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.
In the current ‘great conservation debate’, it seems there is increasingly less common ground to stand on. Should we be mourning the ‘End of the Wild’, following Stephen Meyer? Or should we celebrate the ‘New Wild’, as Fred Pearce urges? Are we living through an age of ‘biological annihilation’ or is nature ‘thriving in an age of extinction’?1 Should we follow the call to now fully and responsibly accept human stewardship of an Anthropocene earth? Or is this typical of human hubris and should we be sceptical of any attempt to place humanity at the steering wheel of spaceship earth? Should we be radically mixing societies and biodiversity into new and potentially exciting ‘socionatural’ arrangements or should we radically separate people and much of the rest of biodiversity in order to enable more sustainable futures? Or are all these considerations unrealistic and ought we instead simply to focus on improving mainstream conservation ‘business as usual’? These important questions, and others, are raised by the current debate. We add one more: are there ways to defuse their all-or-nothing, black-and-white connotations and find other ways to frame the Anthropocene conservation debate altogether?
Clearly, the arbiter in this discussion cannot be science. Or, at least, not science alone.2 As we saw in the previous chapter, how to interpret the role of science in conservation and act on its findings is precisely one of the major issues at stake. Science, no matter how much some neoprotectionists and other conservationists would like to believe otherwise, is always already political; its outcomes and their relevance and potential