This is the last in my series of four posts describing what appears to me to be a trap I am stuck in. I am sitting out under a blazing February sky listening to sparrows and ambulances and the big slow scraping of a plane’s belly over the sky. A jackdaw announces itself conversationally, by its first name. Nobody takes it up on the offer. Everyone’s acting like spring is here and it seems very tempting to trot out those old philosopher’s saws about animals living in the moment while we look to the future with doubt and fear.
This trap is made out of thoughts about the future. One possible way out of it, and I think the one I like best, is to withdraw the osmotic pressure from such concepts and seek answers outside time entirely. As Martin Shaw just said, to “let a mountain be a mountain, a creek be a creek and an antelope be an antelope and to rest in the radiance of the holy maker making play throughout it.” And yet I’ve found that very hard to do while doing conservation work because conservation is entirely rooted in thoughts about the future.
I think my story could have gone like this: I was an Oxford-educated biologist and I went out to Vietnam to save a mysterious antelope from extinction - the saola. In the way I had been taught, I treated the antelope as an object that could be represented by equations and saved by clever white men. We thought we had to take tough decisions; specifically the tough decision to chase saola with dogs. Then I suddenly had a dream which portrayed the saola in the language of myth, as the target of a planned gang-rape1 . I knew I had to change course and so dropped out of conservation, listened to indigenous people and learned to see the world in a new way: filled with living presences which didn’t need saving. I came home, moved to the West Country, and sought spiritual teachers and a deeper relationship with the living presence of the island where I was born. I know that our hubris has brought what we proudly call ‘civilization’ to the brink of collapse. Dark times are ahead but, on the other side, green shoots are growing.
This didn’t happen. Or rather all the bits more or less happened (except moving to the West Country) but all at the same time and the opposite things happened too. Nothing happened suddenly; the dream was nearly eight years ago and I still haven’t stopped working on saola though I’ve kept thinking I’m about to. As I’ve been saying in a roundabout way on this substack since July, the things that ‘indigenous people2’ told me drove me back towards modernity and not away. And, as I’ve tried to say in the last post, specifically, I don’t really think that ‘destruction and then regrowth’ is much use as a guide to the future. The power that we humans seem to have horrifies me and I don’t think it’s an illusion or that it will go away.
My last post was about mistrusting predictions based on a kind of “spiritual intuition.” I believe, wrongly perhaps, that this kind of thing has a proven terrible track record in history and leads to overconfidence. Spiritual truths don’t simply apply to the physical world, even though we tend to be sure that they must3. I remember thinking this for the first time when reading an article by George Monbiot in the Guardian back in about 2004 which compared the sale of carbon offsets to the sale of indulgences. It seemed like a dangerous use of analogy: carbon isn’t actually karma. Doesn’t mean they are unconnected but it is still technically and morally possible to make a mess because you know you can clean it up afterwards.
In the latest episode of their podcast, Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie talk about George Monbiot and the feeling that he and they are no longer in the same boat. Monbiot is making arguments of the kind called ecomodernist; suggesting that the future will be farm-free and certainly without significant animal farming. To Dougald and Ed, I think this sounds like trying to drink ourselves sober. This kind of thinking is what got us into this mess. I’m nervous, because Dougald’s School called Home has been - well - just that for me for the last few years; a school and a home. I believe that modernity doesn’t own us but it does force us to take sides. I might end up in Monbiot’s boat after all; or, more likely, in the river because I can’t make up my mind.
Meanwhile the Guardian has published another article suggesting carbon offsets based on protecting natural forests (REDD+) are at best misguided or at worst a scam. Here’s the rebuttal from the certifying agency if you’re interested. Nobody is doubting that preventing forests from being felled reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide. The argument is about whether the protection has achieved anything because maybe the protected forests would not have been cut down anyway. So the argument is that we shouldn’t pay to protect forests because we can’t be sure how well we are doing it. If you switched to - I don’t know - growing tons of eucalyptus and throwing it down mineshafts - you could calculate more accurately how much carbon you were soaking up. Meanwhile, conservationists working in tropical forests are biting their nails because REDD+ is the biggest source of funding. Should we be reducing all the polyphonic wonder of tropical forests to a single metric of carbon sunk? No. Will pointing this out cause anyone to provide the necessary funds to keep the wonder alive? Also no. We didn’t succeed in marketing the rainforest as a library of cancer cures but we can market it as standing carbon4. Action against climate change has got far more societal traction than action to save biodiversity. Many conservationists are pointing this out and wondering how we can emulate the success of the climate movement. I’m just saying this for context. “The success of the climate movement” isn’t a phrase you hear very often.
