled and oppressive hierarchies. Upon identifying this systemic bias, we can begin to recognize that these approaches are “an imagined system, not an actual, self-regulating one” (Chen 2012, 89) and do not allow for an expansive view of wildlife. Through Queering our approach to ecology, we are able to get dirty and become entangled with wildlife, producing “empathy and kinship” (Nelson 2017, 232). Getting dirty with wildlife allows us to have intimate interactions with nonhuman animals and access understandings of how these animals navigate their environments. In this approach, we are able to flatten taxonomical hierarchies, weave new, personal connections with nature, and access ecological knowledge that would otherwise be missed due to the static observations of nature traditional ecology asks for.

When we begin to work in this flattened landscape, human exceptionalism and bounded individualism fall to the side and a new intimate landscape teeming with complex emotions and relationality is freed. In this landscape, organisms and processes are observed and felt differently. For example, even a prominent ecological concept such as co-evolution, an idea primarily discussed in the context of predator-prey/host-parasite interactions, can be transformed into an intimate interaction that occurs between abiotic and biotic beings: “As plant sex spawned new generations of plants, it also made new fire. As plant life mobilised, evolved and radiated, so fire migrated, proliferated and diversified. As plants made the living world more hospitable to flame, so too did wildfire select for species or communities that tolerated, even depended upon, flame” (Clark and Yusoff 2018, 12). Similarly, photosynthesis transforms from a process of acquiring and processing energy into “celestial fertility” that burns “like a cool green fire” (Clark and Yusoff 2018, 11), and spiders move beyond animals that create webs to capture prey and sustain themselves; instead, they make “attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open knotted in some ways and not others” (Haraway 2016, 31). On this flattened landscape, we can begin to reconstruct and erect the ecological home, where interactions between human and nonhuman beings can be seen, felt, and sensed differently. Once we enter the ecological home, we are able to sit at the table with organisms and fully see them. We are able to hold our research organisms to feel their richness and texture. We are able to slowly move around the edges and note characteristics we overlooked before. Through this intimate process within the ecological home, ecologists can begin to better understand the myriad social and ecological pressures that impact them.

The Queer Concrete Canid

Coyotes are beings that persist in spaces in which they are not wanted and are often demonized even though they are beautiful and meek. Coyotes are often viewed as “antagonistic,” “problematic,” and derogatorily “complex.” Yet, through all adversity—the defamation and subsequent (environmental) violence that has come with human expansion—coyotes persist in urban spaces, much like marginalized humans. In this section, I’ll sit within the ecological home to examine the urban coyote as a Queer ecological being navigating a charged landscape and the associated social-ecological pressures.

The coyote is one of many appendages of Nature. The coyote in particular, similar to Nature at large, exudes vitality and refuses to fit in the arbitrary boxes we affix to it. In this way, coyotes are a model of resistance against the rigidness of Western society and ideologies. The coyote sees the world differently than us and moves through space and time as a Queer ecological being. Here, I leverage Neel Ahuja’s definition of Queer/Queering, as the coyote “emerges by tracing an affective materiality that interrupts anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign stance of negation in relation to Law” (2015, 372). By simply existing and persisting, the coyote dismembers all anthropocentric logic on wildlife survival and how wildlife should (and can) exist in cities. The coyote intimately exists in tandem with asphalt and soil. Between the rough, gritty, chilled, and overbearing grey and the plush, firm, wet, and boundless brown. All of it is home to the coyote. In this way, I would say that the coyote is incredibly intimate with concrete, more than humans may ever be. The coyote, similar to the Black identity (see Samudzi and Anderson 2018, 21), is inextricably linked with the land. It paces and traverses streets as it has traversed time and moved through different embodiments. On one end, the coyote moves through many Indigenous stories as a parental figure, savior, or creator, to name a few (Baldy 2015). On the other end, the coyote erupts in the Anthropocene as an embattled and resilient carnivore that polarizes the Americas. Observing the coyote as this still, yet transient, deviant body bursting with potential and possibilities instills an unmatched wave of peace and power. It’s an overwhelming feeling that drowns you and provides air simultaneously.

