Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas: Darwin, Marx, and Modern Science in the Search for Patterns That Connect

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Notes

Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy, & Jim Igoe, Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas (2008), hereinafter Nature Unbound.

Evolution and Innovation in Wildlife Conservation: Parks and Game Ranches to Transfrontier Conservation Areas (Helen Suich & Brian Child, assisted by Anna Spenceley, eds., 2009), hereinafter Evolution and Innovation.

Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development, and the Bottom Line (Brian Child ed., 2004).

Any of the standard works on the evolution of American wildlife law can be used to trace the way agriculture and its intolerance for predators and pests, as well as sport hunting, exerted their influence on the designation and management of protected areas in the United States. See Thomas Lund, American Wildlife Law (1980); Thomas Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife (1988); Michael Bean & Melanie Rowland, The Evolution of National Wildlife Law (3rd ed. 1997); Robert Fischman, The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System through Law (2003); Dale Goble & Eric Freyfogle, Wildlife Law: Cases & Materials (2nd ed. 2010)

William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (2003). The editors of and contributors to Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2, acknowledge their intellectual debt to Beinart but do so rather curiously by citing a paper Beinart published in 1984, 25 years before their own book was released. [William Beinart, Soil Erosion, Conservationism, and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration 1900–1960, 2 J. S. Afr. Stud. 52–83 (1984)]. It is a mystery why they do not seek to align themselves with the power and sophistication Beinart has now achieved in his arguments about the history of conservation in South Africa and its place in comparative environmental history. But then it is a mystery, too, why there is absolutely no reference anywhere in Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2, where the experience of CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources) in Zimbabwe looms large, to a landmark work on CAMPFIRE, Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (2000).

Nature Unbound, supra note 1.

Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (1999). But see also William Beinart & Peter Coates, Environment & History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (1995).

The baseline reference is to Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). The literature on common property management regimes (CPRs) is nothing, however, if not vast, and it is shot through with confusing cross references to common pool resources (also often referred to as CPRs). See the identification and differentiation of both CPRs in Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 99–104.

The key but not the only sustained network of professional practice within which the contributions to Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2, have been developed is that of the Southern African Sustained Use Specialist Group (SASUSG), one of many such groups hosted by the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Earlier, in the 1960s, the Southern African Commission for the Conservation and Utilization of the Soil (SARCCUS) was also an important venue for networking and learning.

In addition to the extinction crisis, economic globalization, and climate change, all of which are given their due in Nature Unbound, supra note 1, the book also sees challenges posed to protected areas around the world from community conservation, the accommodation of indigenous peoples, and tourism (ch. 5, 6, and 7, respectively).

Brian Child, Innovations in State, Private, and Communal Conservation, in Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 427.

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 190. We do not want to overplay the notion that the authors of Nature Unbound and the contributors to Evolution & Innovation are directly and self-consciously engaged with each other in an ideological contest over how to interpret the past of protected areas and project their future. We will, however, say two things. One is that ideological and scientific disagreements are no strangers to the literature on protected areas. They do not, for obvious reasons, frequently surface in the scientific literature, but in the context of marine protected areas, for example, they are bravely treated in Tundi Agardy, Dangerous Targets? Unresolved Issues and Ideological Clashes around Marine Protected Areas, 13 Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 353–367 (2003). Secondly, there are times when both of these books seem right on the edge of what might be a fascinating political dialog but neither quite grasps the nettle. Child, who worked for wildlife authorities in Zimbabwe for 12 years, writes, for example, that the innovations he describes “stem from the policy insight that the interests of wildlife are best served by placing it in the marketplace, and modifying institutions to ensure that its comparative economic advantage is reflected in the day-to-day decisions of landholders. Wildlife lives on people's land, and the best way to conserve it is to maximize the benefits that landholders are able to derive from it—obviously including financial benefits from hunting and tourism, aesthetic values and environmental services, and less obviously, but importantly, proprietary rights and discretionary choices over wildlife.” Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 434. But when Brockington et al. write about conservation in southern Africa their first observation is that in post-independence Zimbabwe “the notion of privatized wildlife was politically controversial…, given the centrality of the land question and the continued racial disparity in ownership. … The conservancies (or private parks) were to become financially viable and profitable through the development of wildlife tourism, including sport hunting … [but] this form of wildlife ranching (as it is often called) … was really about sidestepping the post-independence government's stated commitment from 1990 to compulsory purchase of land that was defined as ‘underutilized.’… These concerns about the development of private parks and their implications for land redistribution have also arisen in the growth of private reserves in South Africa.” So, although private parks can be presented as an attempt to use the security of commodified land to advance conservation goals, the land is actually taken from its previous social context, alienated, and sold, “precisely … processes that cause tension with former farm workers in South Africa.” Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 183–184, 186.

