The Future of Conservation: A Conversation with Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher

Most people consider conservation an apolitical, unambiguous good. In reality, the national park model has dispossessed millions of Indigenous people from their land since its conception at Yellowstone in 1872. In their new book, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher contend that the present environmental crisis has sparked a reckoning amongst conservationists. And while a number of models such as Half-Earth and Rewilding have been proposed as potential alternatives to the mainstream “protected area,” none address conservation’s deeply entangled relationship with capitalism. In this conversation, we discuss the human-nature dichotomy, the mask of ecotourism, the population scapegoat, and their alternative vision of Convivial Conservation.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Yardain Amron: Rebecca Solnit has a line that “one way to guarantee a conversation without a conclusion is to ask a group of people what nature is.” I think it’s really difficult for people to step outside of themselves and think about nature as this thing we give meaning to. I think that for a casual nature lover, conservation is pretty much an apolitical unambiguous good, though between the two of you there’s probably about 40 years of critical research that begs to differ. So, I thought it would be helpful to give a brief historical overview of Western-style mainstream conservation, the backbone people-versus-parks dispute, and why we even have these special protected areas for nature in the first place.

Bram Büscher: As we were revisiting the great conservation debate in the book, we wanted to show that conservation doesn’t come out of a vacuum and is indeed thoroughly political and part of broader political economic developments and movements. One of them is the rise of protected areas setting nature apart, or protecting the rest of nature from humans, which already is a big step because it means protecting ourselves from ourselves or protecting nature from nature in many ways. It is only the last 200 years that thinking like that has become possible. Now we’re so used to it that we think that protected areas are completely normal. Well they’re not. They’re only 150 years or so old, and most of the protected areas that we know have been put into place over the last 30 to 40 years. What that signals is that conservation has always been a response to broader developments that in one way or another changed the natural world around us and also changed our ability to live from and with that natural environment.

Industrial capitalism in the 17th, 18th, 19th century destroyed a lot of non-human nature, and in order to protect the natural environment a counter-movement arose—just like you could refer to the labor movement as a counter movement to protect society. And then slowly from the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with the neoliberal counter-revolution, we’ve seen a form of integration between the two where conservation was seen as a form of development. Increasingly we’re seeing that they become further and further integrated, leading to the current moment of natural capital, whereby capitalism and nature are basically seen in the dominant image as one and the same. For us, this is the ultimate contradiction. It’s trying to portray a particular political economic form, capitalism, which we argue in the book is inherently unsustainable, as the beginning and end all of how you see nature. Conservation shouldn’t be some kind of handmaiden for economic development in a capitalist society. We should rethink the world in terms where we can actually live together with other human beings and with the rest of nature in a way that does justice to both.

Robert Fletcher: There’s been a lot of critique of the fact that the way that Western Europeans tend to imagine their relationship with the world, going back to the Enlightenment, was in the sense of separation: there was this other world outside that was the world of nature and then there was a world of culture that especially Western Europeans had imposed over the rest of nature. When Europeans colonized and spread out around the rest of the world, they took this imagination with them. When they looked out on vast portions of the world that people occupied to some degree they understood this as relatively unspoiled nature and they often overlooked the myriad signs of human occupation that were actually all around them. And then because of the sense of separation between people and nature, where people were in contact with the environment, the European colonists imagined that the relationship was a negative one—that people were encroaching on this natural environment and destroying it. Subsequent research has revealed that in many cases environments look the way they did and species thrived precisely because of the ways in which local people actually cultivated certain species creating, in a sense, large gardens that could appear quite wild.

The sense that humans were encroaching on natural spaces created this idea of protected areas, where what we needed to do was to remove people from these spaces and patrol the outskirts of these areas to keep people from moving in. That was the idea of the protected area, which our colleagues have described as a fortress conservation paradigm, conceiving of a protected area just like a fortress that you need to defend from human encroachment. So, in order to create protected areas, there was this process of erasure of human impact and inhabitation and this process then had to erase itself for people to imagine that these places were wild nature in the first place.

YA: Your book argues that mainstream conservation already is moving past the people-versus parks-dispute and there’s no way anymore to ignore the big elephant in the room, which is capitalism. I’m curious about the broader global climate crisis as the catalyst for this change within the conservation movement. Specifically, conversations about anthropogenic climate change are understandably hyper-focused around curbing fossil fuels and this implies that our problems start during the Industrial Revolution. In the book you quoted environmental historian Jason Moore who calls this our “love affair with the two-century model of modernity.” I’m curious why, as you argue, is this carbon-centric origin story short-sighted, and where should we start?

RF: The fossil fuels are important, but that really places the focus on one particular phase of capitalism—industrial capitalism—and it misdiagnoses those dynamics as being just an intensification of processes that have been happening for several centuries before this under the development of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, it conveys the idea that if we can just transform how capitalism works away from this industrial model to a more sustainable form, a green economy model, and that we can overturn this. And so what Moore’s trying to do, and we agree with, is really place the focus on the issues with the capitalist mode of production writ large, which requires a continuous expansion in order to overcome internal contradictions and therefore just demands growth in whatever form. Right now, this takes the form of fossil fuel production and extraction as one of its core elements, but if that were to discontinue then capitalism would still need something else as the basis for this growth.

One of the arguments that we make is that right now that’s precisely what capitalism is striving to do under this paradigm of natural capitalism, find something else that can be a fount of continuous economic growth, this model of accumulation by conservation that we describe. All of the attempts to try to do this thus far have fallen far short of the aim but it does speak to this larger dynamic: capitalism needs growth in order to sustain itself. If it doesn’t have that then it can’t really become sustainable even just in basic economic terms let alone in environmental terms. If we focus on fossil fuels as being the main aspect of climate change issues and other environmental impacts then we displace that focus from these overarching dynamics.

YA: In your radical vision of Convivial Conservation, can you paint a picture of what progress is to you, what development looks like under that model? If you went to a park that was a created under this form of Convivial Conservation, what would be different about it?

RF: That’s a very big, difficult question but it also gets to the heart of the matter. What we’re talking about is a vision of development that’s grounded in principles of equality, justice, and solidarity. Models of development mechanisms that get us towards those principles are what we’re interested in, and particularly then a model of development that breaks down this continuing sense of opposition between development on the one hand, and conservation on the other, and really presents more of an integrated vision. We leave as an open question in the book whether or not a vision of conservation within this perspective would really be focused on protected areas. Most likely this would be part of the vision, but we’re also talking about very different forms of cultivation of natural spaces, of relationships between humans and other species that wouldn’t necessarily take the form of a park. In terms of existing parks though, talking about changing relations based on principles of equality and democracy, we would like to see local peoples living in the vicinity of parks to be much more integrated into park management and governance than we’re seeing in most places at present. Issues of quality and access to resources around parks and potentially some resources within parks would need to be much better addressed so that people can actually make sustainable living in and around parks.

BB: I think one of the things we argue for is to move from protected to promoted areas. Can we find a model where the boundaries between protected areas or promoted areas and the outside becomes blurry because animals can also traverse them and find other spaces by moving through more human-dominated landscapes? This is part of our picture moving forward—it’s a different type of modernity but it’s still a modern world.

Featured image: Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve in Nevada. Photographer: James Marvin Phelps, March 2019. Flickr.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Bram Büscher is professor and chair at the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University. He’s the author of Transforming the Frontier. Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (2013), and The Truth about Nature. Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism (2020). Website. Contact. Twitter.

Robert Fletcher is a professor in the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He’s the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (2015) and co-author of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene (2020). Website. Contact. Twitter.

Yardain Amron is a freelance journalist, audio producer and experiential educator currently based in India. Contact. Twitter.