Proposition four:
“Mainstream, science-led conservation is rooted in, and/or allied to, the very whatever-it-is that is causing the problems it aims to solve. If we need ‘conservation’ at all, it must be rooted in, or allied to something quite different.”
I’ve got to explain why I don’t believe that’s right. That is not the same as saying I believe it isn’t right. It’s just difficult to believe and I want to explain why. Here I’m not only arguing with ‘spiritual’ types but also with avowed materialists concerned with social justice. I think both of these (nebulous) groups are bemused (and infuriated) by conservationists repeatedly siding with ‘the enemy.’
I want to explain here why I think we do.
I don't think it’s fundamentally because there is something we are not seeing. I don’t think that we do not know what we are doing, or that we ‘don’t appreciate the irony.’ We do. I don't think it's just because we were born into a culture and tradition that sees only dead matter and so are inherently part of the devouring; I think this is about alliance, not just belonging. I don't think it is because we are motivated, at root, by a misanthropic ideal of ‘untrammelled wilderness;'5 I think that's a straw man now. I think it may well be that we sold out when we adopted the enemy's language but that doesn't explain why we did it in the first place.
Of course there are things we don’t understand so well. Of course, people whose education is in the biological sciences don’t usually have the kind of subtle and broad understanding of politics as those whose education was bent to political questions. Still, it increasingly seems to me that it might be they - the political and humanities types - who don’t understand ‘us’ - the biology types - more than the other way around. For example, if I talk about the survival of human societies and cultures in Darwinian terms, they think I am telling a story with shoulds in it. If such talk isn’t wilfully fascist, then it must be rooted in imperial smugness; some story of ‘progress’ that they can go and poke holes in. Evolution is nothing like that…. evolution is evil6. Surely that’s clear?
I remember a paper in which a political ecologist geographer (I think) heard a conservationist exclaim that he and his fellows seemed to be “like Don Quixote.” The geographer snorted at the naiveté of that. He seemed to think that ‘Don Quixote’ meant what Don Quixote himself thought it did: a knight with a pure heart fighting for what is right. What the conservationist meant, I feel sure, was “there is simply no way we can win.” Cynically, vindictively, I think this academic had the luxury of believing in Don Quixote’s heroism and the conservationist’s hubris because he doesn’t have anything to win himself except the game of being right.
I think it was a him - wish I could actually find the paper.
I think Vladimir Nabokov pointed out that Don Quixote actually won about half of the battles he fought. We can also trot out a lot of success stories to dispel those doomy clouds that we supposedly all need a break from7. But Don Quixote didn’t want to trounce 50% of the characters he encountered by roadsides in 17th century Spain; he wanted to restore the Golden Age. He’s a weapon in the hands of a power that wants to show us how impossible that is. As such, he has hope; he’s sozzled in it, but he has no chance.
Social activists must, I think, believe in solidarity among equals. Social activists must also, I think, be suspicious of anyone speaking on behalf of a group to which they don’t belong. Conservationists, by contrast, can’t believe in equality: I could make a snare to kill a saola but a saola cannot make a snare to kill me and there will never be a political solution to that power imbalance. That’s why I seemed to hear something in the Katu stories of powers that I searched for and could not find in the (stories about) indigenous American stories of peoples. It is fascinating to consider that jaguars might see our blood as manioc beer but it doesn’t tell me about how they see our bulldozers.8
In the universe as I was taught to see it, conservation can only proceed through domination. In the universe as I was taught to see it, saola were objects. Now it would be nice to think that this is just because I’m trapped in seeing them that way since Descartes said so and if I just shake off that influence I can step into a new world. But would it be a world where a saola can get out of a trap by itself? If not, then let’s be honest about what has and hasn’t changed. Seeing with new eyes might be the most important thing anyone can do but it doesn’t necessarily change what happens all that much.
