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ОглавлениеConservation in the Anthropocene
Much has been written about conservation over the last several decades. What we call the ‘great conservation debate’ is one with many nuances, contestations, contradictions and complexities. Numerous authors have produced sophisticated overviews of this debate along with some of its elements and its complicated histories. We do not wish to repeat them here. Our objective in this chapter is to investigate and discuss where the debate stands now and how it has changed – or is in the process of changing – with the advent of the Anthropocene and the fundamental debates this concept has unleashed.
We start the chapter with a (very) brief history of the ‘great conservation debate’ with special emphasis on its roots in the longstanding ‘people-and-parks’ discussion. This overview aims to develop an updated characterization of what political ecologists Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe call ‘mainstream conservation’.1 Building on this characterization, the chapter moves on to discuss the two major radical challenges to mainstream conservation – the new conservation and the neoprotectionist positions - focusing on how they develop their particular solutions for reforming conservation in response to the Anthropocene. In the concluding sections, we provide a first evaluation of the debate, hinging on two main arguments: first, that the debate is currently hampered by the fact that neither alternative provides a coherent and logical frame or set of principles to adequately challenge and move beyond mainstream conservation; second, that only on the basis of a logical and coherent foundation can we come to a realistic and practical proposal for conservation in the future.
A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ‘GREAT CONSERVATION DEBATE’
Most overviews of the great conservation debate start with or lead to what is considered the epicentre of the conservation movement historically, namely the creation of protected areas (PAs). The way that PAs were originally understood and enforced was through an approach termed ‘fortress’ conservation, which in its ideal form sought to enclose a piece of wild terrain and prevent human disturbance therein. It often did so by removing human inhabitants, erecting fences around the newly cleared plots, and imposing fines or other forms of punishment for illegal entry. From this perspective, ‘people in parks are a category error’.2
From the outset, this fortress model has coexisted with other competing approaches. Conservation in Western Europe, for example, has tended to operate quite differently than the wilderness preservation model prevailing in North America, the former emphasizing sustainable management of cultural and often agricultural landscapes.3 Emma Marris glosses this distinction: ‘while European conservationists focused on sustainable human use and avoiding extinctions, America perfected and exported the “Yellowstone Model,” based on setting aside pristine wilderness areas and banning all human use therein, apart from tourism.’4 Even in North America, moreover, a sustainable use paradigm has long competed with the dominant preservationist approach, as symbolized by the famous battles between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot in the early twentieth century. Yet the wilderness preservation ideal has always stood at the centre of US conservation efforts, and even Europeans concerned with sustainable use sought their own wilderness in protected areas established both at home and in the colonies.5 Thus the North American wilderness area stood as the main model for the global expansion of protected areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6
Beginning in the 1970s, the fortress conservation paradigm came under attack. Alongside broader decolonial and developmental shifts and associated challenges to belief in ‘high modernism’,7 different actors, including indigenous peoples affected by conservation policies, start levelling fundamental critiques of the approach. First and foremost, the human costs of protected area creation, involving the expulsion of millions of conservation refugees globally, had become a growing cause for concern and pushback on the part of those expelled, who increasingly demanded compensation for their losses.8 In addition to the social justice issues involved, this displacement was now seen as a threat to conservation itself due to concerns that angry people deprived of traditional livelihoods living on protected area boundaries posed a threat to conserved resources.9 The status of most PAs as isolated islands further threatened the future of their resources due to lack of genetic flow across park boundaries.10 In the 1980s and 1990s, moreover, social scientists seriously began to critique conceptual aspects of the fortress paradigm. They questioned, amongst others, the reality of the ‘wilderness’ it sought to defend and the nature of the ‘nature’ it contained.11 Part of this critique entailed documentation of the immense human labour commonly involved in creating and preserving protected areas in a supposed ‘pristine,’ ‘natural’ state.12
All of this led to the rise of ‘community-based conservation’ (CBC) which, at the time, was a self-proclaimed ‘new’ conservation paradigm.13 This paradigm asserted that development and conservation must be conjoined, and concerns for people’s livelihood incorporated into protected area management.14 Conservation, in this approach, would now be a fundamentally social endeavour. As Catherine Corson and colleagues describe, this perspective transformed PAs from a ‘means to protect resources from people’ to a ‘means to protect resources for people’.15 The degree to which this paradigm shift was successful in achieving conservation and development aims has been discussed intensely in literature on this topic, with some social scientists criticizing community-based conservation ‘from within’, with an eye to improving it, and others asserting that the approach was fundamentally flawed and must be abandoned altogether.16
At the time it was not only social scientists critically investigating this new conservation paradigm. From the outset, it also received strong criticism from more traditionalist conservationists concerned that community-based conservation would fail to adequately conserve the resources it was intended to protect. Their main response was to call for a return to strict fortress-style protection. This neoprotectionist or back-to-the-barriers position asserted, as biologist John Terborgh phrased it most forcefully, that protected areas constitute ‘the final bulwark of nature in the Tropics and elsewhere’.17 This backlash led to what has been labelled a ‘people versus parks’ debate between this position and defenders of a community-based conservation approach.18 Subsequently, the neoprotectionist position was itself criticized severely on various grounds, being deemed an attempt to ‘reinvent a square wheel’ that never worked well in the first place.19
This discussion continues in the present and arguably still forms the backbone of the ‘great conservation debate’. The many and sometimes complex positions adopted in this debate keep coming back in various guises, modified and moulded by the study of rapidly changing empirical circumstances in many parts of the world.20 At the same time, it seems that this backbone has lost much of its earlier appeal, especially in academic circles though perhaps less so in the policy world. With a fundamental social science critique of CBC and the end of much of its popular funding appeal in practice, the people versus parks ‘backbone’ certainly can no longer represent an overall conceptualization of mainstream conservation.21 It is and will remain a central element to this conceptualization, but one that has been overtaken by other discussions and dynamics.