This memorable phrase is used at the very end of one of the books we review and comment on, here. Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 200. The range and variety of connective relationships, “patterns that connect,” imagined and embraced in the book as proper subjects for protected area and wildlife conservation policy and management, however, go far beyond those that would be sanctioned or are even contemplated in the other works we consider, here, embracing “connections and relationships between human beings, as well as between humans and non-humans.” Id.

Connectivity Conservation Management: A Global Guide (Graeme Worboys, Wendy Francis, & Michael Lockwood eds., 2010), hereinafter Connectivity Management.

Nature Unbound, supra note 1.

Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2.

Earthscan, Publishing for a Sustainable Future. Their titles are marketed and distributed in the United States by Stylus Publishing, LLC, of Sterling, VA. There is universal online access to their list at www.styluspub.com

Harvey Locke, Yellowstone to Yukon Connectivity Conservation Initiative, in Connectivity Management, supra note 12 at 161–181. The number and distribution of the various initiatives other than Y2Y is worth summarizing, because it underlines the extent to which connectivity management has become a global phenomenon even while relying almost entirely on scientists for articulation and support. They include the Cederberg Mountains, Cape Floristic Region, South Africa; the Greater Virunga Landscape on the boundary of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda; the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation Program, spanning the boundaries of Lesotho and South Africa; the Australian Alps national parks; the Alps to Atherton conservation corridor stretching roughly from Melbourne, New South Wales to Cairns, Queensland; the Gondwana Link in southwestern Australia; the Bhutan Biological Conservation Complex; the proposed Sacred Himalayan Landscape; the proposed Seulawah-Leuser-Angkola corridor in northern Sumatra; the southern Appalachians; the several initiatives in the northern Appalachian bioregion stretching from New England into Canada; the Mesoamerican biological corridor; the Andean Páramo corridor; the Vilcabamba-Amboro corridor spanning Bolivia and Peru; the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve, Brazil; the Munchique-Pinche Corridor, Colombia; the Llanganates-Sangay corridor, Ecuador; the protected areas system of the Venezuelan Andes; the Altai Mountain Knot, principally in southern Russia; the tri-national Mont Blanc Massif; the Cantabrian Mountains-Pyrénées-Massif Central-Western Alps Great Mountain corridor, and the Appenines.

Charles Chester & Jodi Hilty, Connectivity Science, in Connectivity Management, supra note 12 at 22–33. Their concluding summary is worth quoting: “Scientists and ecologists have generally defined the concept of connectivity as the extent to which a species or population can move along landscape elements in a mosaic of habitat types. Large-scale connectivity conservation includes landscape, habitat, ecological and evolutionary process connectivity, and connectivity conservation areas include the interconnection (and potentially embedding) of key protected areas or refugia areas. With the threat of climate change, an increased attention to connectivity largely results from a belief that the retention of natural environments between such protected areas offers species the best possible chance for survival in the long term.” Id. at 33. So, there is a measure of belief mixed with the science, but nothing rising to the level of Darwinian or Marxian ideology. See also John Terborgh, Why We Must Bring Back the Wolf, 57(12) N. Y. Rev. Books 35–37 (July 2010), reviewing Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (2009).

Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (2002). To put this formative contribution in context, see William M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (2004), especially ch. 5. The recent resurgence of fortress conservation as a response to the perceived weaknesses of community conservation is noted in Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 164.

Michael Lockwood, Scoping the Territory: Considerations for Connectivity Conservation Managers, in Connectivity Management, supra note 12, 34–51 at 38. But by way of counterpoint to the currently fashionable elevation of partnerships and networks vis-à-vis the firm hand of the state, see Judith Layzer, Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment (2008).