Coyotes have emerged as an exciting potential case of ecosystem sentinels—species that provide information about an ecosystem (Zacharias and Roff 2001)—sentinels in cities. The coyote is set to expand its range across the Americas (Hody and Kays 2018), and their intimacy with (toxic) landscapes will be greater than we will understand. With this range expansion, the images of the coyote will continually collide and be rebuilt to articulate who the coyote is both materially and cosmically in modernity, “generating friction and leakage” between these identities (Luciano and Chen 2015, 186). As these conversations of who the coyote is continually surface, the coyote is often seen as a danger, out-of-place, and not belonging. For example, in Denver, Colorado, themes of anger, accusation, violence, and crime in response to the coyote are incredibly prevalent (Draheim et al. 2021). Similarly, in Los Angeles, California, people have organized a group called Evict Coyotes (n.d.), which, the group’s Facebook page explains, is “not here to discuss both sides. The only side we discuss is how to get our government to do their job and start Evicting Coyotes.” This rhetoric around who and what belongs where, and use of phrases such as “they don’t belong here” and “we don’t want to coexist with them, we want them gone," mirror feelings directed towards marginalized humans who are viewed as an Other.

Despite these negative attitudes, coyotes, like many other urban animals, have increased their tolerance of people and human-dominated spaces (e.g., Breck et al. 2019; Estien et al. 2025), all while facing detrimental threats such as the rupturing of our climate and environmental violence (e.g., toxic pollution and contamination). The phenotypic plasticity coyotes exhibit is something to marvel over—almost like no matter how far humans bend them, they never break. And yet this phenotypic bending (i.e., plasticity) done by humans via the construction of a concrete jungle and other large-scale landscape alterations is viewed as negative (e.g., Manzolillo et al. 2019) rather than beautiful. Why is that? Chen asks in Animacies, “What happens when animals appear on human landscapes?” (2012, 89) and for the urban coyote, dramatic and intense slippage occurs as it is rapidly thrown between the many constructed coyotes that exist in, for example, Nextdoor forums, Twitter/X threads, dinner table conversations, or local parks.

The constructed coyote—an “aggressor” and “villain”—directly alters how the material coyote interacts with the urban landscape with actions such as hazing aiming to reinstate human dominion and control over the urban coyote (Niesner et al. 2024). The constructed coyote has incredibly tangible and sometimes violent consequences for the urban coyote, who is simply resourceful, plastic, and resilient. This constructed coyote offers the human a “logical reason” to invest in warfare and violence against the urban coyote rather than build a home with the urban coyote (Niesner et al. 2024). Yet the coyote does not subscribe to this false image of self, despite the human begging for the coyote to buy into this constructed image to validate the coyote’s ultimate death and removal. The urban coyote moves around the constructed coyote and does not seek to be validated from the world or have a desire to be of this world. The urban coyote recognizes that it does not exist beyond the margins of society and the cities we have come to know, so much so that its existence seems to beget the interrogation and destruction of the constructed heteropatriarchal, white supremacist world that has pushed the urban coyote into these very margins.

Within these margins the urban coyote absorbs xenophobic and racist rhetoric via the entanglement with society’s constructed Other, who is similarly crushed and caricatured by myriad systems of oppression. Here the urban coyote becomes Queer and embodies abolition, freedom, and revolution. When we enter the margins alongside the coyote, we can begin to understand that antagonisms towards the coyote are not random, but a direct result of colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy.

There is tension between cities and coyotes, such that when a coyote emerges in a city, it is a polarizing force that disrupts, ruptures, and shatters all quotidian entities and infrastructure. The coyote’s existence has continued to evolve and become conditional within an ongoing settler project, similar to myself as a Black Queer person. This evolution and conditionality can be further understood as extractivism, which views and understands both nature (and Blackness) as entities to be controlled and commodified (Sumudzi and Anderson 2018, 33). With this lens, it becomes clear that to be an urban coyote is to be “anti-human” in the same way that to exist as a Black person in the US is to be “anti-state” (Sumudzi and Anderson 2018, 112). The simple existence of the coyote is in direct opposition of urban spaces and human assumptions of where nature “deserves” to be. The very construction of cities is often made to center (socially dominant) humans and their needs—leading to a dense, built landscape created from a love affair of oppressive systems. For the coyote, capitalism, classism, anti-Black racism, and more materialize to create inequitable and unjust cities that evict slow violence on marginalized communities (Wright 2021). In this toxic urban landscape that was not built for the coyote, it persists as a form of resistance to the many forms of oppression that are consciously overlooked in urban landscapes. The urban coyote experience is not one of thriving, but survival, tenacity, and grit. The coyote’s plasticity bends its destiny to encompass life and a concrete future that prevents the constructed coyote from engulfing the urban coyote until only its ghost is left.

