Abstract
Alongside anthropogenic climate change, the precipitous loss of biodiversity and animal abundance (‘defaunation’) looms large amongst the increasingly apparent impacts of human activity on a variety of Earth systems. The failure of traditional conservation to halt this loss has led some in the field to call for new approaches (Marris, 2011), including ones that reject the separation of nature from human society. Yet, despite such calls, conservation discourses that maintain a conceptual divide between nature and society have proved remarkably persistent. Irus Braverman’s new book, Wild Life: The Institution of Nature, explores this persistence as well as attempts to move beyond it in an extensively researched account of contemporary (primarily North American) conservation practices and discourses.
Wild Life organizes its account of conservation around the field’s defining schism between in situ and ex situ work. Literally ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’, in situ and ex situ refer, respectively, to conservation in the field (what would once have been simply called wilderness or the wild) and conservation in captivity, for example the captive breeding programmes undertaken in zoos. As Braverman documents over the course of six empirical chapters, the difference between in situ and ex situ work has been constitutional for conservation, dividing wild and captive geographies and animal bodies as well as scientific and professional disciplines, funding sources and regulatory regimes. Particularly compelling evidence of the tenaciousness of these categories comes in Chapter 5’s examination of the legal protections given, and not given, by the US Endangered Species Act, as well as Chapter 6’s discussion of the use of distinct databases and population models used by in situ and ex situ conservationists.
For all that separates in situ and ex situ conservation, Wild Life is also an account of the ways in which the distinction between conservation in ‘the wild’ and in captivity is less neat and more fluid than the field’s own discourses suggest. Along with Chapters 3 and 4, which speak to this point in particular, each chapter in Wild Life is preceded by an ‘inter-chapter story’ – ethnographic vignettes about particular endangered species populations that trace ‘what conservationists actually do in these contexts’ (p. 16). The movement between these stories and the chapters serves to highlight the tensions between conservation practices and discourses, in the process adding considerable richness and rhythm to the book as it moves between the more or less ordered worlds presented in the chapters and the messy, constrained sites of actual conservation practice.
Running throughout Wild Life’s interrogation of the in situ/ex situ divide in conservation is an account of the biopolitics that take shape in both sites. Despite their differences, Braverman argues, both in situ and ex situ conservation are deeply biopolitical projects aimed at determining ‘how best to classify, calculate, rank, manage and thus save (certain) nonhuman life’ (p. 13). And, indeed, the identification and discussion of such techniques are central to the book’s narrative. One of the most striking findings of Wild Life, and the thread that ties together the book’s dual interest in conservation’s in situ/ex situ divide and its biopolitics, is that some, if not most, endangered species populations will need to be managed by humans in perpetuity if they are to survive.
The intensification of species management documented in Wild Life raises profound questions for the field of conservation, questions that Braverman spells out at various points in the text. Among the most striking are whether the life-worlds of different species should form part of conservation decisions, how different values are at play in choosing which species and populations to conserve, and the recurring question of the ethical and biopolitical implications of elevating the species unit over the well-being of individual animals. However, where others have tackled such pressing ethical questions head-on (e.g. Smith, 2014; Van Dooren, 2014), Braverman does not offer answers, instead moving the narrative back to the actual practices or discourses of her informants. At first I found this frustrating, wanting the text to unpack these questions and to offer insights on their possible answers. On a second reading, however, I came to see a certain logic in Braverman’s approach. Wild Life, after all, is a book that documents the practices and discourses of conservation from within the field, and the profound questions Braverman identifies are those that present themselves when the tensions and contradictions of contemporary conservation are laid bare. In other words, these questions are not the starting points in this account but instead the places where one ends up after tracing the disjointed and at times contradictory logics of contemporary conservation.
Wild Life is a timely and insightful contribution to the growing body of literature in more-than-human geographies, the environmental humanities and cognate disciplines concerned with the ways humans live with and relate to nonhumans in a world marked by climate change and rapid defaunation. With its clear, compelling prose and non-prescriptive style, it maintains a ‘show-not-tell’ approach that will be welcomed by many readers. Wild Life is a vital resource for geographers and others interested in understanding contemporary conservation on its own terms as the field both clings to old conventions and struggles to (re)define itself in our warming, post-Natural world.