Some Political Problems for Rewilding Nature

Abstract

Recent studies in conservation biology have provided the wilderness preservation movement with a spark. Wilderness, we are told, can no longer be seen as a scenic playground for weary humans—it is, rather, an ecological necessity for the conservation of biodiversity. This paper traces the science and political ideologies that inspire and inform this reinvigorated cadre of environmentalists. Through empirical investigations of one prominent conservation group and one conservation campaign, the author finds that this environmentalism offers simplistic and purportedly self-evident solutions to the complex problems of biodiversity and wilderness conservation.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michelle Hintz, Dave Correia, Josh Clemons, and Sue Roberts for helpful comments on this paper and the response paper that concludes the exchange. He also would like to thank Jean Lavigne and Jim Proctor for helpful comments on the conference paper presentation that held the seeds of this paper.

Notes

Notes

¹The term ‘production of nature’ was coined by Smith (1991).

²The parenthetical section of the quote is van Wyck's.

³Salmon, Idaho was one of seven communities in which the USFWS held public comment meetings after the publication of the Draft EIS. The other communities were Challis, Lewiston, and Boise in Idaho, and Missoula, Hamilton, and Helena in Montana.

¹All direct page numbers refer to John Hintz's article ‘Some political problems for rewilding nature’ in this issue of Ethics, Place & Environment.

²From 1993 to 1997, Noss was the second editor in the history of the journal Conservation Biology.

³Gary Lease is the one person in this group who is not a conservation biologist.

⁴There is a further difficulty that compounds the misconception that deep ecology is ideologically foundational to conservation biology: critics of deep ecology often confuse deep ecology with deep ecologists’ self-proclaimed heirs. Here is an example. David Ehrenfeld—the founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology—promotes the idea that nonhuman nature has some form of nonanthropocentric value in many of his writings. His 1978 book The Arrogance of Humanism is considered a classic by many deep ecologists (Taylor, 2005), but he never uses the word ‘deep ecology’ anywhere in the book. A critique of deep ecology can thus become, in part, a critique of Ehrenfeld in spite of the fact that Ehrenfeld never considers himself to be a deep ecologist.

⁵Following Rorty's (1979) critique of what he calls the mirror of nature, where the human mind is compared to a mirror that reflects nature or reality, constitutive constructivism is the position that wilderness itself is a mirror of our activities and ourselves.

⁶Of course all federal wilderness areas are managed as wilderness areas once they come into existence as legal entities. It is thus true that wilderness management causes wilderness areas to exist as managed areas, but again these areas are not constituted by human management. The presence of an area of nonhuman nature precedes the management and provides something upon which wilderness managers can causally manage.

⁷It is striking that Hintz chooses to borrow this production-of-nature thesis from Smith instead of a social construction-of-nature thesis readily available from many other sources. The term ‘construct’ is from the identical Latin term ‘construct’, which means to heap together or build; prior to a construction, this seems to suggest that something exists that can be heaped together. In contrast, the term ‘product’ is from the Latin term ‘producere’, which means something new that is brought forth.

⁸For another constitutive production-of-nature thesis beyond Smith's, see Vogel (2002). As I argue in my forthcoming book Rethinking Wilderness, the social constructivist/productivist literature is extensive and laden with much confusion. For example, many social constructivists cite Evernden's The Social Creation of Nature (1992) as representative of their position. Evernden, however, argues that when we strip away interpretations of our worldly experiences, we discover a wildness that is ‘self-willed, independent, and indifferent to our dictates and judgments’ (p. 120). He thus argues against constitutive metaphysical constructivism/productivism.

⁹It is true that much of the Earth is now influenced by human activities, particularly in light of greenhouse gas emissions that are leading to global climate change. It is also true that much of the Earth was influenced by human activities in the past, especially when the historical presence of native non-European peoples is acknowledged. In light of these activities, we might want to conclude that there is no such thing as nonhuman wilderness. I call this the no-wilderness argument. I think that this is a bad argument. See my responses to this argument in Woods (2001) and in my forthcoming book Rethinking Wilderness.

¹⁰We might want to put deep ecology back into this sequence between wilderness preservation and the rewilding model.

¹¹See Takacs (1996) and Sarkar (2005) for historical reconstructions of the science of conservation biology. Quammen (1996) is also a useful reference.

¹²It is interesting to note that when Conservation Biology was launched in 1987, American conservation biologists seemed to forget that the European journal Biological Conservation––largely devoted to the same scientific topics––had been in existence since 1968.

¹³Margules (1989) recounts some of the early history of conservation biology in Australia.

¹⁴Caughley (1994) also claimed that two different approaches emerged in conservation biology: the small populations paradigm as measured by stochastic models, and the declining populations paradigm as measured by deterministic models. He argued that the latter was more useful because it showed why species populations were at risk as opposed to the trivial insight from PVA that small populations were subject to stochasticity. He did not use national identities, but the small populations paradigm seemed more akin to a predominantly American approach, while the declining populations paradigm seemed more akin to a predominantly Australian approach. Hendrick et al. (1996) dispute Caughley's two-paradigms analysis and suggest a comprehensive effort they call ‘inclusive population viability analysis’.

¹⁵Margules and Pressey (2000) offer a framework that might be indicative of a merger between these different approaches. They argue that regional strategies for conservation should be built on the cornerstone of nature reserves that protect representative biodiversity by separating it from processes that threaten its persistence across time.

¹⁶For an overview of metapopulation ecology, see Hanski and Gaggiotti (2004).

¹⁷This is sometimes called ‘win–win ecology’; see Rosenzweig (2003).

¹⁸In addition to numerous individual articles, Conservation Biology (CB) has bundled articles on topics such as rethinking the relationship between protected areas and local peoples (CB, 14[5], October 2000), conservation and religion (CB, 19[6], December 2005), and conservation biology, social sciences, and law (CB, 20[3], June 2006).

¹⁹And recall from my earlier discussion of deep ecology that some and probably many conservation biologists have an anthropocentric environmental ethic.

²⁰Brechin et al. (2003) and Adams (2006) provide good places to start.

¹I am also grateful to Andrew Light and Gwynne Taraska for suggesting and facilitating this exchange.

²For example, I could have dedicated at least this much space again to his misplaced positioning of me as yet another ‘social construction of nature’ propagator denying the existence of an outside world. Yet there is one debate that has already received a flood of attention (although I would contend that Woods grossly trivializes the diverse and interesting literature on produced/constructed natures).