The latter positions resonate strongly with our own. Hence, we will spend some time discussing this issue in more depth later. First, however, we need to do more justice to the nuances in the debate, while also providing more evidence for what we believe are ultimately the two main, interrelated axes of contention: the nature–culture dichotomy and the relationship between conservation and capitalism. We start with the issue at the heart of it all: the nature of ‘nature’ itself.
THE NATURE OF NATURE
First and foremost among the issues of contention within the great conservation debate has always been the meaning of the term ‘nature’. It would, perhaps, not be an exaggeration to say that this is the key foundational issue around which the whole discussion pivots. One of the central components of common critiques of mainstream conservation is that it has, historically, rested on a conceptual distinction between opposing realms of nature and culture that conservation practice has, in a sense, sought to render material through the creation of protected areas from which human inhabitants were often forcibly removed.17 This dichotomy, and the particular understanding of (nonhuman) nature to which it gives rise, has been problematized as a culturally specific construction largely limited to ‘Western societies’ in the modern era. Such a strict separation between opposing conceptual realms, it is argued, does not reflect the different ways in which other peoples throughout the world understand relationships between humans and other living beings.18 So why, precisely, is this dichotomy such a big issue, and how do different actors in the debate deal with it?
To start with the last part of this question, mainstream conservationists have generally been ambivalent about the concept of nature. On the one hand, many claim that a nature–culture separation is an impediment to conservation: it enforces a sense of distance and alienation from nonhumans, and conservationists therefore often call for greater ‘connection with nature’ through direct experience in outdoor landscapes.19 In their rhetoric and actual practice, on the other hand, conservationists commonly continue to reinforce separations between people and the very nature we are all supposed to be part of. This is most visible in the continued enforcement of conventional protected areas, but also in newer market-based mechanisms such as ecotourism, payments for environmental services, and species banking in which conservation and development are supposed to become one and the same.20
More contradictory still, even as they advocate greater connection with nature, conservationists often simultaneously reinforce a sense of separation from nature. This, then, provides a first glimpse of what is so problematic about the nature–culture dichotomy: humans are supposed to be part of nature, but are at the same time often seen as separate from it. Conservation International’s ‘Nature Is Speaking’ campaign epitomizes this problematic ambivalence (see figure 2). This campaign features a series of short films in which high-profile celebrities like Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts assume the voices of natural forces (such as water and Mother Nature) and decry humans’ rampant assault upon them. One of these short films, narrated by Robert Redford as a redwood tree, insists that the solution to this destruction is for humans to recognize that they are ‘part of nature, rather than just using nature’.21 Yet the campaign’s own motto (‘Nature Doesn’t Need People, People Need Nature’) emphasizes this same separation between people and nature that is seen as the problem, a separation further reinforced by many of these short films in which narrators explicitly speak, as elements of nature, to their distinction from a generic humanity. Julia Roberts, as Mother Earth, for instance, proclaims, ‘I am nature. I am prepared to evolve. Are you?’22
Figure 2. CI signs at the World Parks Congress, Sydney, November 2014.
Photos by Bram Büscher.
Anthropocene conservationists, as we have seen in the previous chapter, embrace the mounting critique of the nature–culture dichotomy. Kareiva and colleagues assert, ‘One need not be a postmodernist to understand that the concept of Nature, as opposed to the physical and chemical workings of natural systems, has always been a human construction, shaped and designed for human ends.’ On this basis they advocate greater integration of human and nonhuman processes within a variety of different strategies, including integrated-conservation-and-development programmes, biosphere reserves, biological corridors, assisted migration routes, and even the creation of ‘novel ecosystems’. Central to all these is a ‘new vision of a planet in which nature – forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems – exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes’.23
Since at least the 1990s, neoprotectionists have strongly contested this view. They argue that nature is not a social construction but a real entity that stands to some extent independent, ‘self-willed’ and ‘autonomous’ with respect to human perception and action. From this perspective, those who critically reflect on the concept of nature are themselves often criticized for endorsing an extreme position that denies the existence of physical reality altogether.24 Yet, as with mainstream conservation, this perspective is ambivalent. Some neoprotectionists, like David Johns and Roderick Nash, accept the assertion that humans are part of nature:
How can human behavior be anything but part of Nature? We are the products of evolution; we breathe air, eat, and are otherwise dependent upon the Earth. Unless one invokes the supernatural then, by definition, everything we do is natural, and that doesn’t get us very far.25
Of course humans remain ‘natural.’ But somewhere along the evolutionary way from spears to spaceships, humanity dropped off the biotic team and, as author and naturalist Henry Beston recognized, became a ‘cosmic outlaw.’ The point is that we are no longer thinking and acting like a part of nature. Or, if we are a part, it is a cancerous one, growing so rapidly as to endanger the larger environmental organism.26
At the same time, such statements conflict with a common desire amongst neoprotectionists to preserve nature as a ‘self-willed’ force independent of human intervention and cordoned off within depopulated protected areas. Assertions of the ‘need to share the world with nature’, ‘the will to create a new humanity that respects nature’s freedom and desires’, or that ‘it is wrong for humanity to displace and dominate nature’, again imply a separation between humans and the nature we are supposedly part of.27 This, clearly, is problematic. But another central concern of the global conservation movement illustrates this contradiction – and hence of the role of the dichotomy in the broader Anthropocene conservation debate – even more sharply: the desire not just to protect nature, but to preserve wilderness.
THE REALITIES OF WILDERNESS
For many conservationists, the nature they defend is often directly equated with wilderness.28 Wilderness was paradigmatically defined by the 1964 US National Wilderness Preservation Act as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’ As noted in chapter one, the aim to preserve wilderness within protected areas has always only been one model of conservation that has coexisted with other competing approaches from the outset. Yet the North American wilderness park has long stood as the main model for the global expansion of protected areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, and further reinforced after the paradigmatic definition by the US Wilderness Act, the very act of preserving wilderness has ensured and even deepened the centrality of the nature–culture binary in global conservation.29
Following Paul Wapner, there are two main reasons why a focus on ‘wilderness’ deepens the dichotomy, one material and one discursive.30