A vision sketched in Evolution & Innovation, supra note 2, at 7–10 but seen to be not without problems in some transfrontier conservation areas in Webster Whande & Helen Suich, Transfrontier Conservation Initiatives in Southern Africa: Observations from the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, id. at 373–391. There is also a thorough and critical treatment of the political context for transfrontier conservation in William Wolmer, Transboundary Conservation: The Politics of Ecological Integrity in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, 29 J. S. Afr. Stud. 261–278 (2003).

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 164–167; Rosaleen Duffy, Global Governance and Environmental Management: The Politics of Transfrontier Conservation Areas in Southern Africa, 25 Pol. Geog. 89–112; (2006).

Arguments for Protected Areas: Multiple Benefits for Conservation and Use (Sue Stolton & Nigel Dudley eds., 2010). This book is important in part because of the association of one of the editors with Guidelines for Applying Protected Areas Management Categories (Nigel Dudley ed., 2008).

One earlier contribution focused on marine protected areas, for example, takes the science-based, normative approach of Connectivity Management, supra note 12. See Erich Hoyt, Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises: A World Handbook for Cetacean Habitat Conservation (2005). The grounding of connectivity conservation and landscape-level wildlife management in sound science and good professional practice is the preoccupation of Jodi Hilty, William Lidicker, & Adina Merenlender, Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation (2006). The history of trans-boundary or transfrontier conservation as a way to rise above the limitations of the “territories of chance” making up traditional protected areas, with detailed attention to the International Sonoran Desert Alliance and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, is the subject of Charles Chester, Conservation across Borders: Biodiversity in an Interdependent World (2006).

One especially unusual and imaginative approach to the connectivity management of wildlands and their plant and animal populations, focused on Britain and growing out of the work of the British Association of Nature Conservationists, argues the case not just for protecting nature as it now exists but also for restoring and repairing damaged habitat and ecosystems. See Peter Taylor, Beyond Conservation: A Wildland Strategy (2005).

This is true whether we rely on the official histories of protected areas bequeathed to us by powerful states with written records or whether we look at the learned conservation practices of smaller and more traditional human groups. Nature Unbound, supra note 1at 19–20.

Despite several revisions, the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA), maintained by the World Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, England, in association with the United Nations Environment Programme, fails to capture this diversity. Id. at 21–28.

Much is made in the literature we review, here, of the desirability or undesirability of treating nature and wildlife as if they were economic commodities. Surprisingly, nothing at all is said about nature and wildlife as political commodities, although we think this a powerful idea and one pursued to great advantage in Clark Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (1999). Stripped of the overbearing theoretical pretensions in which Gibson wraps his work in Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, the same idea is used to good effect in Duffy, supra note 5, who focuses just on Zimbabwe. This treatment of nature as a political commodity is, however, to be distinguished from and has nothing at all to do with the ostensibly neutral auditing of the benefits and costs of protected areas essayed by Stolton & Dudley, supra note 27.

This phrase appears several times in the book after first surfacing in Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 6.

Most of the contributors to Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2, abjure, for example, explicit or detailed discussion of the racially imbalanced distribution of land ownership in southern Africa or links between the history of protected areas and racial discrimination policies, most extremely apartheid. Indeed, it comes as a shock when Jane Carruthers observes that “African–white interaction in matters relating to wildlife preservation has been crucial to the history of South Africa's protected areas and it remains a burning issue” (emphasis added). Id. at 44. The treatment of this subject in Zambia and Zimbabwe is much more forthright and telling in Gibson, supra note 32 and Duffy, supra note 5.

Even after acknowledging that it is a mistake to begin histories of protected areas at Yellowstone that is what the authors of Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 21, do, as indeed do most others.

The designation of Yellowstone was an attempt by railroad companies to stimulate tourism and traffic, rather than an offset to or mitigation of the depredations the American industrial revolution was visiting on natural resources in the western states and territories. The more or less contemporaneous designations (reservations from entry under federal public land laws) of forest reserves, later the nucleus of a nationwide system of national forests, or of the first wildlife refuges, were more clearly motivated by mitigation. George Cameron Coggins et al., Federal Public Lands and Resources Law (6th ed. 2007), ch. 2. The perception that American national parks were first designated in places no one wanted, because they were useless for farming even though they might be attractive to tourists, originated with Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (1979).

