and even the creation of ‘novel ecosystems’. Central to all these is a ‘new vision of a planet in which nature – forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems – exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes’.23
Since at least the 1990s, neoprotectionists have strongly contested this view. They argue that nature is not a social construction but a real entity that stands to some extent independent, ‘self-willed’ and ‘autonomous’ with respect to human perception and action. From this perspective, those who critically reflect on the concept of nature are themselves often criticized for endorsing an extreme position that denies the existence of physical reality altogether.24 Yet, as with mainstream conservation, this perspective is ambivalent. Some neoprotectionists, like David Johns and Roderick Nash, accept the assertion that humans are part of nature:
How can human behavior be anything but part of Nature? We are the products of evolution; we breathe air, eat, and are otherwise dependent upon the Earth. Unless one invokes the supernatural then, by definition, everything we do is natural, and that doesn’t get us very far.25
Of course humans remain ‘natural.’ But somewhere along the evolutionary way from spears to spaceships, humanity dropped off the biotic team and, as author and naturalist Henry Beston recognized, became a ‘cosmic outlaw.’ The point is that we are no longer thinking and acting like a part of nature. Or, if we are a part, it is a cancerous one, growing so rapidly as to endanger the larger environmental organism.26
At the same time, such statements conflict with a common desire amongst neoprotectionists to preserve nature as a ‘self-willed’ force independent of human intervention and cordoned off within depopulated protected areas. Assertions of the ‘need to share the world with nature’, ‘the will to create a new humanity that respects nature’s freedom and desires’, or that ‘it is wrong for humanity to displace and dominate nature’, again imply a separation between humans and the nature we are supposedly part of.27 This, clearly, is problematic. But another central concern of the global conservation movement illustrates this contradiction – and hence of the role of the dichotomy in the broader Anthropocene conservation debate – even more sharply: the desire not just to protect nature, but to preserve wilderness.
THE REALITIES OF WILDERNESS
For many conservationists, the nature they defend is often directly equated with wilderness.28 Wilderness was paradigmatically defined by the 1964 US National Wilderness Preservation Act as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’ As noted in chapter one, the aim to preserve wilderness within protected areas has always only been one model of conservation that has coexisted with other competing approaches from the outset. Yet the North American wilderness park has long stood as the main model for the global expansion of protected areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, and further reinforced after the paradigmatic definition by the US Wilderness Act, the very act of preserving wilderness has ensured and even deepened the centrality of the nature–culture binary in global conservation.29
Following Paul Wapner, there are two main reasons why a focus on ‘wilderness’ deepens the dichotomy, one material and one discursive.30 Materially, it is well documented that many areas that are considered wildernesses to be preserved within protected areas were made so by forcibly evicting the former inhabitants of these areas. It is therefore only through violent acts of displacement that they were given the appearance of unpopulated pristineness. What is painfully contradictory here is that the same indigenous people who in many places long managed landscapes that became attractive to conservation were subsequently removed (or even exterminated) in order to preserve what then became ‘wilderness’.31 Rod Neumann astutely labelled this material dynamic ‘imposing wilderness’.32
At the same time, the contradictory material production of wilderness needed also to be discursively produced, in order to be (seen as) legitimate and ‘real’. In Igoe’s perceptive words, this ‘process of erasure had to erase itself’.33 Only by writing people out of landscapes could protected areas also discursively take on the semblance of ‘untrammeled’ wilderness. Needless to say, these contradictory dynamics, which were also often racist, colonialist and imperialist, have been heavily criticized. The foundational text here is William Cronon’s essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, where he stated that wilderness ‘far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, is quite profoundly a human creation’.34 Cronon and others challenged the very idea that wilderness can or ever has existed, which de facto renders it ‘an impossible geography’.35
This critique of the ontology of the wilderness conventionally prized by conservation is one of the main issues that new conservationists have embraced in support of their position. As Kareiva et al. assert,
The wilderness ideal presupposes that there are parts of the world untouched by humankind … The truth is humans have been impacting their natural environment for centuries. The wilderness so beloved by conservationists – places ‘untrammeled by man’ - never existed, at least not in the last thousand years, and arguably even longer.
On this basis they contend that:
Conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, prehuman landscapes. Humankind has already profoundly transformed the planet and will continue to do so … conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness – ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science – and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.36
Marris, similarly, describes a ‘post-wild’ world in which we ‘must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden’. This, she suggests, is
a much more optimistic and a much more fruitful way of looking at things … If you only care about pristine wilderness … you’re fighting a defensive action that you can never ultimately win, and every year there’s less of it than there was the year before … But if you’re focused on the other values of nature and goals of nature, then you can go around creating more nature, and our kids can have a world with more nature on it than there is now.37
This, clearly, is one of the contentions most disputed by neoprotectionists. Wilson insists that ‘areas of wilderness … are real entities’.38 In a section entitled ‘wilderness is real’, Locke even argues that ‘to those of us who have experienced such primeval places, claims of the non-existence of wilderness are absurd and offensive’.39
A number of interrelated arguments are mobilized to support these assertions. First, neoprotectionists dispute research concluding that indigenous inhabitants have long tended many ‘wilderness’ areas. Instead, they contend that in reality there were far fewer such inhabitants than researchers claim and that these inhabitants altered the landscape far less than is suggested. Foreman points out that ‘the combined population of Canada and the United States today is over 330 million’ while ‘the pre-Columbian population was little more than 1 percent of that’. Moreover, ‘There were large regions rarely visited by humans – much less hosting permanent settlements – because of the inhospitality of the environment, the small total population of people at the time, uneven distribution, limited technology, lack of horses, and constant warfare and raiding’ and hence human ‘impact until very recently was scattered and light’. As a result, environmental campaigner and Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman asserts, ‘The issue is not whether natives touched the land, but to what degree and where. Even if certain settled and cropped places were not self-willed land due to native burning, agriculture, and other uses, it does not follow that this was the case everywhere’.40 He favourably quotes geographer Thomas Vale who argues that:
