Opinion: Challenging conventional conservation

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When most people think of conservation, they picture national parks, endangered wildlife, some specific species and famous names. But this image tells only part of the story and hides uncomfortable truths. Claire Thomas, a conservation researcher, argues that conservation has long ignored its entanglement with climate change and social justice. 

• “Conservation must reckon with its past failures like fortress conservation that displaced indigenous peoples and campaigns centred on ‘cute’ species to remain relevant.” says Mrs Thomas.

• Drawing on research and history, she challenges readers to rethink what conservation should mean in the 21st century.

By Claire Thomas

When you think of conservation, what comes to mind? National parks? Wildlife? Charismatic endangered species? Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Goodall, John Muir? David Attenborough? (Notably, all white people…I wonder why?)

It’s a rather complicated subject. It might conjure a mixed concoction of positive associations and misguided ones. For me, conservation is most strongly associated with people who like nature and want to preserve it, but don’t quite understand the broader context in which it sits, namely the climate crisis and social injustice. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot in the intentions of conservation that is worth, well, conserving. In order to fully embrace an updated conception of what conservation means and should be, we need to reckon with the ways it falls short.

First, some philosophical notes

Since the dawn of life on Earth, life forms have been adapting and evolving. Over time, the environment on Earth naturally changes and with those changes come species changes in response. Some of these adaptations work, and others don’t. That’s where Darwin’s survival of the fittest comes in. Thus all of life, every species, is a constantly changing experiment to try to successfully adapt to the world around us, this place that we call Earth. Life, as a whole, will always do this, whether or not humans are here. Life on Earth began before humans, and it will continue after humans are gone.

Therefore, conservation is a moral, anthropogenic project in which humans position themselves as deciders of which life forms are worth intervening to save. This alone makes conservation a sticky and fraught endeavor.

And yet. The fact remains that our world is in dire need of conservation.

Why we need conservation, & what’s at stake

We are unequivocally actively in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event in the history of the world. According to a 2014 study, current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural pre-human rates of extinction, and future rates are likely to be 10,000 times higher. In 2019, the UN reported that our actions threaten extinction for up to a million species. Wildlife has declined by about 70% (!!!) just since 1970.

And it’s 100% our fault.

Why? Because humans have destroyed so much habitat in such a short amount of time. Biodiversity loss is the direct result of ecosystem loss. To blame is the mass destruction of habitat by fossil fuel and timber industries since the Industrial Revolution, and which still continues today.

The changes to Earth’s ecosystems, which cause the mass extinctions occurring as we speak, are not in the realm of the natural environmental changes that have happened throughout history. As a result of human actions - burning fossil fuels and devastating ecosystems for short-term profit - the Earth is changing more and faster than ever before in the planet’s existence. As climate scientist Lesley Hughes states in her Ted Talk, “What we are doing is conducting the biggest, fastest, most frightening experiment in environmental change that has ever happened.”

It’s crucial for solving the climate crisis

The climate biodiversity nexus tells us that the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are two sides of the same coin. The causes are the same: extreme over-extraction. They also make each other worse. We desperately need biodiversity in order to solve the climate crisis, and we need to manage and mitigate the climate crisis as best we possibly can if we want to maintain the biodiversity we have left. 

Our extractive actions are causing ecosystems to change. That means the patterns are less stable and no longer the predictable ones that species have evolved around. Ecosystems are transitioning to entirely different states, like forests becoming grasslands and grasslands becoming deserts. But there’s so much chaos we are injecting with our wrecking ball to Earth’s systems that none of these changes are happening in clear, uniform ways. Our climatic changes are seriously messing with species movement, seasonal ecological events, and all kinds of ecosystem functioning.

That biodiversity loss led by climate change is in turn hindering our ability to effectively deal with the climate crisis. We need healthy ecosystems, which need biodiversity, in order to capture and store the vast amounts of carbon we’ve pumped into the atmosphere. Conserving ecosystems in the right way can do so much to cushion humans against the worst impacts of the climate crisis. So-called nature-based climate solutions are cheaper than infrastructure-based solutions, and have tons of other benefits, too. But natural climate solutions require diverse animal and plant presence in order to work. This 2023 study argues just that.

In short, we need conservation if we have any hope of restoring balance to humanity’s presence on Earth. That is, if we have any hope to continue on our tenure as a species on this magnificent planet. (Remember, life on Earth will go on without us. It will just look different.)

How conservation is failing

Conservation to date has been plagued by a lot of sinister forces and bad ideas. Here are the big ones.

Anti-Indigenous racism & fortress conservation

National parks are widely loved and celebrated by the public, at least in the United States. A 2022 YouGov survey found that three fourths of surveyed American adults have a favorable attitude towards the National Park Service. But national parks have a dark history fraught with racism, violence, and something called fortress conservation.

John Muir, lauded as father of the National Park System and founder of the Sierra Club, held racist views toward Black people and Indigenous people. That should be unsurprising given the fact that behind virtually every national park is the conveniently swept over story of forced Indigenous removal. Acts of violence to displace Indigenous peoples from their lands for the creation of a formally designated protected area, such as a national park, is understood as fortress conservation. The fortress conservation approach assumes nature has the best outcomes when humans are absent, and translates to this: Indigenous peoples = dirty and unworthy of living in a ‘pristine landscape.’ So whatever atrocities it takes to fulfill that vision of untouched aesthetic wilderness are deemed acceptable. This illuminating story for Grist outlines several examples of such atrocities peppering the history of this widespread conservation model.

