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 of conservation in terms of whole landscapes, from the wildest places to the most urban places … We need to do more and better conservation work outside protected areas and sacred spaces; on our ‘working’ farms, ranches, and forests; and in the suburbs and cities where people increasingly live.96
Some go so far as to themselves advocate economic valuation and market mechanisms for conservation. Conservationist Kathleen Fitzgerald states, ‘Biodiversity offsets and credits, as well as carbon credits, offer potential market solutions to sustaining parks’. She explains: ‘If the local community felt that they were benefiting from conservation – through wildlife-based tourism, for example – and if these benefits outweighed the losses resulting from human-wildlife conflict, the situation undoubtedly would be different’.97 Celebrity primatologist Jane Goodall writes, ‘Another way to show that protecting rather than destroying forests can be economically beneficial is by assigning a “monetary” value to living trees and compensating governments, landowners, and villagers for conserving’. She adds as an example that a key market-based instrument known as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), ‘assigns a value for the carbon stored in different kinds of forests and forest soils, so that appropriate compensation can be paid to those who protect their forests’.98
For some, promotion of development occurs in terms of strict spatial separation wherein pure conservation is to be practiced in some spaces and intensive development in others – a version of the more general approach often termed ‘land sparing’.99 In such a strategy, Crist describes, ‘Barring people from sources of livelihood or income within biodiversity reserves (prohibiting settlements, agriculture, hunting, mining, and other high-impact activities) needs to be offset by coupling conservation efforts with the provision of benefits for local people’.100 E. O. Wilson advocates an extreme version of this strategy as well.
It is clear, in sum, that two of the biggest issues that new conservationists and neoprotectionists debate are, first, how to relate to human–nature dichotomies and, second, the prospects of successfully combining conservation with contemporary capitalism (again mostly couched in the language of ‘development’). This, then, forms a good bridge to deepen our own evaluation of the debate in the next two chapters, from the perspective of a political ecology critical of contemporary capitalism. In brief, through this frame, we will show that, underlying both radical challenges to mainstream conservation, as well as mainstream conservation itself, are theoretical and/or logical contradictions regarding key issues and concepts that first need to be sorted and explained. These include – amongst others – the intrinsic versus the exchange values of nature; the ‘proper’ relations between humans and nonhumans and how to mix or separate them; and how both of these fit within a broader development model that responds to the dynamics of the Anthropocene. On these issues, we find that, on both sides, several arguments and positions are untenable.101
Concerning new conservation, we believe it is conceptually incoherent and untenable to embrace capitalism-for-conservation while arguing that this necessitates abandoning the same human–nature dichotomies that capitalism constructs and normally thrives on. At the same time, we believe that neoprotectionists are highly contradictory in believing that we can simply separate our way out of environmental trouble through a massive increase of protected areas and connectivity and even reserving half of the earth for nature and the other half for people or ‘development’. After all, it is this same capitalist development that is intent upon continually transgressing such boundaries in search of new spaces and sites for accumulation.
What we therefore need is a more consistent, coherent frame and set of principles to make sense of the issues that both neoprotectionists and new conservationists struggle with – issues that we will be tackling in chapter four.102 And this is especially important since both have important critiques of mainstream conservation with which we do agree and that we will incorporate into our own proposal for the future of conservation. Yet, in order to get there, we must first delve deeper into the complex and often confusing fundamentals of the debate, which we will do in the next two chapters.
CONCLUSION
The great conservation debate and its recent radical additions are anything but mundane or boring. With the stakes as high as ‘the future of life on the planet’, as some neoprotectionists frame the problem, there is no shortage of emotion, sharpness and venom in the debates. This book is our attempt to make sense of and contribute to the debate. This chapter sought to lay the basis for this contribution by providing a first appraisal of the current discussion concerning how to save nature in the Anthropocene. In doing so, we must admit to a sense of unease while writing and debating. This is not because we have to admit that our perspective, like all others, is a partial one, steeped in our own biases and informed by our own experiences, our research and our political, scientific and related interests. It is also not because we are necessarily omitting, generalizing and simplifying important issues.
Rather, our sense of unease stems from anthropological inclinations. Delving deeply into debates – as when delving into ethnographic realities of particular places when doing anthropological research – makes one realize the numerous shades of grey that can never be understood fully nor represented adequately. This is again inevitable, but the difference that anthropological engagement makes is to try and appreciate the lived reality of particular ‘communities’. In analysing the great conservation debate,
