In the mid-1990s conservationists responded to a wave of ideological attacks directed at wilderness and biodiversity. In the last few years concerted attacks have again emerged, and, although they are shopworn, riddled with factual errors, and marbled with hierarchical values, they also appear well-funded, receive lots of media attention, and are advanced with great energy, as if careers depended on them.81
Harvey Locke even implies a stealthy betrayal of trust:
In the last twenty years a more subtle and perhaps equally dangerous group has snuck up on conservationists. They come in stealth, professing to be allies with a fresh approach. They come armed with altruism – concern for the poor and disenfranchised humans around the world. Sharing this moral value, we conservationists listen to them, strive to accommodate their concerns, and then learn to our dismay that they don’t share our basic goal of conserving wild nature.82
Perhaps this helps to explain the impassioned force of neoprotectionists’ critique of the new conservation perspective. Such strong reactions to their work have, in turn, provoked consternation on the part of new conservationists. Why, Marris asks of neoprotectionist critics, ‘do they worry so much about expanding our set of approaches to work for these goals to include more than just protected areas?’83 Similarly, Marvier, on behalf of Kareiva and co-authors, queries not without irony, ‘We do not get it: why are people who love the diversity of plants and animals and habitats so afraid of a diversity of approaches and motivations within the conservation community?’84
But, for neoprotectionists, this is not the point. As Soulé argues, ‘because its goal is to supplant the biological diversity-based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely an economic growth-based or humanitarian movement, it does not deserve to be labelled conservation.’ This is a heavy charge. Soulé makes this point for various reasons, but especially because he feels that new conservationists do not understand the basic science that conservation should be built on: ‘most shocking is the dismissal by the new conservationists of current ecological knowledge. The best current research is solidly supportive of the connection between species diversity and the stability of ecosystems.’85 More generally, much of the new and old back-to-the-barriers literature holds a similarly one-dimensional view of science as uncontested and apolitical; science that espouses a basic truth that only they understand and hence need to defend.86
Again, Marvier is shocked by how her group’s understanding of science can be so interpreted. In an editorial tellingly entitled ‘new conservation is true conservation’, she argues that ‘even more troubling is that Soulé’s stance has no basis in fact. As one of the authors of what Soulé calls “the manifesto of the new conservation movement”, I hope to set the record straight and to help move this debate beyond unproductive infighting.’ She denies that new conservation dismisses the science or the need for protected areas and connectivity in general. Rather, she believes that conservation must expand beyond ‘traditional’ science: ‘We need rigorous testing of new approaches and innovative new science.’87 Pearce is even more forceful on this point. In his book The New Wild he regularly counter-accuses ‘traditional’, neoprotectionist conservationists of adhering to poor, outdated, orthodox science when it comes to the benefits and dangers of alien and invasive species and that, in some cases, conservationists have even resorted to ‘Orwellian science’ and ‘ideology’, rather than ‘good science’.88
Science – like nature – is clearly more dynamic and amenable to multiple interpretations for new conservationists than it is to neoprotectionists. Yet, we believe that it is not just science itself that is at stake in the discussion, even though it is important that the two camps differ on what science is and should be about. What is also fundamentally at stake in this dispute is what science should lead to in practice. For neoprotectionists, this is a radical separation between humans and nonhuman nature in order to protect the latter from increased human influence. For new conservationists, this is a radical acceptance of the mixing of humans and nonhumans into potentially exciting new assemblages. In our terms, all this suggests that what is most fundamentally at stake here is the nature–culture dichotomy itself and how to relate scientific findings and endeavours to this binary – and vice versa. This is such a central issue that we will devote the next chapter to exploring it further.
Other significant issues of contention are the developmental aspirations of new conservation. Soulé again: ‘The key assertion of the new conservation is that affection for nature will grow in step with income growth. The problem is that evidence for this theory is lacking. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction, in part because increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint.’89 Marvier disputes this. She argues that ‘we advocate building a solid foundation from the bottom up and providing alternative livelihoods to the poor so that they are not forced to illegally harvest resources or otherwise work against protected areas.’ Central to this conflict is the intrinsic value of nature, long an essential pillar of the neoprotectionists’ perspective. As Marvier contends:
Soulé claims that ‘new conservationists demand that nature not be protected for its own sake but that it be protected only if it materially benefits human beings.’ To the contrary, I encourage the conservation community to continue working in this vein. However, at least in the United States, surveys demonstrate that messages about protecting biodiversity or nature for its intrinsic value are inspiring for relatively narrow segments of the population, particularly those who self-identify as conservationists or environmentalists.90
She goes on to suggest that moving beyond nature for nature’s sake will allow more people to join the conservation cause, and, for that, poverty needs to be addressed. This is something about which neoprotectionists are rather sceptical. They are not necessarily afraid of reaching out to more people, but are certainly concerned, as noted above, that ‘increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint’.91 More examples of this tension could be mentioned (and will be in the following chapter), but we argue that what is most fundamentally at stake here is not just the intrinsic value of nature itself, but how this value features or gets recognized. To be blunt, we argue that new conservationists generally see opportunities in ‘modern’ capitalist economies and the selling of ecosystem services, while neoprotectionists are critical of this (save for outliers like E.O. Wilson). What makes this more complicated still is that this fundamental debate is mostly waged under the rubric of ‘development’ rather than capitalism per se – though, we contend, it is a capitalist mode of development that is fundamentally at issue here.
Neoprotectionists diverge strongly from new conservationists in their perspective on the relationship between conservation and development and the obligation of conservation to the poor. In fact, many neoprotectionists, as they have for quite some time, explicitly reject the conjoining of development and conservation aims altogether. Hence they decry ‘justifying biodiversity protection based on narrowly conceived human well-being (essentially cost–benefit analysis)’; ‘decision-making dominated by the desires to optimize for efficiency and maximize short-term gains’; and ‘exploiting nature for the exclusive purpose of human gain’.92 Importantly, they contend that ‘the economy’s dominion over us is all too often conceded and rationalized with garden metaphors and ideologies of balanced domestication’.93 Mackey asserts that ‘a utilitarian attitude toward nature is an insufficient foundation for conservation in the twenty-first century. Alone, this attitude inexorably results in ecosystems becoming depauperate and simplified to the point where they are no longer, among other things, self-organizing and resilient’.94
Yet others in the neoprotectionist camp, by contrast, do advocate bringing development into conservation policy. Often this is reluctant, produced by a sense of necessity or inevitability. Thus, Wuerthner concedes, ‘Given our current global population and dependence on technology, humanity may have no choice but to “work the landscape”’.95 Others appear more enthusiastic. Sounding quite similar to Kareiva and Marris, Curt Meine, the conservation biologist and historian, asserts:
We need to think