The other idea inherent in the model of fortress conservation is that we should section up pieces of the world for singular uses: urban vs agriculture vs untouched protected area. It’s an assumption that is sorely misguided, harmful, and is shooting us in the foot. We can and should build places that have multiple purposes. Cities that biodiversity can thrive in. Gorgeous natural ecosystems that humans are empowered to steward and interact with for benefits both ways. We have to grow a norm of supporting practices that help both land and species, while also contributing to the livelihood of people, especially Indigenous communities. To not do these things is a ridiculous missed opportunity.

Unhelpful strategies

Funding conservation of individual cute species

Flagship species are animals chosen to serve as the charismatic face of a conservation campaign. You know them, you love them: the giant panda, the polar bear, the bald eagle, etc.

The problem is two-fold: 1) Only the ‘cutest,’ most marketable species get the resources they need. 2) Conserving individual species does not meet the demands of our time.

While the flagship species marketing approach does effectively take advantage of human bias for certain animals to garner funding, letting that bias dictate where money flows leads to an unfair distribution of resources. It completely disregards keystone species. Keystone species are species that are critical to the functioning of a certain ecosystem. They are the most important ones for keeping an ecosystem intact, and other species within that ecosystem rely on them. Keystone species, not flagship species, should be the real foundation of conservation efforts because saving individual species in a vacuum does not help us. Conserving entire ecosystems is what we need, and keystone species are the direct path to do that.

More isn’t automatically better

In 2022, about 200 countries got together and decided to embark on an initiative called 30 by 30 - to conserve 30% of Earth’s land and waters by 2030. Sounds great, right?

Indigenous leaders have voiced strong concerns about this initiative. For one, government-led conservation efforts, as mentioned, have too often meant death and displacement for Indigenous peoples. This UN report estimates that over the last century, about 20 million people were evicted from ‘protected areas’ across 15 countries, 250,000 of which estimated between 1990-2014. When you add a fast timeline to a goal based on the amount of land set aside (the percentage of protected area has to double by 2030), it’s easy to see how that could spell danger for Indigenous communities across the globe.

30x30 is a lot cooler-sounding than it is strategic and coordinated. It matters a lot which 30% is protected; we should target the most important and most at risk habitats. It’s possible to meet the 30x30 goal without even protecting any ecosystems that are in danger. It also matters that the protected areas should be coordinated so they can have an impact of building genuinely resilient ecosystems. But the most valuable and threatened ecosystems are often the most ignored, such as deserts.

“In a global analysis with Munich colleague Matthias Biber and Alke Voskamp, of Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, Hof found that protected areas on land are rarest in hot deserts such as the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula. Deserts contain many rare species uniquely adapted to the dry conditions, yet policymakers often regard them as ecologically worthless.” - Yale Environment 360

Put restoration to rest

Conventional conservation upholds an ideal of restoration. That means striving to restore a habitat to the way it once was, like before humans messed it up. But that’s actually not possible. Most conservation has assumed the environment to be relatively stable, but at this point in the climate crisis, ecosystems are changing, transitioning from one state to another. If we could successfully restore ecosystems back to the way they once were, say, 300 years ago, the work would be undone immediately because we live in a completely different world now. There has never been a finished, unchanging version of any ecosystem, anyway, so it’s a silly goal altogether.

The wrong people are in charge

Most conservation projects have been top-down. This has resulted in imperialist governance structures, inaccessibility, and less effective results.

Conservation has often been utilized as neo-colonialism, just another excuse for outsiders to stick their noses in and control the resources in the same countries historically exploited by other kinds of colonialism. Many big conservation projects are funded and managed by large conservation NGOs like World Wildlife Fund and Wildlife Conservation society. Both NGOs have been linked to human rights abuses including group rape and killings.

When not directly controlling conservation projects, outsiders still hold the funding keys for locals to engage in their own projects. Much of that funding is inaccessible to Indigenous and local communities because such funds require a cultural understanding of Western grant application processes and English literacy.

When local Indigenous communities are allowed to steward their lands, the conservation results are far better, as a 2022 study on governance of protected areas demonstrates.

Even collaborative governance over protected areas and conservation projects have limitations. For instance, the Socio Bosque program in Ecuador, in which the government paid A’i Cofán community members to safeguard a portion of the Amazon, failed to actually protect the forest and indigenous territories from oil interests and damage. The government turned their backs on their conservation promise when faced with oil profits. Some governments fail to understand that you can’t have it both ways - you can’t pursue conservation while simultaneously selling land for exploitation.

The path forward

Conservation needs to consider with utmost importance several things that currently get pushed to the backburner, if acknowledged at all. Number one must be upholding human rights, especially Indigenous rights and autonomy to steward their land according to their culture and rich reserve of ecological, place-based knowledge. This includes honoring cultural practices like foraging, harvesting or hunting certain species. Accessibility to livelihood and cultural traditions is crucial.

Next, conservationists need to embrace (research-backed) experimentation and action. It’s foolish to let fear of unintended consequences stymie swift, tangible actions to build as much ecosystem resilience and biodiversity health as possible. There is no time to make ‘perfect’ decisions. Conservation is a triage discipline, and the patient is dying with each second. For another metaphor, the genie has left the bottle. It’s no longer about whether or not or how much to intervene, it’s about the best strategies for intervening.