The saola aren’t objects just because it’s convenient to us to pretend they are. They are also objects because it is possible for us to pretend they are. That is what I keep coming back to. They can’t write letters, attend workshops, join marches or armies. They can’t fight us or even be martyrs. All they can do is just die; alone on the slopes, bound at the ankle waiting for the machete. The machete would be best. That is what I keep coming back to. I’m looking at the long horns of the plastic saola on my desk. The horns are longer than machetes on the real animal. Also, they are convenient to grab once the animal is immobilized.
“An object,” I wrote, “is just a subject that doesn’t have the power to resist,”9 and I’m creeped out that I wrote that, but I did.
So we are not empowering the saola to fight for themselves. That would be ridiculous. Everybody knows that would be ridiculous. It’s easy to think that wildlife conservation is something that our society cares about to at least a reasonable degree. Not as much as - say - human health, but it’s on the B-list at least. Then you see the money - or rather you don’t. So many times I’ve been watching credits scroll on hotel TVs and thinking how many times over we could have met all our funding needs with the budget of just one film. Looking out across the brown rooves from my parents’ London window and thinking ‘with the price of any one of those houses...’
I am in danger of erasing the story of my personal failure with grand narratives about society’s priorities. I could have been a better fundraiser. Nonetheless, conservationists who are better fundraisers also say this.
Conservation is like black magic. We must petition some greater power to achieve our ends. And that power must be, or at least appear to be, of the enemy. Because there simply are no other credible powers. And that isn’t because we have been duped into thinking capitalism is just reality and never can fall - although perhaps we have. It’s not about capitalism or materialism or colonialism, it would be great if it were. If you are an environmentalist, rather than a conservationist, concerned with carbon and nitrogen, acid and fire, then you can believe one of these bug theories. If you are a conservationist who works on insects or fungi or marine life, you can probably believe them too. It’s just for the old-fashioned and probably pith-helmeted sort who are childishly obsessed with terrestrial ‘charismatic megafauna’ that such stories are not credible. Capitalism and colonialism are awful developments, of course, but they are still developments. It’s obvious that the extinction wave began millennia before the dawn of agriculture and it’s honestly now pretty obvious why10. If you happen to find it easier to think in epochs than decades and to tell stories of species rather than civilizations or cultural movements, then the obvious story is one about a monster in our world which might sometimes be in a benevolent mood.
So, to sum up all of the ideas I’m struggling with in these four posts, here’s a quote from Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael:
“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
No, see, that is exactly what is fundamentally wrong with people. We change too fast. Your ‘new story’ whatever it is, isn’t going to help because your new story isn’t going to last either. You may prevail on the fair fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the force that now arises… well that force is us. It’s not an evil within us, or some of us, or something we’re doing right now; it’s just us. As David Quammen put it in Song of the Dodo: we’re the death star. Te ipsum. That’s it.
My point isn’t that this is how it is, or that this is the right story to be telling and that you should believe it. My point is just to illustrate why it’s not proving particularly easy for me to abandon this view. I don’t think I’m being bloody-minded here. Telling me I’m wrong about the deep nature of the human heart doesn’t help, or at least it hasn’t helped yet and I don’t see how it can. Maybe the king is a good man? Maybe; what about his son? What makes this story appear or disappear is adjustments to temporal resolution, not beliefs about human goodness. I love people; it’s just humanity I can’t stand. A species has characters while individuals have behaviour. We all do all kinds of things. Homo sapiens has power.
In their 2020 book The Conservation Revolution, two prominent academic critics, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, argue that the current epoch should be called the Capitalocene, not the Anthropocene. They note that “the argument that Capitalism is ecologically unsustainable is not straightforward,” but they do a pretty good job of explaining it nonetheless. Of course, to do so, they summarize a vastness of Marxist literature, making extensive reference to ‘alienation’ and ‘the metabolic rift’; concepts whose polyvalent resonance confuses me because it doesn’t seem very materialist. There’s clearly a lot going on behind the scenes; Marxist thought-lives carefully drawn out and interwoven, the whole boxed and packaged for the non-specialist - and still we’re in a world where ‘pithy’ can be used to refer to a sentence with three semicolons. I struggle through this, feeling virtuous, but after a while I wonder why I should bother? I have a bug story that’s so much simpler: “Capitalism might end but, as long as humans are here, we could always start it up again.”
