Bear tricks. Designing an old and better landscape in the Pyrenees through a wildlife reintroduction program

In 1996, the bear reintroduction program was launched in the Pyrenees. This project consisted of translocating individuals from Slovenia, but it also entailed the return of shepherds once they had almost disappeared from these corners of the mountain range. Twenty-five years later, the program is assessed in terms of biological success, considering that the bear population was considered extinct whereas today amounts to more than seventy individuals. However, the social conflict, especially with local farmers, has persisted throughout this period. Faced with this conundrum, the bear program employs a double discursive maneuver around the notions of restoration and improvement to appease these conflicts and conceal its political essence. While the renewed presence of bears and shepherds aims at retrieving parts of the past and is associated with the restoration of natural and socio-cultural heritage values, the resulting landscape is presented in terms of improvement through the moral ecology of wilderness. Considering that conservation is never about conserving but rather about a set of socio-ecological transformations that shift the control over natural resources, the move from nature conservation to landscape design urges us to understand how restoration and improvement play out in wildlife programs. Thus, designing-as-if-restoring and designing-as-if-improving are crucial in the depoliticization of wildlife conservation. In response to this mechanism and to better understand the persistence of conflicts around the bear program, I propose to approach rewilding initiatives through the moral and territorial views of the landscape by addressing the following question: Whose views and whose rights prevail in the design of new green landscapes in the Pyrenees?