In South Africa the first reserves and parks were a response to what “Carruthers describes [as] the long-established settler attitude, particularly among Boer trekkers, that destroying wildlife was not a criminal offence, indeed it was considered ‘immoral and unpatriotic not to exterminate wildlife, because clearing land in this way encouraged agriculture and expedited the progress of civilization,’” Evolution & Innovation, supra note 2 at 21, citing Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (1995), at 11.

The shades of meaning of this term (“conservation is an incredibly broad church and one that is riven with conflict”), and its principal organizational manifestations, are the subject of Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 6–14.

Examples are given in id. at 3–5 and 167–170.

Data derived from the World Database of Protected Areas are displayed in id. at 2, 30–31, and 40–42.

A standard introduction is David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 5–6.

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965).

Anticipating a counter to the argument that conservationists did not create the neoliberal environment in which they work but must nevertheless contend with it and, therefore, “creatively engage with corporations to raise money to protect nature,” the response in Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 198, is two-fold. The first is to say the assumption that conservation stands apart and can be separated from capitalism is now false and, secondly and more vehemently, to insist that “mainstream conservation has never stood outside of [the] processes” commodifying nature and alienating people from it (emphasis added). Id. See also Johann Hari, The Wrong Kind of Green, The Nation (March 4, 2010), accessible online at www.thenation.com/article/wrong-kind-green

Two important points need to be made, here. One is that, while the authors of Nature Unbound borrow Marxian concepts to establish a framework for understanding contemporary conservationist behavior vis-à-vis protected areas, the book is not an exercise in Marxist environmentalism nor does it call for socialist revolution. And second, for those who want to persevere with the book's uses of Marxian terminology, the critical pages are Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 185–190.

The use of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard and their terminology to establish that images of nature can be more powerful than the real thing is even more labored than the use of Marx, but again, for those who want to persevere with the jargon, the relevant pages are in id. at 190–197.

Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 4. The unconventional references to landholders rather than landowners in the book are odd and raise the question of exactly who does own the land in southern Africa.

Id.

Id. For an overview of Murphree's thoughts and contribution, see Marshall Murphree, Communal Approaches to Natural Resource Management in Africa: From Whence and to Where? 7 J. Int’l Wildlife L. & Pol’y 203–216 (2004). This forms part of Arielle Levine & Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Wildlife, Markets, States, and Communities in Africa, 7 J. Int’l Wildlife L. & Pol’y 135–216 (2004).

Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 434.

Id. at 428.

Progress with conservation, the book notes, is invariably associated with individuals, people who have “driven change, including many of the authors of this book, [and who] combine strong qualifications with a passion for wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods and a long track record of dedication to making their ideas work.” Id. at 434–435.

The main examples relied on are SARCCUS and SASUSG, supra note 9. The outlines of the relevant history are in id. at 8–11.

This institutional context is broadly sketched in Brian Child, The Emergence of Parks and Conservation Narratives in Southern Africa, Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 19–33.

Id. at 23.

One critical impetus to changing conservation philosophies in southern Africa appears to have come when Reay Smithers, a famous mammalogist and Director of Museums in Zimbabwe invited three Fulbright Scholars to visit Zimbabwe and South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The essential details are in Evolution & Innovation, supra note 2 at 8, reinforced at 75–77.

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 182–185; Gibson, supra note 32 at 22–46.

Sometime in the 1960s, although it is not clear exactly when, meetings growing out of the work of SARCCUS [supra note 9] “quickly shared information about the emerging science of ecosystem management, and developed new ideas about [conservation] policy, enabling institutions and wildlife utilization that still reverberate today. Scientists and heads of wildlife agencies, including [those in] Zimbabwe … Namibia … and Mozambique, began to articulate and champion the ‘use it or lose it’ philosophy that underpins the southern African sustainable use movement today.” Evolution & Innovation, supra note 2 at 8–9. This” idea of conserving wildlife through sustainable use [that] emerged in the 1960s, almost two decades before the World Conservation Strategy [announced by IUCN in 1980, shows that] southern Africa's practical experience influenced, as much as it was influenced by, important narrative-setting forums [about protected areas] such as the 1982 World Parks Congress held in Bali, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and [IUCN's subsequent] shift towards people and sustainable use.” Id. at 5. And at another point we learn that “Under [an FAO] project, the role of wildlife in the future economy of rural people was promoted scientifically, and Riney [Thane Riney, who studied under Starker Leopold at the University of {California at} Berkeley and was a Fulbright Scholar in Africa in the 1960s] and others…developed a philosophy of sustainable use that began to be reflected in the global discourse” [as eventually reflected in IUCN's 1980 World Conservation Strategy and the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, beginning in 1983]. Id. at 8. This is about as clear an indication as we are likely to find of the stakes involved in properly unraveling the origins and history of the struggle to create protected areas as a prime strategy of modern conservation. The contrarians in southern Africa believe that the mainstream conservation movement owes them an enormous and unacknowledged debt—owes them, in fact, the origination of sustainable use as a basic doctrine of modern environmental policy.

