Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature

By Jamie Lorimer

I feel like I have always had an eye out for conservation. My grandmother is a "master naturalist" and avid birder, and the rest of my family has always been equally environmentally conscious - organizing trash cleanups; caring for wild animals; fighting for better plastic pollution laws. Yet Wildlife in the Anthropocene explained and analyzed conservation in ways I had never thought of, or realized, before.

For some context, the Anthropocene refers to the current era, in which people essentially have control of the environment. We can choose what animals live or die, which plants are "weeds", what bacteria is good for us, etc. In the Anthropocene, humans have moved past Nature and become actors on a geological scale - and it's weird. How can we decide what to let prosper? To me, the answer was to simply let biodiversity thrive, right? Lorimer points out how biodiversity in itself is a human-defined concept: in many places, we quantify biodiversity through a discrete set of monitored species, and how these species are chosen is an extremely bias process. The idea of "nonhuman charisma" contributes partially to this, as animals, plants, and other life have charisma just like we do. Of course we want to save the elephants - they're big, majestic, and smart! Consequently, we don't care about that life lacking in charisma, like many insect, plant, or bacteria species. 

Okay, so let's say you have figured out how to quantify biodiversity without bias. But then the problem is, according to Lorimer, that humans are still actively controlling life. When we want a species to thrive, we have to implement physical and political structures to allow it to happen. One example in the book is the development of "nature highways" for elephants in India. This sounds good, but not for the economically marginal farmers that it displaces, or the ones who suffer from elephant raids. On the other side, if we decide a species is not good for all of Nature, then we must kill it. How can we justify this?

This is why some conservationists advocate not for the prosperity of species, but that of ecological processes. We cannot actively control life and death, so we should provide a place for nature to "take its course", but in a fair way that prohibits human overpowering. In Denmark, this was tried at the Oostvaardersplassen -  a place created to be an ecological haven. Large herbivores were taken from captivity and allowed to live, supposedly, naturally along with other life in an effort to "rewild" the area. To me, this sounds great, and perhaps like an ideal way to create wildlife and allow for natural processes to occur. But animal rights activists opposed this scheme, when in harsh winters many of the large herbivores died of starvation. Now another choice comes into the question of species or processes: how do we value individual life? This question is equally as difficult to answer, and Lorimer doesn't investigate it much. 

The book also talks about a hybrid way of looking at conservation. Maybe we can't restore nature, and as Lorimer explains, nature is different to many. In Europe, conservation focuses on the restoration of a premodern agricultural landscape. This type of soft agriculture existed for a long time in Europe and allowed for the prosperity of many niche species. Contrarily, other places focus on a prehistoric perspective of nature. If we are trying to make things "wild", we should restore them to before humans affected the environment (think of National Parks in the US). I don't know which one's better, but I think I agree with Lorimer in that neither will work long term for the Anthropocene, and we must find a way to incorporate prosperity of wildlife into the prosperity of human life. Things like green (or brown) rooftops, graveyards, and abandoned places with decaying wood provide awesome sites for new ecological processes to occur. This might take a reframing of what is beautiful in many people's minds. Right now, the lush green parks in cities are cute but provide little advantage over a brown field with some dead wood, rough grass, and mud. 

This book doesn't really have the answers - I came out of it having more questions than I went in with, which to me is indicative of how great this book is at explaining conservation in its most twisted, un-explainable way. If everyone was asking themselves the questions this book instills, I think wildlife may still have a chance in the Anthropocene. (02/03/21)