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Many national parks and other protected areas (PAs) are experiencing an intensification of military actors, logics, and partnerships across the globe. This amounts to one of the most consequential conservation trends this century, one that violates human rights and threatens conservation’s long-term viability. These dynamics have been chronicled in the burgeoning literature on green militarization. Set against dire predictions of biodiversity loss and the importance of both PAs and local communities in slowing this decline, this intervention makes the argument for demilitarizing conservation and sets out an initial framework for what this entails conceptually and in practice. We show how demilitarizing conservation must be based on an ethics and politics of care and non-violence. While PAs are already landscapes of care for non-human nature, we argue for a more robustly care-full conservation that, perhaps uncomfortably, requires care to be extended to those who harm wildlife and nature more broadly. We illustrate how demilitarization requires infusing care into conservation at two related moments: the actual encounter between conservation’s transgressors and law enforcement and the larger structures that produce the encounter and military buildup as a response. The latter includes how green militarization is driven by economic logics, global patterns of economic inequality, and colonial structures that continue to shape conservation. This intervention also opens space for considering how the need for demilitarization allies with other movements like Indigenous-led and convivial conservation working to radically reshape conservation theory and practice and makes a case for explicitly including demilitarization within these efforts. 

We argue for bringing jurisdiction more centrally into geographic and political ecology scholarship. Jurisdiction shapes life in profound and often hidden ways and as a concept helps make sense of the relationship among space, power, law, and governance. Drawing from the scholarly literature and empirical examples, we present an understanding of jurisdiction as the defined space of (legal) governance and the (legal) power to make decisions over this space and the lives, objects, and events within it. Building from this, we show how jurisdiction both unites and is distinct from the core geographic and legal concepts of territory, sovereignty, and borders that are used to unpack intersections of space and power. Jurisdiction, moreover, allows us to attend to consequential spatial dynamics these core concepts cannot fully explain. To further elaborate what exactly jurisdiction is, we identify specific jurisdictional concepts (e.g., overlap, adjacency, and fragmentation) that underscore its consequential yet underappreciated features and show how these merge around jurisdiction’s spatiality, compatibility with other jurisdictions, temporality or changeability, and application. We ground these concepts in examples spanning land and sea to show the ubiquity of jurisdiction and how it carves up, creates, and codifies spaces. Within these spaces, we show how jurisdiction inaugurates life before the law and then governs this life, its well-being, and its death, whether human or more than human. 

Designed to be “wilderness” spaces with minimal human impact, the establishment of national parks contributed to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from traditional territories across North America, preventing access to dwindling populations of wildlife essential to cultural and material well-being. With the systematic near extermination of buffalo during the nineteenth century and forcible relocation of Tribes onto reservations, Tribal food systems collapsed. Tribal Nations across the Great Plains are now restoring buffalo to support food sovereignty and political resurgence, while re-asserting a presence in national parks where Indigenous hunting remains prohibited. This article focuses on the Blackfoot-led Iinnii Initiative working to restore free-roaming buffalo (Bison bison) along the Rocky Mountain Front, supported by Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Recognizing Tribal rights to hunt buffalo in these parks would enable Tribal hunters to exercise practices that challenge the idea of national parks as wilderness. We coproduce this article as Blackfoot and non-Indigenous scholars and activists, drawing on interviews with restoration practitioners, Blackfoot knowledge holders, and park and other government officials to explore distinct narratives of what it would mean to enable Tribal hunting in national parks, with implications for food sovereignty, political resurgence, and wildlife management. We argue that openness within parks agencies to Indigenous hunting suggests a potential watershed moment for reimagining the role of people in parks. Through this, we examine important links between food sovereignty, political sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, and decolonization.