Gibson, supra note 32.

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 157 and 165. See also Dan Brockington & Katherine Scholfield, The Work of Conservation Organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa, 48 J. Mod. Afr. Stud. 1–33 (2010).

Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 8.

Whether neoliberal capitalism is in quite the same ascendancy as it was before the global economic recession that began in 2008 is, perhaps, debatable, but it is not a matter taken up in any of the work cited, here.

A concluding observation made in Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 436.

There is a great deal of confusion about how to reconcile the evolution of conservation and protected areas policy in southern Africa, for example, with arguably related intellectual developments in the literature on property and on regimes for common property resource management. This shows up, for example, in the discussion of the origins in southern Africa of community-based natural resource management [Evolution and Innovation, supra note 2 at 10], a development that is eventually claimed as a case of independent but parallel intellectual invention with the work of Elinor Ostrom, supra note 8, as if the two were coincident, which they were not. The highly constrained relevance of Ostrom's work about regimes for common property resource management to the origins and history of protected areas is much more convincingly dealt with in Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 99–104.

Connectivity Management, supra note 14.

The term connectivity conservation area has a special meaning, which is explained along with a great deal of other specialized terminology in a glossary of connectivity conservation terms in id. at xxxi–xxxiv. The development and introduction of this terminology is presumably part of the proto-development of professionalism in connectivity conservation management and among practitioners of that science (or art). We do not find it either necessary or helpful and suspect many will agree.

We earlier listed these by name, supra note 18.

Connectivity Management, supra note 14 at xviii–xxi and 18–20.

Robert Boardman, International Organization & the Protection of Nature (1981); Lynton Keith Caldwell with Paul Stanley Weiland, International Environmental Policy: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century (3rd ed. 1996).

Connectivity Management, supra note 14 at 31–33.

Id. at 22.

Id. at 25–29.

Id. at 29 and 33.

Id. at 39.

Id. at 40, citing William Adams & Jon Hutton, People, Parks, and Poverty: Political Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation, 5 Conservation & Society 147–183 (2007).

Id. at 39–40.

Id. at 40, citing Liza Grandia, Between Bolivar and Bureaucracy: The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, 5 Conservation & Society 478–503 (2007).

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 164–167.

Id. at 43; David Western, Ecosystem Conservation and Rural Development: The Case of Amboseli, in Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-based Conservation 19–52 (David Western & R. Michael Wright eds., 1994).

Nature Unbound, supra note 1 at 167.

It is nicely summarized by Charles Chester & Jodi Hilty, Connectivity Science, in Connectivity Management, supra note 14 at 22–33.

Id. at 166.

There is a nicely critical introduction to the rise of networks in international environmental governance, part of a general trend in international relations in recent decades, and to understanding the interests different sorts of networks are likely to favor, in Charlotte Streck, Governments and Policy Networks: Chances, Risks, and a Missing Strategy, in A Handbook of Globalization and Environmental Policy: National Government Interventions in a Global Arena 653–686 (Frank Wijen, Kees Zoeteman, & Jan Pieters eds., 2005).

The trail that leads to a fundamental and overdue reappraisal of conservation networks and of the value they offer vis-à-vis governments or state actors in environmental problem-solving, in part touching on issues of transparency and accountability, is blazed in Judith Layzer, Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment (2008). Her examples deal with landscape-scale connectivity areas but are regional rather than international.

In a future essay, we shall return to this challenge in the context of marine protected areas.

Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. The authors acknowledge the helpful comments of Elizabeth De Santo.

Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, London N5 2AD, UK, Education Adviser, Commonwealth Human Ecology Council, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. E-mail: [email protected]

Fisheries Monitoring and Socioeconomic Division, Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. E-mail: [email protected]