Conservation and Invasive Alien Species: Violent Love 445 conceptualisation of the ‘relational nature’ of life on the planet, but was later ‘extrapolated and…mapped onto contiguous definable territorial units…for national estate management purposes’ To Franklin (2015, p 68), this move exemplifies Alfred Whitehead’s ‘fallacy of misplaced concretism’ in that ‘a theoretical understanding of a system of connections’ was wrongly extrapolated to ‘territorially bounded spaces’ The concept of IAS offers even more food for thought Warren (2007) offers an excellent parsing of this concept As discussed earlier, there are three criteria that go into the categorisation of an organism as invasive alien The first is spatial scale, and has to with area, location or region Alien species are those that are found outside of ‘their natural range of distribution’ (IUCN 2015) The same animal elsewhere might be celebrated as ‘native’ This ‘natural’ range is defined by examining the organism’s presence/absence in a particular region at a particular point in time For example, grey squirrels are considered alien to the UK because they were not present on the island before 1876 when they were introduced by humans (The Forestry Commission UK 2015) Time or temporal scale is the second criterion Native species are those that have been present in a region, without the aid of human introduction, since a particular time in the past Rabbits are considered alien and invasive to Scotland because they were not there at the beginning of the current interglacial period and were introduced later on by humans But they were present in Scotland in previous interglacial periods (Warren 2007) Nonetheless, they are categorised as ‘alien’ because a particular point in history is used as a cut-off date for these classificatory decisions Indeed, organisms that are classified as ‘native’ need not necessarily have been present in a region all through the time period used as a cut-off For example, red squirrels, an emblematic ‘native’ species in Scotland, went extinct in some parts of Scotland by the eighteenth century because of extensive habitat loss and were later reintroduced from Scandinavia and England (The Forestry Commission UK 2015) Furthermore, the inherently partial and incomplete character of natural history records means that ‘there is no reliable biological or ecological method that can distinguish between aliens and natives’ (Peretti 1998, p 185) The spatio-temporal criteria used to decide whether an organism is alien or native are ultimately a question of choice, and arguably, a political one Particularly telling is the increasing use of geopolitical borders as spatial criteria for determining the ‘alien’ character of organisms Conservation discourse (McNeely et al 2001) refers to organisms that are ‘alien’ to the USA or India and recommends border control measures as key to the management of invasives, thereby conflating geopolitical borders with biophysical ones