MAINSTREAM CONSERVATION: AN UPDATE
With mainstream conservation, Brockington, Duffy and Igoe refer to ‘a particular historical and institutional strain of western conservation’, practised and promoted especially by large, powerful international conservation organizations and agencies.22 They emphasize that this strain has, almost from the start, centred on both the parks and people debate and conservation’s ‘collaborative legacy’ with prominent business interests.23 From the time Brockington and colleagues published their book until now, more than a decade later, the latter dimension has further intensified and expanded. These are the ‘other dynamics’ that need to be emphasized: the ways that conservation has further embraced the practices, imaginaries and discourses of contemporary capitalism.24 An update of contemporary mainstream conservation thus needs to account for this intensified integration.
While Western conservation has always been closely conjoined with capitalist development25, the ‘mainstreaming’ of the relationship between capitalism and conservation arguably started in earnest in the early 1990s. Triggered by broader sustainable development discourses, the drive to merge conservation and development concerns was signified by revamping older and promoting new ‘market-based instruments’ (MBIs).26 Examples of these include tourism and forms of ecotourism (which had accompanied protected area development from the start and includes wildlife hunting), bioprospecting, payments for environmental services (PES), and other mechanisms intended to combine forms of (neoliberal) economic development with environmental conservation. The aim of these interventions was to harness the economic value of in situ resources in order to incentivize their preservation. Kathleen McAfee presciently called this strategy ‘selling nature to save it’.27
Drawing on a parallel trend of increasing privatization and marketization in conventional primary commodity markets discussed as ‘neoliberal natures’, this trend in conservation became analysed as ‘neoliberal conservation’.28 Here the analysis shifts ‘the focus from how nature is used in and through the expansion of capitalism, to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism’.29 Conservation, in other words, has moved beyond a Polanyian double-movement to accompany the march of capitalist progress by trying to selectively reign in or counterbalance its concomitant destruction of nature and biodiversity. It is becoming a potential – yet vital – force in fostering capitalist growth in its own right.
The neoliberal approach was rapidly and enthusiastically adopted by many of the most influential players in the global conservation movement. This includes the big non-governmental organizations (BINGOs) such as Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but also intergovernmental financial institutions like The World Bank, IMF and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as well as prominent business ‘partners’, many of which coordinated within the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). These various actors are, in turn, conjoined within an increasingly dense and self-referential network, of which IUCN is a key component.30 The partner companies that the big non-governmental organizations currently collaborate with, depend upon and even share staff with is highly illustrative in this respect: they are the largest and many of the most environmentally destructive capitalist corporations in the world. It is for this reason that we highlight the centrality of neoliberalism to contemporary mainstream conservation in general.
Importantly, the link between conservation and capitalism becomes ‘mainstream’ in two ways. On the one hand, we see that the ‘particular historical and institutional strain of western conservation’ that Brockington and colleagues describe has become more intensely and overtly capitalist in its goals, expressions, imaginations and ways of operating. To provide but one illustrative example, in explaining his involvement in the United Nations Environment Programme’s TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) initiative intended to monetarily value and create markets for trade in ‘ecosystem services’, Pavan Sukhdev, a former executive of Deutsche Bank, relates: ‘As an investment banker with another life built over fifteen years around my passion for the economics of nature … I am often asked how I reconcile my capitalist background with my commitments to nature and the environment … I give my stock reply “I don’t reconcile them – I am a total capitalist”.’31
On the other hand, we witness how conservation has become more central to global mainstream capitalist dynamics. Hence mainstream capitalism is quickly coming to grips with the importance of conservation to capitalist processes, even if this is mostly still discursive at present.32 An important example in this regard is the ‘Natural Capital Coalition’, which brings together over 200 governmental, business and conservation organizations and whose central point of departure is that the future of capitalist business needs to take conservation of ‘natural capital’ into account.33 The crucial point is that from both the side of conservation and from the side of capitalist industry, the link between the two has become more intense, accepted and mainstream.34 This fundamental development – together with the point to be developed further in chapters two and three that capitalism is inherently environmentally unsustainable – is the reason why we argue that a critique of capitalism must be at the heart of any meaningful prospects for the future of conservation.
Claiming that capitalism and conservation are increasingly intertwined and mainstream is not to imply a straightforward, one-dimensional or clear process and result, nor that this is merely a recent phenomenon. To the contrary: this intertwining and main-streaming is highly uneven, complex, multidimensional, political, and deeply historical – just like capitalist uneven geographical development more generally.35 Our thinking on this, therefore, stays far from any determinism. It instead embraces uncertainty, complexity and change as fundamental dynamics of contemporary capitalist political economy and its uneven geographical development. At the same time, we can discern broad yet specific historical trends and forms running through these uneven and complex developments.