This 2019 paper by Chris Sandbrook and four colleagues analyses questionnaire data from 9,264 conservationists from 149 countries. The questionnaire asks them how much they agree or disagree with typical statements about what conservation is or should be. The statements come from the literature on this subject. They don't come from people's private conversations, still less our private hearts. After these particular yarrow sticks are cast, the stats tease out three independent dimensions of our thinking: “people-centred conservation”, “science-led ecocentrism”, and “conservation through capitalism.” That last one is controversial, by the way, but it does get wide support, particularly from the highest-ranking among us11.
"Us" is it still "us"? Well it was “us” when I took the survey myself and found, to my surprise, that I came out as a centrist. I had moderate opinions on all three axes; I’d thought I was more interesting! Why did I feel so alienated in this centre which I supposedly occupied? Was it just an excuse for avoiding work?
Although that is my standard null hypothesis about myself, I tentatively reject it in this case. I think that my own values lay in a dimension which does not appear in this graphic and I doubt I’m the only one for whom that’s true . It’s straightforward enough: I want an ‘ecocentrism’ which isn’t ‘science-led.’ Why doesn’t it exist within mainstream conservation?
Here’s my hypothesis. It’s because these three ‘dimensions’ aren't positions but allegiances. Humanism, Science or Capitalism are the deities that different conservationists try to propitiate. Enthusiastic participation in the cult is optional12 but performing rituals does engender faith. Ecocentrism’s most convincing champion happens to be science, even though science can’t actually lead and gets most of its power from claims to benefit humanity or the economy. It's still the best champion we apparently have because it tries to speak with a voice that isn't only human and it also has some power.
So, do we need a conservation that is rooted in another world; in another alliance? Well is it a world that can resist invasion? Is it an ally that can stand up to the thing that pushed the spirits back to the stream sources and whipped the tigers out of their mountains with nothing but bicycle wire? If not, then maybe we should stick with the crappy alliances we’ve forged already. With materialist, capitalist, modernist, patriarchal, humanist powers. Because they actually have power.
A river may have legal rights like a corporation but it still can’t hire lawyers.
There’s no point telling us that we shouldn’t ally with the very thing that is causing the destruction. We long ago had to accept that we have no choice about that - for obvious reasons: we are that thing.
OK now I am done describing this trap and I am very glad of that fact! I’m not quite sure what I am going to do here next but perhaps I will just write about bugs for a while. I didn’t start this Substack for these kinds of thoughts but these are the kind of thoughts the trap is made of.
However.
This is still potentially a functional trap and I worry it was irresponsible to put it up here and certainly that it would be irresponsible to just leave it lying around. I’m supposed to be writing about spells here, not casting them.
As far as I know, there are three responses to a trap: you can try and find that it’s poorly made. you can accept it is well made but still try and work your way out if it, and you can try and live as best you can inside it, with or without the dream of a literal rescue. It might be, in fact, that it is not a trap at all but a hawser. Or even the mooring rope of a buoy… at the moment I don’t think so, but perhaps.
Anyway, in writing this, I have been thinking of potential responses of all these kinds. In fact, rather a number of them. The trap starts to seem like it is full of holes. The responses are only logical ones and the actual trap, as I feel it, is not just logic. But it’s the logical structure I’m presenting here so hopefully these routes will work. Of course the logical loopholes may end up working the thing tighter. Of course the genuine offers of escape may be met with snarls, dismissed as psychological torture or hallucination. But obviously, with that attitude, no-one would even be able to get out of Milton Keynes. I don’t know why I even said that.
…Yes I do. It’s because I’m still stuck and I do genuinely want to know if anyone else out there has thoughts about the way out of this thing…. if anyone’s been following all this.
I am open to suggestions!
