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,