The world we’ve come to know is not a neutral nor natural phenomenon but constructed through many systems of oppression that affect humans and nonhumans alike (Cannon et al. 2024; Estien et al. 2024; Hubbard and Brooks 2021; Schell et al. 2020). The urban coyote, along with other wildlife, is swept up in this constructed world where it subjected to harsh social and ecological processes stemming from injustices and oppressive systems (e.g., imperialism, capitalism). Yet traditional ecology prevents ecologists from engaging with this part of the world when investigating the environmental pressures, both social and ecological, that influence wildlife. With the reconstructed ecological home, and the lens it produces, we can begin to recognize that the large-scale oppression directed towards marginalized and minoritized humans—including racialized rhetoric, violent actions, environmental degradation, and unjust laws—encompass the urban coyote, ultimately shaping its phenotype and crystalizing it as a Queer being.

Conclusion: Ecology as a Home

We should not wait for the magic words we want to hear to come out of someone else’s mouth when we can designate, dictate, and deliver change ourselves.
—Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

Science as a modern approach has a long history of entanglement with white supremacy, dismissing other forms of knowledge, being, and understanding. Such that when we reduce nonhuman organisms to solely scientific terms, we are reducing and stripping nonhuman organisms of their being and preventing a full understanding of said organism. We are inevitably reinforcing a taxonomical hierarchy and colonial human/nonhuman power schemes, losing the ability to create boundless, intimate relations with our research subjects. What if intimacy and love, such as respect, trust, commitment, and recognition (hooks 2000, 5), was shown to wildlife as a researcher? For instance, what would it mean for ecologists to commit to wildlife and recognize wildlife as beings with agency? Committing to and recognizing the agency of wildlife would lead to erecting and reinforcing the ecological home, consequently pushing ecologists to shift their disciplinary lens and methodological approaches. The movement into the ecological home allows ecologists to better recognize, for example, the myriad oppressive structures that shape the urban coyote (Cannon et al. 2024). More applicably, through the trans-species intimacy within the ecological home, we can begin to think how to plan cities and manage urban landscapes that support all life, especially those that have been marginalized.

Currently, ecology has found itself in an unintimate landscape that encounters itself as a hurdle. In this piece, I have argued that by Queering ecology, ecologists are able to shift the field such that the core aspects to ecology—understanding the relationship between organisms and their environment—can be better interrogated. Specifically, I have argued that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, we can best identify the vast social-ecological pressures, including systemic racism, charged rhetoric, and constructed perceptions, that shape wildlife ecology. My hope is that by grounding ecology as a dwelling place and working within a home, an intimate atmosphere for a multitude of concepts, bodies, and souls to interact at a never-ending table can be created. This intimate ecological atmosphere calls for the abolition of taxonomic hierarchies because intimacy, and by extension respect, care, and coexistence, cannot exist with dominion. Through ecological homemaking, we can begin to understand the positionality of wildlife in our constructed world, how this varies across organisms based on their social and ecological niches, and how the ecological pressure wildlife is subjected to is a direct consequence of this violent, constructed world.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Salar Mameni, who taught Queer of Color Ecologies in spring 2022. The conversations and readings from this class changed my scholarship and perspective as an urban ecologist. I would also like to thank Drs. Ambika Kambath, Max Lambert, Natalie Hofmeister, and Chase Niesner, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for comments that improved this manuscript. My writing time was supported by the University of California, Berkeley’s Chancellor Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-2146752. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Author Bio

Cesar O. Estien is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Cesar is an urban ecologist investigating how societal inequity shapes the ecology of cities, from animal behavior to urban ecosystem health.