In an earlier article building on world system perspectives, we argued that the global conservation movement can be seen to have moved through three broad, overlapping stages.36 These stages represent different ways in which conservation functions as a component of the capitalist world economy facilitating the internalization of environmental conditions in order to safeguard or expand capital accumulation. They therefore also logically parallel historical shifts in the dominant regime of capitalist accumulation within the global economy as a whole. Analysts have suggested that these regimes have transitioned, firstly, from ‘organized’ or ‘Fordist’ to ‘disorganized’ or ‘post-Fordist’, ‘flexible’ forms.37 Secondly, in the present period, scholars describe a further shift away from commodity production of any sort towards an emphasis on financialization – what David Harvey calls ‘fictitious capitalism’.38
Building on this, we have suggested that the global conservation movement has broadly moved through three related stages that we call fortress, flexible, and fictitious conservation, corresponding with the historical movement from protected area creation through community-based conservation with its preferred integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) and attendant income-generation mechanisms to the increasing focus on financialization through neoliberal market engagement (table 2).
Table 2. Accumulation by Conservation
| Period | Regime of Accumulation | Key Characteristics | Dominant Ideology | Conservation Approach | Key Mechanisms |
| 1860s- | Colonial / | Vertical | Liberalism / | Fortress | Protected Areas; State funding; wildlife tourism |
| 1960s | Fordist / Organized Capitalism | integration; Statism; violence | Keynesianism | Conservation | |
| 1970- | Post-Fordism / | Flexible | Roll-back | Flexible | CBC; ICDPs; |
| 2000 | Disorganized Capitalism | accumulation; decentralization | Neoliberalism | Conservation | Biosphere reserves; Ecotourism; Bioprospecting |
| 1990s | Roll-out Neoliberalism | TFCAs; PES | |||
| 2000-Present | Financialization / Casino Capitalism | Spectacular accumulation, networks, crisis | Fictitious Conservation | Carbon markets; species/wet-lands banking; financial derivatives; REDD |
Source: Büscher and Fletcher, Accumulation, 284.
When we therefore claim that mainstream conservation needs to be updated by emphasizing how it is now more intensely capitalist, this is in no way to imply a linear, ahistorical or all-encompassing trend. Rather, it is to suggest precisely that we are witnessing an intensification of longer-standing, uneven dynamics. All this makes ‘mainstream conservation’ an extremely complex and diverse proposition, rendering the generalizations necessary to make sense of things inevitably unfair and tenuous with respect to many actors, situations and positions.39 Yet, in all this diversity and complexity, two key elements remain fundamental to mainstream conservation: that conservation is and has long been a capitalist undertaking (and hence not a bulwark against capitalism, as it has sometimes been portrayed), and that it is fundamentally steeped in human–nature dichotomies that have indeed haunted capitalism itself for centuries.
To this we must add that mainstream conservation is mainstream not only because the ideas expressed are dominant and globally hegemonic, but also because they are endorsed and advanced by globally dominant actors including those previously mentioned.40 It is therefore crucial to note that radical challenges to mainstream conservation also mean radical challenges to these actors and hence to many entrenched power structures. Because of its import, this point will inform our ensuing discussions of the challenges to mainstream conservation presented by the Anthropocene.
ANTHROPOCENE CHALLENGES TO MAINSTREAM CONSERVATION
In 2012, Peter Kareiva, then Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, Michelle Marvier and Robert Lalasz published what quickly became a famously controversial article entitled ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene’. They argued that mainstream conservation was failing to stop biodiversity loss and that even a growing global protected area estate would not change this. For too long, they insisted, conservation had been working against people rather than through and with people, especially the poor in the Global South. The authors believed it was time, therefore, for conservationists to drop unrealistic myths of ‘wilderness’ and ‘pristine nature’, which the Anthropocene in any case renders obsolete. Instead, conservation should ‘demonstrate how the fates of nature and of people are deeply intertwined – and then offer new strategies for promoting the health and prosperity of both’.41 They also offered concrete suggestions on how to achieve this, worth quoting in full:
Conservation should seek to support and inform the right kind of development – development by design, done with the importance of nature to thriving economies foremost in mind. And it will utilize the right kinds of technology to enhance the health and wellbeing of both human and nonhuman natures. Instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures. Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor. Instead of trying to restore remote iconic landscapes to pre-European conditions, conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Nature could be a garden – not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life.42
This new conservation recycling of the idea of nature as a garden was also the central message of a book, entitled Rambunctious Garden, that came out the year before Kareiva and colleague’s piece. In this book, science journalist Emma Marris asserted in similar terms as Kareiva et al., ‘if we fight to preserve only things that look like pristine wilderness, such as those places currently enclosed in national parks and similar refuges, our best efforts can only retard their destruction and delay the day we lose. If we fight to preserve and enhance nature as we have newly defined it, as the living background to human lives, we may be able to win.’43
Marris thus pleads passionately for the ‘joyful’ and experimental designing of a global rambunctious garden that contains ‘nature that looks a little more lived-in than we are used to and working spaces that look a little more wild than we are used to’.44
An embrace of the Anthropocene is foundational to this perspective. In this bold new epoch, Kareiva et al. contend, ‘it is impossible to find a place on Earth that is unmarked by human activity’ and hence ‘conservation’s continuing focus upon preserving islands of Holocene ecosystems in the age of the Anthropocene is both anachronistic and counterproductive’.45 While rarely mentioning the Anthropocene specifically, Marris speaks similarly:
Today, our increasing awareness of the long history, massive scope, and frequent irreversibility of human impacts on the rest of nature make the leave-it-alone ethic even more problematic than it was in 1995. Climate change, land-use change, global species movements, pollution: these global forces affect every place, even those protected as parks or wildernesses, and dealing with them requires increasingly intensive intervention.46
There are many other interesting elements in these and related interventions, such as by journalist Fred Pearce among quite a few others, including many associated with The Breakthrough Institute.47 Common in all of these interventions is a conceptualization of nature that aims to move beyond dichotomies, boundaries and limits. In Kareiva et al.’s words:
We need to acknowledge that a conservation that is only about fences, limits, and faraway places only a few can actually experience is a losing proposition. Protecting biodiversity for its own sake has not worked. Protecting nature that is dynamic and resilient, that is in our midst rather than far away, and that sustains human communities – these are the ways forward now. Otherwise, conservation will fail, clinging to its old myths.
