Killing One Trout to Save Another: A Hegemonic Political Ecology with Its Biopolitical Basis in Yellowstone’s Native Fish Conservation Plan

Yellowstone National Park implements a native fish conservation plan to control translocated trout species competing with native cutthroat trout. Under the plan, millions of lake trout are removed from Yellowstone Lake and park streams are poisoned to eradicate other translocated trout species. Killing trout introduced by officials decades earlier is a significant reversal in fisheries management. This article employs a biopolitical analysis of data derived qualitatively from semistructured interviews, relevant documents, and participant observation in the field. Results reveal a diversity of sometimes antagonistic stakeholders subjecting themselves to the practice of killing formerly revered fish based on truth claims circulating around the crisis-based conservation of native fish populations and ecosystem health. Stakeholders support logics of killing in relation to their varied engagements with fish, leading to a multiplicity of biopolitical motivations endorsing nativism in Yellowstone. From this multiplicity emerges a conservation hegemon where power over life and death is enacted in many corners of the biosocial collective but trends toward dominant knowledge and practice vested in the National Park Service. Theorizing killing for conservation as a hegemonic political ecology reconceptualizes the place of species outside of problematic dichotomies like native and nonnative. Instead, species are either hegemonic or counterhegemonic based on their lively positions relative to the conservation hegemon, leading to more honestly articulated motivations behind resource management goals associated with the practice of killing for conservation.