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