Marris, similarly, believes we must shed old-fashioned ideas about boundaries and ‘baselines’. ‘Rambunctious gardening’, she writes, ‘creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left.’48 Finally, with specific reference to the heated discussion on alien and invasive species, Pearce argues that:
Conservationists need to take a hard look at themselves and their priorities… . Nature no longer congregates only where we expect to find it, in the countryside or in ‘pristine’ habitats. It is increasingly eschewing formally protected areas and heading for the badlands. Nature doesn’t care about conservationists’ artificial divide between urban and rural or between native and alien. If conservationists are going to make the most of the opportunities in the twenty-first century to help nature’s recovery, they must put aside their old certainties and ditch their obsessions with lost causes, discredited theories, and mythical pristine ecosystems.49
What is striking about this perspective is how it has taken up aspects of social science critiques of the nature concept and redeployed these in particular ways to support its own positions – something we will analyse in more detail in the next chapter. All of this is couched in assertions that the realities of the Anthropocene reinforce these critiques and so necessitate a wholesale rethinking of the global conservation movement and the means and meaning of environmentalism in a ‘post-wild’ or ‘post-nature’ world. What is more, new conservationists have very explicitly taken up social scientists’ critiques regarding the development impacts and possibilities of conservation. There are two sides to this issue. The first is that conservation must not hurt people – especially poor people living near or displaced by protected areas – and it should ideally benefit them. The second is that conservation will likely fail if it does not simultaneously address the social causes of biodiversity loss.
So, ‘in order to save the orangutan’, Kareiva and colleagues assert, ‘conservationists will also have to address the problem of food and income deprivation in Indonesia. That means conservationists will have to embrace human development and the “exploitation” of nature for human uses, like agriculture, even while they seek to “protect” nature inside of parks’.50 Development, however, is understood in a particular way, as capitalist development, a position that remains close to mainstream conservation and its infatuation with market-based solutions to conservation challenges. In calling for attention to the human side of conservation, many critical social scientists have also pointed to the problems of doing so through the market-based instruments increasingly advocated in the growing neoliberalization trend within the mainstream conservation movement.51 In this, critics – ourselves included – have pointed to the paradox in this advocacy that capitalist mechanisms are promoted to address problems that are in large part caused by capitalist development itself.52
Yet this neoliberal approach is precisely what Kareiva and colleagues advocate in their call to integrate conservation and development.53 Marris, to be sure, is more reticent, remaining relatively agnostic concerning questions of economics. About the ecosystem services perspective for instance, she writes that ‘arguments come from the “what have you done for me lately” school of ecology’.54 She does not, however, take a clear position on the question of economic valuation of ecosystems or other forms of development herself. As the essays collected by Ben Minteer and Stephen Pyne in After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans illustrate, this type of new conservation has become a broad church that includes many different positions.55
Generally, however, Minteer and Pyne assert that a ‘traditional focus on the wilderness’ and a ‘knee-jerk hostility to corporate America and distaste for the market’ are considered ‘outdated preservationist beliefs’ to be ‘roundly rejected by the new Anthroprocene-ic environmentalists’.56 For our purposes, we therefore distil the main contribution and challenge by new conservationists down to the argument that embracing capitalism-for-conservation does not require yielding to the human–nature dichotomies that capitalism normally thrives on. This, as it turned out, is a radical position, with respect to both mainstream conservation and another set of radical proposals we will discuss next. Whether this central claim of new conservationists is a tenable position is a question we will come back to later.
