to and working spaces that look a little more wild than we are used to’.44
An embrace of the Anthropocene is foundational to this perspective. In this bold new epoch, Kareiva et al. contend, ‘it is impossible to find a place on Earth that is unmarked by human activity’ and hence ‘conservation’s continuing focus upon preserving islands of Holocene ecosystems in the age of the Anthropocene is both anachronistic and counterproductive’.45 While rarely mentioning the Anthropocene specifically, Marris speaks similarly:
Today, our increasing awareness of the long history, massive scope, and frequent irreversibility of human impacts on the rest of nature make the leave-it-alone ethic even more problematic than it was in 1995. Climate change, land-use change, global species movements, pollution: these global forces affect every place, even those protected as parks or wildernesses, and dealing with them requires increasingly intensive intervention.46
There are many other interesting elements in these and related interventions, such as by journalist Fred Pearce among quite a few others, including many associated with The Breakthrough Institute.47 Common in all of these interventions is a conceptualization of nature that aims to move beyond dichotomies, boundaries and limits. In Kareiva et al.’s words:
We need to acknowledge that a conservation that is only about fences, limits, and faraway places only a few can actually experience is a losing proposition. Protecting biodiversity for its own sake has not worked. Protecting nature that is dynamic and resilient, that is in our midst rather than far away, and that sustains human communities – these are the ways forward now. Otherwise, conservation will fail, clinging to its old myths.
Marris, similarly, believes we must shed old-fashioned ideas about boundaries and ‘baselines’. ‘Rambunctious gardening’, she writes, ‘creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left.’48 Finally, with specific reference to the heated discussion on alien and invasive species, Pearce argues that:
Conservationists need to take a hard look at themselves and their priorities… . Nature no longer congregates only where we expect to find it, in the countryside or in ‘pristine’ habitats. It is increasingly eschewing formally protected areas and heading for the badlands. Nature doesn’t care about conservationists’ artificial divide between urban and rural or between native and alien. If conservationists are going to make the most of the opportunities in the twenty-first century to help nature’s recovery, they must put aside their old certainties and ditch their obsessions with lost causes, discredited theories, and mythical pristine ecosystems.49
What is striking about this perspective is how it has taken up aspects of social science critiques of the nature concept and redeployed these in particular ways to support its own positions – something we will analyse in more detail in the next chapter. All of this is couched in assertions that the realities of the Anthropocene reinforce these critiques and so necessitate a wholesale rethinking of the global conservation movement and the means and meaning of environmentalism in a ‘post-wild’ or ‘post-nature’ world. What is more, new conservationists have very explicitly taken up social scientists’ critiques regarding the development impacts and possibilities of conservation. There are two sides to this issue. The first is that conservation must not hurt people – especially poor people living near or displaced by protected areas – and it should ideally benefit them. The second is that conservation will likely fail if it does not simultaneously address the social causes of biodiversity loss.
So, ‘in order to save the orangutan’, Kareiva and colleagues assert, ‘conservationists will also have to address the problem of food and income deprivation in Indonesia. That means conservationists will have to embrace human development and the “exploitation” of nature for human uses, like agriculture, even while they seek to “protect” nature inside of parks’.50 Development, however, is understood in a particular way, as capitalist development, a position that remains close to mainstream conservation and its infatuation with market-based solutions to conservation challenges. In calling for attention to the human side of conservation, many critical social scientists have also pointed to the problems of doing so through the market-based instruments increasingly advocated in the growing neoliberalization trend within the mainstream conservation movement.51 In this, critics – ourselves included – have pointed to the paradox in this advocacy that capitalist mechanisms are promoted to address problems that are in large part caused by capitalist development itself.52
Yet this neoliberal approach is precisely what Kareiva and colleagues advocate in their call to integrate conservation and development.53 Marris, to be sure, is more reticent, remaining relatively agnostic concerning questions of economics. About the ecosystem services perspective for instance, she writes that ‘arguments come from the “what have you done for me lately” school of ecology’.54 She does not, however, take a clear position on the question of economic valuation of ecosystems or other forms of development herself. As the essays collected by Ben Minteer and Stephen Pyne in After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans illustrate, this type of new conservation has become a broad church that includes many different positions.55
Generally, however, Minteer and Pyne assert that a ‘traditional focus on the wilderness’ and a ‘knee-jerk hostility to corporate America and distaste for the market’ are considered ‘outdated preservationist beliefs’ to be ‘roundly rejected by the new Anthroprocene-ic environmentalists’.56 For our purposes, we therefore distil the main contribution and challenge by new conservationists down to the argument that embracing capitalism-for-conservation does not require yielding to the human–nature dichotomies that capitalism normally thrives on. This, as it turned out, is a radical position, with respect to both mainstream conservation and another set of radical proposals we will discuss next. Whether this central claim of new conservationists is a tenable position is a question we will come back to later.
THE NEW BACK-TO-THE-BARRIERS
Many were not charmed by the new conservation proposals. In fact, it quickly drew incensed reactions from several of the same prominent conservation biologists central to the original neoprotectionist position. Miller et al. retorted that ‘the assumption that managing nature for human benefit will preserve ecological integrity’ is an ‘ideology’ that ‘rests more on delusion and faith than on evidence’.57 Michael Soulé, in an editorial in Conservation Biology, concluded bluntly ‘that the new conservation, if implemented, would hasten ecological collapse globally, eradicating thousands of kinds of plants and animals and causing inestimable harm to humankind in the long run’.58 Celebrity biologist E. O. Wilson even criticizes ‘Anthropocene conservationists’ for holding ‘the most dangerous worldview’ and for being ‘unconcerned with what the consequences will be if their beliefs are played out’.59 Finally, Harvey Locke proclaims:
the death of the wild in favor of the garden with Homo Sapiens triumphant is no vision for those who proclaim to love nature. It will also inevitably be disastrous for the human species. We do not know how to run the world. It is time for our species to become humble and wise and to stop being greedy and clever.60
As also becomes clear from this quote, in contrast to the new conservationists, many neoprotectionists subject to critique the very idea of the Anthropocene altogether. In this, they deride the concept as a fiction of human hubris that vastly overestimates the extent to which humans actually control nonhuman processes. The following statement is typical:
The Anthropocene notion … seriously exaggerates human influence on nature but also … draws inappropriate metaphysical, moral, and environmental policy conclusions about humanity’s role on the planet. Despite our dramatic impact on Earth, significant naturalness remains, and the ever-increasing human influence makes valuing the natural more, not less, important in environmental thought
