Conservation and Invasive Alien Species: Violent Love 441 Fostering Biodiversity, Killing Invasives The emphasis in conservationist discussions on IAS is on caring for nature and nonhuman life The social formation of conservation is by no means comparable to other domains where the abuse and exploitation of nonhuman animals for human gain can be expected—for example, the meat, medical and recreational industries (Twine 2013; Pilkington 2010; Shukin 2009) Rather, conservation discourse and practice is primarily about care However, as explained below, the Foucauldian analytical lens helps to identify the biopolitical character of conservationist care (Srinivasan 2014), For one, the social formation of conservation is directed at protecting life, but at the scale of collectivities such as populations, species, ecosystems and biodiversity (Callicott 2006) This is often described in environmental philosophy as ecocentrism (Sarkar 2012) Ecocentrism refers to the attribution of intrinsic value to aggregations or collectivities of nonhuman nature such as ecosystems, biotic communities, species, and populations (see also chapter on Legal and Illegal Theriocide for further discussion).3 Indeed, when conservation biology was first established as a scholarly discipline, it was defined as follows (Soule 1986): Conservation biology, a new stage in the application of science to conservation problems, addresses the biology of species, communities, and ecosystems that are perturbed, either directly or indirectly, by human activities or other agents This definition is striking in its omission of the individual organism In the context of IAS, a similar emphasis on the larger collectivity prevails in the form of the goal of protecting the native ecosystem and global biodiversity from the impacts of the invasive organisms This focus on promoting the collectivity results in conservation programmes that harmfully intervene on ‘undesirable’ elements of nonhuman nature—the invasive organisms This emphasis on protecting ‘biodiversity’ is evident in the very definition of invasive species: ‘an alien species whose introduction and/or spread threaten biological diversity’ (Convention on Biological Species 2015a) Species that are the targets of control are viewed as undesirable members of the ecosystem/biodiversity and as such they are sacrificed While an entire species may be labelled and targeted as invasive, the harm that is exercised is done so at the level of the individual organism, which experiences the harms of poisoning, shooting, trapping, burning, ripping, and other methods By contrast, biocentrism refers to the attribution of intrinsic value to individual living organisms