THE NEW BACK-TO-THE-BARRIERS
Many were not charmed by the new conservation proposals. In fact, it quickly drew incensed reactions from several of the same prominent conservation biologists central to the original neoprotectionist position. Miller et al. retorted that ‘the assumption that managing nature for human benefit will preserve ecological integrity’ is an ‘ideology’ that ‘rests more on delusion and faith than on evidence’.57 Michael Soulé, in an editorial in Conservation Biology, concluded bluntly ‘that the new conservation, if implemented, would hasten ecological collapse globally, eradicating thousands of kinds of plants and animals and causing inestimable harm to humankind in the long run’.58 Celebrity biologist E. O. Wilson even criticizes ‘Anthropocene conservationists’ for holding ‘the most dangerous worldview’ and for being ‘unconcerned with what the consequences will be if their beliefs are played out’.59 Finally, Harvey Locke proclaims:
the death of the wild in favor of the garden with Homo Sapiens triumphant is no vision for those who proclaim to love nature. It will also inevitably be disastrous for the human species. We do not know how to run the world. It is time for our species to become humble and wise and to stop being greedy and clever.60
As also becomes clear from this quote, in contrast to the new conservationists, many neoprotectionists subject to critique the very idea of the Anthropocene altogether. In this, they deride the concept as a fiction of human hubris that vastly overestimates the extent to which humans actually control nonhuman processes. The following statement is typical:
The Anthropocene notion … seriously exaggerates human influence on nature but also … draws inappropriate metaphysical, moral, and environmental policy conclusions about humanity’s role on the planet. Despite our dramatic impact on Earth, significant naturalness remains, and the ever-increasing human influence makes valuing the natural more, not less, important in environmental thought and policy.61
Others accept the reality of the concept yet argue that the political lessons Anthropocenists draw from it are misguided:
I do agree … that Earth has entered a human-dominated era … Where I begin to part company with cheerleaders like Kareiva, Marvier, and Marris is in their embrace of the Anthropocene … Too often, proponents of the Anthropocene seem more interested in normalizing these losses than in stopping them.62
‘Rather than embrace the Anthropocene era,’ Cafaro continues, ‘conservationists should act to rein in its excesses’.63 Mackey similarly contends that ‘it is foolish and dangerous to confuse force with control. The Anthropocene, while an empirical fact, does not mean that humans “run the show.” Rather, it means only that we can be powerfully disruptive.’64 Wuerthner adds that ‘there’s a critical difference between documenting and acknowledging human impact and accepting it as inevitable and even desirable.’65 Cafaro thus concludes: ‘It is just not true that our only path is ever further into the Anthropocene. We can instead work to ratchet back the current, excessive human footprint on Earth and make a place (hopefully, many places) for other species to also flourish on our common home planet.’66
As a result of this critique of the Anthropocene concept and its embrace by new conservationists, neoprotectionists offer quite different solutions for the global environmental crisis. Most centrally, they make a plea for better understanding and accepting limits and boundaries: to human population growth, to places where ‘humanity’ should be allowed to develop, and – intriguingly – to consumption and economic growth as well. This latter limit has more recently been added onto the former set of limits that characterized these authors’ earlier defence of protected areas against integrated conservation and development projects.67 This earlier neoprotectionist literature became known as advocating a ‘back-to-the-barriers’ position and we therefore label this revised version critical of new conservation as the ‘new back-to-the-barriers’ or, simply, neoprotectionism.
In the face of calls to embrace diverse forms of human-focused conservation, the new back-to-the-barriers proponents assert that ‘only within parks and protected areas will many large animals critical to ecological processes persist’. For these neoprotectionists, today, as in their preceding proposals, ‘the center of traditional conservation’ is still ‘the preservation of biodiversity for ecosystem function and evolutionary potential … Doing this requires networks of protected lands; connectivity is a critical tenet’.68 The logical consequence is that neoprotectionists demand another resurgence and expansion of fortress-style protection, arguing that we must:
Protect and reconnect habitat, exclude poachers, and combat invasion by nonnative species. This is exactly what national parks and other protected areas are intended to do. There is no alternative. Parks and other strictly protected areas are the answer.
The conclusion therefore remains straightforward: ‘the global strategy must be to expand the number and size of protected areas, interconnect them, and rewild them.’69
Neoprotectionists are nothing but steadfast on this point. However, in this most recent campaign, they have upped the stakes dramatically. Many in their camp no longer believe that ‘the number and size of protected areas’ need simply be ‘expanded’; they now self-confidently – almost belligerently – assert that the protected area estate must be increased so dramatically as to encompass half the entire planet or more. Locke, for example, argues that ‘it is time for conservationists to reset the debate based on scientific findings and assert nature’s needs fearlessly.’ So far, he contends, it has been politics that has set conservation goals. This has resulted in ‘arbitrary percentages that rest on an unarticulated hope that such nonscientific goals are a good first step toward some undefined, better, future outcome’. Conservationists, Locke asserts, must now move beyond a ‘destructive form of self-censorship’ and promote targets based on ‘scientific assessment, review, and expert opinion’.70
Conservation biologist Reed Noss and colleagues, writing in an editorial in Conservation Biology state that, ‘In contrast to policy-driven targets, scientific studies and reviews suggest that some 25–75% of a typical region must be managed with conservation of nature as a primary objective to meet goals for conserving biodiversity’. Based on this, the authors recommend that:
When establishing global targets … it would be prudent to consider the range of evidence-based estimates of ‘how much is enough’ from many regions and set a target on the high side of the median as a buffer against uncertainty. From this precautionary perspective, 50 per cent – slightly above the mid-point of recent evidence-based estimates – is scientifically defensible as a global target.71
More explicit is Wilson, the revered biologist, in his book Half Earth. Stating bluntly that ‘humanity’ is ‘the problem’, he believes that ‘only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival’.72 Clearly, Wilson and other neoprotectionists are very worried about the fate of the planet, which they believe is doomed if we do not do something drastic as soon as possible. Setting aside at least half the earth for ‘self-willed’ nature, they argue, is the only solution commensurate with the scale of the problem. This radical, if not extreme, proposal has also been taken up by big non-governmental organizations such as Conservation International and many wilderness organizations united in the ‘Nature Needs Half’ campaign.73 Clearly, the human–nature dichotomy seems to become extremely rigid in this proposal, as aptly illustrated by the Nature Needs Half logo in figure 1.
