Michelle Nijhuis has written a history of conservation, Beloved Beasts. There are 1) many interesting characters and 2) fascinating ideas concerning species and their preservation. Unfortunately, these two features of the book seemed to conflict to my mind. The stories of the colorful characters’ lives kept getting interrupted by digressions about ideas. Still, none of the digressions were in-depth enough to really get into the discussions of the interesting topics raised before we returned to the characters. For example, I wanted to hear more about the thinking behind the argument between lumpers and splitters. There are those who see few species (lumpers) or many species (splitters) but there apparently wasn’t time to explain the positions properly.
Lessons About Great Beasts And Awful People
A fascinating problem with any movement is what to say about the dodgy characters in the past. There have been plenty of deeply unpleasant characters involved in conservation, e.g., Paul Ehrlich (see here and here). For example, consider a potential challenge in the motivation of why things are being conserved and for whom. A tension that recurs in the book is that conservationists wanted to preserve wildlife but they often didn’t think much about the people who lived near the wildlife. The most obvious examples of this are the colonial conservationists who wanted to preserve the wildlife (good) and were happy to mess with the local populations to do so (bad). It turns out the history of conservation is like pretty much all other histories, some progress but not always in a straight line and there are many deeply unpleasant things if you look closely.
In the history of conservation, there have featured some awful people. A collection of eugenicists, followers of the Third Reich, ecofascists, and old-fashioned racists. This manifested as a lack of concern for human animals while caring for other life on the planet:
… Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, in a notorious interview in the wake of the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s, [said] that “the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid — the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there starve”. (Foreman belatedly apologized).
Nijhuis (2021), page 210
Successes In The History Of Conservation
A challenge in this area, and many more, is how to build coalitions of support. Successful coalitions should include the local people, who need to see the benefits of living near (sometimes dangerous) animals. Also relevant are the views of any potential donors, governments, and sometimes hunters. (I must admit that preserving animals so rich arseholes can shoot them later doesn’t fill me with joy but I’ll move on from that quickly).
Many of the stories look at tensions keeping disparate parts of a coalition on board. Given this, any solution needs to be politically cognizant. People who work for causes need to know where the power lies, and so when to make deals and when to hold firm. Strangely, early conservationists had to worry about the malign influence of Big Feather, the feather industry. Activists had to work hard to get feathers out of women’s hats to keep bird species alive. (This also made women’s hats less silly but reducing silliness wasn’t the core motivation just a happy side effect).
Strange People
Beyond the big picture issues, smaller behaviors seem to show that some of the conservationists might be a little bit disturbed.
(Wilson and his graduate student Daniel Simberloff tested this theory [about population levels] by poisoning all the resident spiders and insects on seven islets in the Florida Keys, then watching as the islets were repopulated.)
Nijhuis (2021), page 184
Conservation is about preserving species and is not focused on individual creatures but mass poisoning seems to take a lack of concern with individuals of the species to the extreme. (How would you even know you have successfully poisoned every insect if you didn’t get rid of all the foliage too).
Valuation Of Nature
One reason why nature is destroyed is that it doesn’t have economic value. Should we, therefore, try and give it an economic value? In which case, what should that value be? It is an interesting question. It parallels the, admittedly less existential, question of brand valuation. Is it better to value a brand as that conveys a notion of worth even if the valuation developed is far from perfect? I’d say yes generally.
How about valuing Rhinos? This problem seems to have a similar logic to me but I may be wrong and I’d have no idea how to do the valuation.
Read: Michelle Nijhuis (2021) Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, W.W.Norton
