and its uneven geographical development. At the same time, we can discern broad yet specific historical trends and forms running through these uneven and complex developments.
In an earlier article building on world system perspectives, we argued that the global conservation movement can be seen to have moved through three broad, overlapping stages.36 These stages represent different ways in which conservation functions as a component of the capitalist world economy facilitating the internalization of environmental conditions in order to safeguard or expand capital accumulation. They therefore also logically parallel historical shifts in the dominant regime of capitalist accumulation within the global economy as a whole. Analysts have suggested that these regimes have transitioned, firstly, from ‘organized’ or ‘Fordist’ to ‘disorganized’ or ‘post-Fordist’, ‘flexible’ forms.37 Secondly, in the present period, scholars describe a further shift away from commodity production of any sort towards an emphasis on financialization – what David Harvey calls ‘fictitious capitalism’.38
Building on this, we have suggested that the global conservation movement has broadly moved through three related stages that we call fortress, flexible, and fictitious conservation, corresponding with the historical movement from protected area creation through community-based conservation with its preferred integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) and attendant income-generation mechanisms to the increasing focus on financialization through neoliberal market engagement (table 2).
Table 2. Accumulation by Conservation
| Period | Regime of Accumulation | Key Characteristics | Dominant Ideology | Conservation Approach | Key Mechanisms |
| 1860s- | Colonial / | Vertical | Liberalism / | Fortress | Protected Areas; State funding; wildlife tourism |
| 1960s | Fordist / Organized Capitalism | integration; Statism; violence | Keynesianism | Conservation | |
| 1970- | Post-Fordism / | Flexible | Roll-back | Flexible | CBC; ICDPs; |
| 2000 | Disorganized Capitalism | accumulation; decentralization | Neoliberalism | Conservation | Biosphere reserves; Ecotourism; Bioprospecting |
| 1990s | Roll-out Neoliberalism | TFCAs; PES | |||
| 2000-Present | Financialization / Casino Capitalism | Spectacular accumulation, networks, crisis | Fictitious Conservation | Carbon markets; species/wet-lands banking; financial derivatives; REDD |
Source: Büscher and Fletcher, Accumulation, 284.
When we therefore claim that mainstream conservation needs to be updated by emphasizing how it is now more intensely capitalist, this is in no way to imply a linear, ahistorical or all-encompassing trend. Rather, it is to suggest precisely that we are witnessing an intensification of longer-standing, uneven dynamics. All this makes ‘mainstream conservation’ an extremely complex and diverse proposition, rendering the generalizations necessary to make sense of things inevitably unfair and tenuous with respect to many actors, situations and positions.39 Yet, in all this diversity and complexity, two key elements remain fundamental to mainstream conservation: that conservation is and has long been a capitalist undertaking (and hence not a bulwark against capitalism, as it has sometimes been portrayed), and that it is fundamentally steeped in human–nature dichotomies that have indeed haunted capitalism itself for centuries.
To this we must add that mainstream conservation is mainstream not only because the ideas expressed are dominant and globally hegemonic, but also because they are endorsed and advanced by globally dominant actors including those previously mentioned.40 It is therefore crucial to note that radical challenges to mainstream conservation also mean radical challenges to these actors and hence to many entrenched power structures. Because of its import, this point will inform our ensuing discussions of the challenges to mainstream conservation presented by the Anthropocene.
ANTHROPOCENE CHALLENGES TO MAINSTREAM CONSERVATION
In 2012, Peter Kareiva, then Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, Michelle Marvier and Robert Lalasz published what quickly became a famously controversial article entitled ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene’. They argued that mainstream conservation was failing to stop biodiversity loss and that even a growing global protected area estate would not change this. For too long, they insisted, conservation had been working against people rather than through and with people, especially the poor in the Global South. The authors believed it was time, therefore, for conservationists to drop unrealistic myths of ‘wilderness’ and ‘pristine nature’, which the Anthropocene in any case renders obsolete. Instead, conservation should ‘demonstrate how the fates of nature and of people are deeply intertwined – and then offer new strategies for promoting the health and prosperity of both’.41 They also offered concrete suggestions on how to achieve this, worth quoting in full:
Conservation should seek to support and inform the right kind of development – development by design, done with the importance of nature to thriving economies foremost in mind. And it will utilize the right kinds of technology to enhance the health and wellbeing of both human and nonhuman natures. Instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures. Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor. Instead of trying to restore remote iconic landscapes to pre-European conditions, conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Nature could be a garden – not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life.42
This new conservation recycling of the idea of nature as a garden was also the central message of a book, entitled Rambunctious Garden, that came out the year before Kareiva and colleague’s piece. In this book, science journalist Emma Marris asserted in similar terms as Kareiva et al., ‘if we fight to preserve only things that look like pristine wilderness, such as those places currently enclosed in national parks and similar refuges, our best efforts can only retard their destruction and delay the day we lose. If we fight to preserve and enhance nature as we have newly defined it, as the living background to human lives, we may be able to win.’43
Marris thus pleads passionately for the