Figure 1. Nature Needs Half logo.
Source: natureneedshalf.org.
While this radical new back-to-the-barriers position is increasingly supported by many neoprotectionists, this does not mean that they all think alike. Above and beyond the general acceptance of the importance of a dramatic increase in protected areas, there are many issues on which neoprotectionists diverge, sometimes sharply. But there is one other, somewhat surprising issue where it seems that more and more neoprotectionists are starting to converge, namely the issue of how to relate to the global political economy. Without necessarily referring to capitalism as such, many clearly feel uneasy about things like consumption and economic growth.74 Daniel Doak and colleagues, for example, criticize new conservation’s embrace of the green economy, simplistic ideas about partnering with business, and the notion that people are focused most on economic self-interest rather than intrinsic and moral goals.75 McCauley is even more explicit. He asserts that ‘market-based mechanisms for conservation are not, unfortunately, the panacea that they have been made out to be’ and proposes that ‘we must redirect much of the effort now being devoted to the commodification of nature back toward instilling in more people a love for nature.’76
More such examples abound, but dissenting voices are also present. Most prominently, Wilson has an almost evangelical faith in the power of the ‘free market’. Despite being critical of rising percapita consumption patterns, Wilson assuages these concerns by promoting a worryingly simplistic vision of ‘intensified economic evolution’. According to him, the ‘evolution of the free market, and the way it is increasingly shaped by high technology’, means that ‘products that win competition today … are those that cost less to manufacture and advertise, need less frequent repair and replacement, and give highest performance with a minimum amount of energy’. He further contends that ‘almost all of the competition in a free market, other than in military technology, raises the average quality of life’.77
We will come back to these simplistic and demonstrably false claims in chapters to follow, as they help to build the case for our own alternative proposal. For now, it is interesting to note that through this move, Wilson paradoxically ends up endorsing a similar proposal to some of the very Anthropocene conservationists he, in other respects, so opposes. Surprisingly, he even ends up advocating a vision of ‘decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs’ in order to create sustainable livelihoods for a population herded into urban areas to free space for self-willed nature.78 This vision, while grounded in a quite different overarching conceptual perspective, is in many ways quite similar to that which the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute has recently promoted in its own proposal for land sparing and decoupling to increase terrain for conservation.79
Yet Wilson seems quite iconoclastic in this respect. Many other neoprotectionists are increasingly veering towards a more critical stance on the embrace of capitalism-for-conservation and would want to reign this in, just like they want to reign in population growth, landuse change, and much else that has so far been quite central to the development of global capitalism. This is, clearly, a radical proposal in a context where global capitalism is still hegemonic – something acknowledged by several neoprotectionists. Yet whether it is tenable to be increasingly critical of capitalism while holding one of capitalism’s greatest vices – the human–nature dichotomy – central to one’s plan for the future is something that needs to be critically evaluated.
A FIRST ATTEMPT AT EVALUATING THE ANTHROPOCENE CONSERVATION DEBATE
Given all of this, how should we understand the current status of the great conservation debate, especially the latest, radical responses to the erstwhile dominance of mainstream conservation?80 There are several ways in which we could proceed, but in this chapter’s penultimate section we want to do two things: first, to discuss how different actors in the discussion and the conservation community more broadly have themselves evaluated the debate and how they view the main issues; second, to provide a brief evaluation of the conceptual logic and coherence of the main positions and issues under debate. The point of the latter aim is to provide the basis upon which in the next chapters we will, in more depth, assess whether these positions are tenable or not, theoretically as well as politically, and whether they could lead to just, effective and, equally importantly, realistic conservation proposals for the future.
First, how did different actors in these debates, and within the broader conservation community, understand and evaluate the latest iterations of the great conservation debate? Unsurprisingly, the two main protagonist camps discussed above responded in ways that befit their general outlook on conservation. Neoprotectionists see their position just as they view nature and wilderness itself: as under siege from multiple fronts. Johns relates:
In the mid-1990s conservationists responded to a wave of ideological attacks directed at wilderness and biodiversity. In the last few years concerted attacks have again emerged, and, although they are shopworn, riddled with factual errors, and marbled with hierarchical values, they also appear well-funded, receive lots of media attention, and are advanced with great energy, as if careers depended on them.81
Harvey Locke even implies a stealthy betrayal of trust:
In the last twenty years a more subtle and perhaps equally dangerous group has snuck up on conservationists. They come in stealth, professing to be allies with a fresh approach. They come armed with altruism – concern for the poor and disenfranchised humans around the world. Sharing this moral value, we conservationists listen to them, strive to accommodate their concerns, and then learn to our dismay that they don’t share our basic goal of conserving wild nature.82
