Resisting the language of invasion in more-than-human mobilities
Schuyler Laparle, Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University
Abstract: The language of war invades public discourse on nearly every issue. We wage war on drugs, crime, and the climate crisis. We battle poverty and combat inflation. We place our nurses and teachers on the front line and deploy medicine as weapons against disease. These metaphors are both pervasive and acutely harmful, capable of contributing to an acceptance of unnecessary violence. I am particularly concerned in my work with the use of invasion metaphors for the mobility of human and non-human populations. In these two domains, responses by policymakers and the public can look very much like literal war, as the encroaching “other” is detained, removed, or killed. In this essay, I elaborate on how the popular acceptance of invasion rhetoric around more-than-human mobilities—indicated by the uncritical use of “invasive species” in policy and media—exposes and reinforces the limits of our empathy toward the other. I argue that the continued use of invasion rhetoric for more-than-human mobility in the media undermines attempts to reject the same language in human immigration discourses. This, in turn, risks a continued acceptance of militarized fear in response to human and more-than-human population movements alike.
Walking through a particularly affluent neighbourhood of Edinburgh, I am struck by a strange assemblage of color. Neon graffiti, the deep green of New Zealand Flax, and the delicate pink of Japanese Cherry Blossom, all made more vibrant under Edinburgh’s grey skies. Which of these things belong? All of them or none of them, myself—a citizen of the United States of America with a spotty genealogical record—included. Who will decide which can stay and what reasons will they give? The graffiti will be removed and I will leave the country before my six month allowance is up. The others might remain, either villainized or beloved for their “otherness”.
Human-induced climate change precipitates a complex web of interdependent challenges, disruptions, and disasters. Mass displacement of human and non-human animals will be among these challenges as homelands are rendered inhospitable by extreme weather and sea level rise (Bellard et al. 2012; Bronen 2015). Especially as these displacements result in movement across geopolitical borders, we will have to decide who belongs and what exactly they belong to.
Metaphor helps to bring the climate crises into focus, enabling us to reason about their enormity at the human scale and plan for the futures they may bring about. However, metaphors are also capable of obscuring complexity and forming false equivalencies. The ubiquitous use of war metaphors in public discourse (Flusberg, Matlock, & Thibodeau, 2018) is especially concerning in this regard, as an over-reliance on the metaphor can result in advocacy for and tolerance of literal violence (e.g. Colautti & MacIsaac, 2004; Elwood, 1995; Larson, 2005; Larson, Nerlich, & Wallis, 2005; Nerlich, 2004; Smith, 2002; Stuart, 2011; Warren, 2007). For example, the War on Drugs, launched by Richard Nixon in the 1960’s, has directly contributed to the brutal rise of racialized mass incarceration in the USA, funneled funding away from social programs and toward the criminal justice system, and conditioned citizens to accept the “collateral damage” of disrupted lives, families, and communities (Moore & Elkavich, 2008). When the UK went to “war” with Foot and Mouth Disease, nearly 6 million animals were slaughtered, the vast majority of which were not infected (Larson, Nerlich, & Wallis, 2005). The war framing, along with the framing of animals as commodities, supported the public’s acceptance of largely unnecessary violence against the actual victims of the disease.
In my work, I am concerned with a particular subset of war metaphors, those of invasion, as used in discourses on human and more-than-human displacement. Invasion metaphors are particularly effective at villainizing “the other.” War metaphors entail a division of participants into opposing sides with irreconcilable goals. In invasion metaphors, the sides are also attributed asymmetric blame, with the “invading” side understood as the aggressor, and the opposing side understood as the victim. The perceived victim is then granted the moral authority of self-defense, wherein violence is justifiable so long as it is in the name of protection (Rodin 2004). When invasion rhetoric is used for human and more-than-human displacement, the being on the move assumes the role of invader. The agency of the displaced individual is stripped as they are reconceptualized as acting on behalf of a hostile nation. This metaphoric framing can then be used to justify literal violent responses by citizens and governments. For example, invasion rhetoric for immigration has been used to support the militarization of the US-Mexico border in order to “defend” against undocumented immigrants (Slack et al., 2016: 12). In South Africa’s “Alien Buster” campaign, governmental agencies explicitly used invasion rhetoric to instill fear and motivate citizens to kill non-native species on sight (Lidström et al., 2016).
As the climate crises worsen, humans and more-than-humans will continue to be displaced by socio-ecological disasters and will continue to seek acceptance in new homes. The mass displacement of human populations (or the fear thereof) then contributes to anti-immigrant sentiment (Gorodzeisky & Semyonov, 2020), exacerbating the challenge of caring for displaced communities (McLeman, 2019). The appearance and proliferation of non-native more-than-human species in human-managed spaces is causing increasing alarm as native biodiversity is threatened by local ecological collapse and habitat destruction (Mainka & Howard, 2010).
