We conclude the book by arguing why we believe the alternative of convivial conservation is the most optimistic, equitable and, importantly, realistic model for conservation for the future. In doing so, we emphasize that while the term ‘convivial conservation’ may be new, many of its premises are not. Numerous indigenous, progressive, youth, emancipatory and other movements, individuals and organizations have long been working on, and engaged in, alternative conservation practices and ideas that include elements of what we propose here. We pay tribute to these in the intermezzo after chapter four. And while we may not be able to do justice to them all in a short book, we present convivial conservation as a scientifically grounded, political platform and paradigm that aims to build on, through and with these many past, current and no doubt future examples of alternative conservation practices and ideas.
The ultimate purpose of this platform and paradigm is to help make political choices clearer in this particular moment of time, what we will refer to as the ‘Trump moment in conservation’: a moment in which radical choices are no longer ‘coming’, but are being made all around us all the time.23 Convivial conservation delves into this political fray with the hope of adding to others to (re)direct the choices that are being made in a more hopeful and just direction. And to be clear: these choices are foundational. As the following chapters show in detail, the anthropocene conservation debate touches on the foundations of the relations between humans and the rest of nature. This is why we need to go to their roots, as from these roots emerge the possibilities for hope.
Conservation 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