Conservation by the People
Finding our place in nature in the Anthropocene
The 21st century is poised to be the era of global crises. Biodiversity change appears to be yet another planetary emergency on humanity’s plate, only adding to the predicaments posed by the climate and pandemic disease.
Echoing the urgency of IPCC reports, national representatives at a UN meeting in Kunming, China declared that global species declines posed “major risks to human survival”, emphasizing the need “for nothing less than urgent transformative action.” New international agreements set the radical target of setting aside almost a third of the planet to be “protected” from humans. But the last decade’s global biodiversity targets weren’t met, and little has changed to suggest that the 2020s will be any different.
If a person doesn’t feel a sense of déjà vu reading this, they should. Biodiversity change, like COVID and climate change, exposes yet again the limits of our political institutions and even the way we debate collective problems. Decisive action usually fails to deliver or is undermined in the next election cycle, while citizens seem increasingly incapable of calmly discussing collective problems with one another. Must conservation suffer a similar fate?
Like other environmental challenges, biodiversity change is contentious because it exists at the intersection of two dilemmas. What is the proper place of humans in nature? What is the rightful role of science in a democracy? People are divided over the question of how homo sapiens should tread upon the Earth and to what extent “science” should dictate the answer. But our seeming inability to turn these disagreements about nature and science into sensible politics makes every environmental issue polarized, nasty, and unproductive. One side prophesizes planetary apocalypse, another thinks humanity can navigate its way to world of sustainable abundance, and still others wonder what all the fuss is about.
Since 2022, I’ve been working on a book about the politics of biodiversity. Specifically, it’s about how we could avoid conservation becoming yet another trench in ongoing culture wars. How might we save environmentalism from the diehards to act as if they only pathway toward progress lied in transformative change and, in turn, fanatical, existential political confrontations.
Bits of my argument have already appeared here in Taming Complexity. I’ve examined how cataclysmic environmental stories often get overturned in the next wave of research publications, and questioned the rightness of climate technocracy, especially when technocrats try to use apocalyptic prophesies to sidestep democratic politics. I’ve championed a “meliorist” approach to political problems, arguing that compromising one’s values is literally what democracy is all about.
Previous posts have featured expositions of examples and case studies mentioned in the book. The aftermath of a clandestine beaver reintroduction in Scotland illustrates the importance of including potential victims in environmental change. A failed effort to bring bears back to the Bitterroot Mountains shows the deep roots of rural resentment. A NIMBY freakout over an indigenous group building high-rises in the middle of Vancouver uncovers the contradictions of making the inclusion of rural people in land use decisions contingent on them possessing or enacting “traditional ecological knowledge.”
The good news is that these posts are mere snippets of a far broader examination of the politics of conservation biology. My manuscript examines the debate over claims that we are in the midst of a “sixth extinction,” takes a detour through Pablo Escobar’s narcotrafficking (and love of exotic animals) to put the idea of invasive species under the microscopic, along with topics such as rewilding and resurrection biology. I explore the complex historical, political, and economic underpinnings of conservation conflicts and explores how we might better navigate our way through them.
The bad news: The book won’t be out for another year. I just submitted the final manuscript to MIT Press. Now comes proofing, indexing, and all the other book production work. That’s often the trouble with non-profit, academic presses. They’re slow. The tradeoff is that they take more chances with the books they decide to publish, that they are more adventurous. But I’ll be sure to remind you when it’s available for purchase, and I’ll upload a few more teaser posts along the way.
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