The language we use to talk and reason about changes in the composition of human and more-than-human populations will affect how we respond to such phenomenon. In other words, the concept of invasion is used differently by different people to serve different ends. On the far right, politicians evoke invasion as a fear tactic in support of anti-immigrant policy and white-nationalist agendas (Ekman, 2022). This evocation is frequently met by criticism from popular media outlets. NPR warned of the relationship between Republicans’ use of invasion rhetoric for immigration and the white nationalist conspiracy of “the great replacement” (Rose, 2022). The Washington Post criticized Florida’s Ron DeSantis for alluding to the possibility of an actual war with Mexico over border security (Knox & Anders, 2023). PBS and The Guardian reported on the swift and severe backlash the U.K. interior minister faced after equating illegal immigration with an “invasion” (Lawless, 2022; Townsend, 2022). Though invasion metaphors are still used in attempts to criminalize cross-border human mobilities, their harm is recognized and debated in public discourse.
The use of invasion metaphors in discourses on more-than-human population movement, however, is not met by the same popular criticism. In fact, invasion metaphors are frequently promoted for the movement of non-native species by the same news outlets that criticize invasion metaphors in immigration discourse. The media continues to stoke wars against non-native species by, for example, framing non-native earthworms as “slimy intruders” (NPR, Fadel et al., 2022), spreading the call for a “citizen army” to “tackle invasive species” (The Guardian, Laville, 2019), and reporting on the “weed warriors” “rescuing” trees from non-native vines (The Washington Post, Moyer, 2023). Invasion rhetoric is even used when the media engages with the complexity of interactions between non-native species and new local environments, such as when NPR reported on a non-native snail species providing food for endangered birds in Florida, and yet still termed the snail an “invader” (Allen, 2023). In all of these cases, the invasion metaphor serves to equate a native/non-native dichotomy to good/bad and victim/villain dichotomies. We are then called upon to do our part to stop the invasion, even when the actual harms of the ‘invader’ are unclear. In the USA, we are asked to stomp the Asian lanternfly as soon as we see it (Elkeurti, 2024), despite evidence that their feeding on native trees likely does not have lasting impacts on forest health (Hoover et al., 2023). In Scotland, we are told to eat grey squirrels in order to give native red squirrels a fighting chance (Greenfield, 2022), even when grey squirrels appear to provide an important food source for native pine martins and when red squirrels will remain in peril as long as we fail to address habitat loss (Wauters et al., 2023). In order to protect native more-than-human species from non-native invaders, we “kill to be kind” (McClure, 2023).
I do not mean to deny the very real ecological disruptions that can follow from the sudden introduction and proliferation of a species new to a local environment—the impacts of Burmese pythons on local mammal populations in the Everglades (Dorcas et al., 2012) and of lionfish on coral reef ecosystems (Green at al., 2012) are, for example, well-documented. Non-native grey squirrels do introduce fatal diseases to native red squirrel populations (Collins et al., 2014), and the presence of Asian lanternflies in North American forests do negatively impact tree growth, at least in the short term. What I am concerned with is how the use of invasion metaphors grants us the moral authority of “self-defense”, to kill without having to reflect on why and at what cost. I am also concerned with how the acceptance of invasion metaphors for the movement of non-native more-than-human species may undermine our rejection of invasion metaphors in immigration discourse (Olwig, 2003; Subramaniam, 2001), especially given eco-nationalist rhetoric that couples “nature” to “nation” (Marulies, 2021).
Compassionate conservation (Wallach, Batavia, et al., 2020; Wallach, Lundgren, et al., 2020) offers an alternative to the invasion framing. In its most radical departure from traditional conservation ideologies, compassionate conservation grants personhood to more-than-human species, entailing an inherent right to life for individuals of native and non-native species alike. This move alone does not resolve the question of what to do about species who, beyond a reasonable doubt, pose a real and imminent threat to the survival of other species. Instead, it introduces moral complexity where there has traditionally been moral surety. Given that we, as humans, are currently reconciling with our own out-sized role in ecological destruction, introducing moral complexity where there was once moral surety seems to me an important step toward “staying with the trouble” of a more-than-human world (Haraway 2016). By pushing us to recognize the agency of non-human animals, compassionate conservation unsettles our exclusive right to moral authority and encourages us to extend our empathy beyond humans.
Outside of far-right circles, violence against a human “other” is recognized as immoral while violence against a non-human “other” too often remains justifiable (Warren, 2007). I believe this contradiction is indicative of a limit to our empathy, namely our capacity to identify with the “other”. The continued uncritical use of invasion metaphors only serves to reinforce that limit. Furthermore, the exact limits of our empathy are usually ill-defined, full of exceptions and contradictions. I felt this acutely as I stared at the Japanese Cherry Blossom and New Zealand Flax in Edinburgh, reflecting on how they are loved while so many other “others” are turned away from UK shores and criminalized at US borders. The national borders separating the ones who belong from the ones who don’t are built by those in power to permit the entry of likeable “others”. This is seen in the variable acceptance of immigrants based on religious affiliation and race (Bell et al., 2021; Sinclair et al., 2024), and of non-native more-than-human species based on cuteness, ornamental appeal, cultural value, and economic worth (Courchamp et al. 2017; Dickie et al., 2014).
To inhabit a more-than-human world, in which all beings are granted a right to be, is also to embrace more-than-human mobilities. To do so, we must resist narratives that grant us the moral authority to deny movement to “the other”. We are on the move, all of us together, toward uncertain futures where all of us or none of us belong.