Well, I’ll try to be. There’s such a thing as being trap-happy, of course.
Just in case you’ve got here but don’t know this, the story of the dream is here: https://dark-mountain.net/beast-dreaming/
The scare quotes are just because it’s dubious whether the term can be applied to the Katu. According to the UN, self-identification is essential to indigenous identity and no translation for ‘indigenous’ is widely used in Vietnam. By the original meaning of the word, the dominant ethnic group, the Kinh, are just as ‘indigenous’ as the Katu; they aren’t settlers.
I don’t really think there are two separate worlds either but that’s kind of the point. Maybe you can’t insulate science or history from spirituality but I think it cuts both ways.
Because it is actually a better deal, not because we have better marketing.
It was a hugely appealing idea that Katu hunters might be supported to maintain a stable human ecology based on shifting cultivation and hunting within village territories. If I could have believed we could achieved it, I’d have instantly supported it over state-patrolled protected areas and so would, I think, the majority of conservationists. Why? It doesn’t threaten the livelihoods of struggling people whom I knew, or earn their enmity but, more important than that, it contains its own source of funding through the sale of forest products or tourism. Government rangers have to be paid either from donor funds (in the short term) or from taxes. Having gangs of local hunters scrapping the traps of their rivals with the government’s moral support would save millions. I didn’t want to limit human access to the land because the land was intrinsically better without humans in it; that didn’t even come up. I wasn’t trying to keep humans and nature separate because my culture told me they were separate, or that humans were fallen and impure. It was quite simple really: I wanted there to be saola in the forest and those saola not to be dead. The humans in the forest were killing all the animals and there seemed no actually actionable way to prevent that happening without ranger patrols to keep people out. Ideologically humanist left-wing critics talk about this stuff as if that’s not a concern. And then those same people want us to take their side because they’re on the side of humanity which obviously means the side of right. And then they accuse us of being naively certain that we’re the good guys. And of having all the power when they support the oppressed. We’re trying to operate across power differentials they don’t even seem able to comprehend exist! … is the kind of thoughts I sometimes have. You know, when I’m not doing my breathing and that.
Look don’t quote me on that. I wrote a piece for the School called Home which probably gives an idea and which I am still mostly pleased with. The one about snow leopards.
“We” meaning conservationists in general, not me personally obviously.
I do not know any American indigenous people at all. I only have read stories about their stories. I’m not comparing like with like. I’m comparing what some people suggest it is useful for us to learn from American indigenous people with what I actually heard from Katu people.
In this post. Taking sides.
See this recent paper, for example.
As noted in this follow-up paper: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10391 See the chart in the third row and third column of figure 2.
Technically anyway. I suspect it helps.
Sort of glad I don’t have time to make a mess of a comment as I have to go out and feed the animals.
But this series has given me so much to think about, thank you.
I was lent a book once titled 'Is God Green?' The opening chapter was all about how other religions and world views are wrong. In the section on animism, the author explained that animism does not place humans at the centre of things, there is no special place or plan for them, so that's clearly wrong because humans are special and god loves them... I stopped reading at this point, thinking this book is written by and for idiots. The reason I am attracted to animism is that it doesn't put humans at the centre of everything. But perhaps the author (Lionel Windsor, though I can't find the book itself any more, it must have been returned to it's owner) was actually representing a fairly mainstream idea, or not even idea, maybe more of an assumption. People are more important than all other beings, because we are people. That sloppy.
That is not to say that this is the standpoint of most Christians, who I know are not idiots and would not make such a stupid kind of argument.
I am liking your explanation of the situation in terms of power dynamics, it is very practical and realistic. Solutions, (escapes) are not easy to see, and I wouldn't even try to think about it in terms of the saola, since you have already worked so hard and come up against all the obstacles already.
But how about we think about all the ways in which people are not special or more worthy and important than all other beings? I think there's a logical argument to be made there, but I'm not sure if that is what's needed. Logical arguments may not affect the power structures very much... Probably as you suggest what is really needed is a lot of money. A billionaire benefactor. I suppose they are rather hard to get hold of. Although I work in an art gallery, which attracts the kind of people who can spend £800 on a painting on a whim, which always blows my mind.