Perhaps this helps to explain the impassioned force of neoprotectionists’ critique of the new conservation perspective. Such strong reactions to their work have, in turn, provoked consternation on the part of new conservationists. Why, Marris asks of neoprotectionist critics, ‘do they worry so much about expanding our set of approaches to work for these goals to include more than just protected areas?’83 Similarly, Marvier, on behalf of Kareiva and co-authors, queries not without irony, ‘We do not get it: why are people who love the diversity of plants and animals and habitats so afraid of a diversity of approaches and motivations within the conservation community?’84
But, for neoprotectionists, this is not the point. As Soulé argues, ‘because its goal is to supplant the biological diversity-based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely an economic growth-based or humanitarian movement, it does not deserve to be labelled conservation.’ This is a heavy charge. Soulé makes this point for various reasons, but especially because he feels that new conservationists do not understand the basic science that conservation should be built on: ‘most shocking is the dismissal by the new conservationists of current ecological knowledge. The best current research is solidly supportive of the connection between species diversity and the stability of ecosystems.’85 More generally, much of the new and old back-to-the-barriers literature holds a similarly one-dimensional view of science as uncontested and apolitical; science that espouses a basic truth that only they understand and hence need to defend.86
Again, Marvier is shocked by how her group’s understanding of science can be so interpreted. In an editorial tellingly entitled ‘new conservation is true conservation’, she argues that ‘even more troubling is that Soulé’s stance has no basis in fact. As one of the authors of what Soulé calls “the manifesto of the new conservation movement”, I hope to set the record straight and to help move this debate beyond unproductive infighting.’ She denies that new conservation dismisses the science or the need for protected areas and connectivity in general. Rather, she believes that conservation must expand beyond ‘traditional’ science: ‘We need rigorous testing of new approaches and innovative new science.’87 Pearce is even more forceful on this point. In his book The New Wild he regularly counter-accuses ‘traditional’, neoprotectionist conservationists of adhering to poor, outdated, orthodox science when it comes to the benefits and dangers of alien and invasive species and that, in some cases, conservationists have even resorted to ‘Orwellian science’ and ‘ideology’, rather than ‘good science’.88
Science – like nature – is clearly more dynamic and amenable to multiple interpretations for new conservationists than it is to neoprotectionists. Yet, we believe that it is not just science itself that is at stake in the discussion, even though it is important that the two camps differ on what science is and should be about. What is also fundamentally at stake in this dispute is what science should lead to in practice. For neoprotectionists, this is a radical separation between humans and nonhuman nature in order to protect the latter from increased human influence. For new conservationists, this is a radical acceptance of the mixing of humans and nonhumans into potentially exciting new assemblages. In our terms, all this suggests that what is most fundamentally at stake here is the nature–culture dichotomy itself and how to relate scientific findings and endeavours to this binary – and vice versa. This is such a central issue that we will devote the next chapter to exploring it further.
Other significant issues of contention are the developmental aspirations of new conservation. Soulé again: ‘The key assertion of the new conservation is that affection for nature will grow in step with income growth. The problem is that evidence for this theory is lacking. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction, in part because increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint.’89 Marvier disputes this. She argues that ‘we advocate building a solid foundation from the bottom up and providing alternative livelihoods to the poor so that they are not forced to illegally harvest resources or otherwise work against protected areas.’ Central to this conflict is the intrinsic value of nature, long an essential pillar of the neoprotectionists’ perspective. As Marvier contends:
Soulé claims that ‘new conservationists demand that nature not be protected for its own sake but that it be protected only if it materially benefits human beings.’ To the contrary, I encourage the conservation community to continue working in this vein. However, at least in the United States, surveys demonstrate that messages about protecting biodiversity or nature for its intrinsic value are inspiring for relatively narrow segments of the population, particularly those who self-identify as conservationists or environmentalists.90
She goes on to suggest that moving beyond nature for nature’s sake will allow more people to join the conservation cause, and, for that, poverty needs to be addressed. This is something about which neoprotectionists are rather sceptical. They are not necessarily afraid of reaching out to more people, but are certainly concerned, as noted above, that ‘increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint’.91 More examples of this tension could be mentioned (and will be in the following chapter), but we argue that what is most fundamentally at stake here is not just the intrinsic value of nature itself, but how this value features or gets recognized. To be blunt, we argue that new conservationists generally see opportunities in ‘modern’ capitalist economies and the selling of ecosystem services, while neoprotectionists are critical of this (save for outliers like E.O. Wilson). What makes this more complicated still is that this fundamental debate is mostly waged under the rubric of ‘development’ rather than capitalism per se – though, we contend, it is a capitalist mode of development that is fundamentally at issue here.
Neoprotectionists diverge strongly from new conservationists in their perspective on the relationship between conservation and development and the obligation of conservation to the poor. In fact, many neoprotectionists, as they have for quite some time, explicitly reject the conjoining of development and conservation aims altogether. Hence they decry ‘justifying biodiversity protection based on narrowly conceived human well-being (essentially cost–benefit analysis)’; ‘decision-making dominated by the desires to optimize for efficiency and maximize short-term gains’; and ‘exploiting nature for the exclusive purpose of human gain’.92 Importantly, they contend that ‘the economy’s dominion over us is all too often conceded and rationalized with garden metaphors and ideologies of balanced domestication’.93 Mackey asserts that ‘a utilitarian attitude toward nature is an insufficient foundation for conservation in the twenty-first century. Alone, this attitude inexorably results in ecosystems becoming depauperate and simplified to the point where they are no longer, among other things, self-organizing and resilient’.94
Yet others in the neoprotectionist camp, by contrast, do advocate bringing development into conservation policy. Often this is reluctant, produced by a sense of necessity or inevitability. Thus, Wuerthner concedes, ‘Given our current global population and dependence on technology, humanity may have no choice but to “work the landscape”’.95 Others appear more enthusiastic. Sounding quite similar to Kareiva and Marris, Curt Meine, the conservation biologist and historian, asserts:
We need to think of conservation in terms of whole landscapes, from the wildest places to the most urban places … We need to do more and better conservation work outside protected areas and sacred spaces; on our ‘working’ farms, ranches, and forests; and in the suburbs and cities where people increasingly live.96
Some go so far as to themselves advocate economic valuation and market mechanisms for conservation. Conservationist Kathleen Fitzgerald states, ‘Biodiversity offsets and credits, as well as carbon credits, offer potential market solutions to sustaining parks’. She explains: ‘If the local community felt that they were benefiting from conservation – through wildlife-based tourism, for example – and if these benefits outweighed the losses resulting from human-wildlife conflict, the situation undoubtedly would be different’.97 Celebrity primatologist Jane Goodall writes, ‘Another way to show that protecting rather than destroying forests can be economically beneficial is by assigning a “monetary” value to living trees and compensating governments, landowners, and villagers for conserving’. She adds as an example that a key market-based instrument known as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), ‘assigns a value for the carbon stored in different kinds of forests and forest soils, so that appropriate compensation can be paid to those who protect their forests’.98
For some, promotion of development occurs in terms of strict spatial separation wherein pure conservation is to be practiced in some spaces and intensive development in others – a version of the more general approach often termed ‘land sparing’.99 In such a strategy, Crist describes, ‘Barring people from sources of livelihood or income within biodiversity reserves (prohibiting settlements, agriculture, hunting, mining, and other high-impact activities) needs to be offset by coupling conservation efforts with the provision of benefits for local people’.100 E. O. Wilson advocates an extreme version of this strategy as well.
It is clear, in sum, that two of the biggest issues that new conservationists and neoprotectionists debate are, first, how to relate to human–nature dichotomies and, second, the prospects of successfully combining conservation with contemporary capitalism (again mostly couched in the language of ‘development’). This, then, forms a good bridge to deepen our own evaluation of the debate in the next two chapters, from the perspective of a political ecology critical of contemporary capitalism. In brief, through this frame, we will show that, underlying both radical challenges to mainstream conservation, as well as mainstream conservation itself, are theoretical and/or logical contradictions regarding key issues and concepts that first need to be sorted and explained. These include – amongst others – the intrinsic versus the exchange values of nature; the ‘proper’ relations between humans and nonhumans and how to mix or separate them; and how both of these fit within a broader development model that responds to the dynamics of the Anthropocene. On these issues, we find that, on both sides, several arguments and positions are untenable.101
Concerning new conservation, we believe it is conceptually incoherent and untenable to embrace capitalism-for-conservation while arguing that this necessitates abandoning the same human–nature dichotomies that capitalism constructs and normally thrives on. At the same time, we believe that neoprotectionists are highly contradictory in believing that we can simply separate our way out of environmental trouble through a massive increase of protected areas and connectivity and even reserving half of the earth for nature and the other half for people or ‘development’. After all, it is this same capitalist development that is intent upon continually transgressing such boundaries in search of new spaces and sites for accumulation.
What we therefore need is a more consistent, coherent frame and set of principles to make sense of the issues that both neoprotectionists and new conservationists struggle with – issues that we will be tackling in chapter four.102 And this is especially important since both have important critiques of mainstream conservation with which we do agree and that we will incorporate into our own proposal for the future of conservation. Yet, in order to get there, we must first delve deeper into the complex and often confusing fundamentals of the debate, which we will do in the next two chapters.
CONCLUSION
The great conservation debate and its recent radical additions are anything but mundane or boring. With the stakes as high as ‘the future of life on the planet’, as some neoprotectionists frame the problem, there is no shortage of emotion, sharpness and venom in the debates. This book is our attempt to make sense of and contribute to the debate. This chapter sought to lay the basis for this contribution by providing a first appraisal of the current discussion concerning how to save nature in the Anthropocene. In doing so, we must admit to a sense of unease while writing and debating. This is not because we have to admit that our perspective, like all others, is a partial one, steeped in our own biases and informed by our own experiences, our research and our political, scientific and related interests. It is also not because we are necessarily omitting, generalizing and simplifying important issues.
Rather, our sense of unease stems from anthropological inclinations. Delving deeply into debates – as when delving into ethnographic realities of particular places when doing anthropological research – makes one realize the numerous shades of grey that can never be understood fully nor represented adequately. This is again inevitable, but the difference that anthropological engagement makes is to try and appreciate the lived reality of particular ‘communities’. In analysing the great conservation debate, it is clear that the lived reality of the conservation community is a tense and pressurized one, imbued with a great sense of crisis and responsibility. This lived reality is reflected in the numerous contributions to and reflections on the debate, more of which will be presented in ensuing chapters. While cutting corners in order to deal with complexities and nuances, we hope that this chapter has nevertheless been able to convey a sense of this lived reality. This is important, we believe, because it might help to find ways to move forward across differences. In chapter four, we will come back to this point.
Our more grounded goal was to distil the main issues at stake in these complex debates, which we argue revolve around two main axes: the human–nature dichotomy and the ecological merits or perils of contemporary capitalism. Both issues are not straightforward, and there can be no straightforward, black-and-white arguments for or against them. Indeed, there is a distinct danger in presenting them this way, as it does not correspond to empirical reality and the nuances of the debate. We therefore need to do justice to the potentially radical natures of these alternative proposals by discussing them in more depth to show in greater detail how and why they are radical and important, yet contain several untenable contradictions.
