Abstract
The stakes for conservation have never been higher. Many creatures are struggling to adapt to the pace of environmental change in the Anthropocene, as their forests are cleared, their hormones disrupted by chemicals or their food webs collapse. This century may well see the guts ripped out of global biodiversity. Adaptive generalists and our nonhuman allies in making the Anthropocene – cereals, chickens, rats and various micro-organisms – may well thrive, but will leave us with a thin, human-oriented planetary ecology. Various strategies are in the offing to avoid this dystopian future. Faced by the relative failures of fortress and community-based conservation, conservationists have recently – more out of desperation than conviction – turned to natural capital and ecosystem services: selling nature to save it, as the slogan goes. Geographers have been highly critical of these new market-based mechanisms, pointing out that further integration of natural systems and nonhuman lives into a crisis-ridden, vampiric system might not be the best plan. More outlandish plans also proliferate: continental-scale rewilding, de-extinction, genome-banking and novel ecosystems among them.
Against this backdrop of crisis and loss, Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene strikes a hopeful note. He proposes a new conservation paradigm based less on securing spaces for nonhuman refugees and more on processes of evolving partnership and non-profit-oriented mutual experimentation. Because conservation has rarely been in control of its ‘target ecologies’, letting go dreams of mastery and control is an important step for multispecies responsibility. I did have some misgivings about the title’s use of the preposition ‘in’, however (Wildlife in the Anthropocene). Lorimer’s version of wildlife is too vital and too exuberant to be contained ‘in’ the Anthropocene; perhaps ‘after’, ‘against’ or ‘beyond’ the Anthropocene might have been more appropriate prepositions for the title.
Lorimer emphasises that modes of engaging nature are multiple: different organisms and people are affected by wildlife through a ‘multitude of multispecies entanglements’ (p. 181). As more-than-human geography – and the cognate fields of animal studies or multispecies ethnography – have amply demonstrated over the last 15 years, nature is not reducible to a single plane or single set of interactions. Lorimer’s book does a fine job of demonstrating nature’s multiplicity. This is indeed its main strength. The book stresses that forms of nonhuman difference emerge from differences in species, ecological processes, individual bodies, nonhuman cultures and genetics, and that these forms of difference work and are reworked as part of very different political ecologies. Across a series of convincing and well-worked studies – in places as diverse as the Outer Hebrides, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands – Wildlife in the Anthropocene really shows that wildlife has no single baseline, no linear or concordant temporality on which conservation can work.
Although Lorimer’s account is impressively attentive to different registers of animal worlds and their entanglements with humans, it never succumbs to the hyperbolic promises of new conservation paradigms. In the best geographic tradition, it always keeps its feet (and claws and hooves) on the ground. The book also refuses the usual Anthropocene arithmetic of nature + humans (or the dystopian nature minus humans/humans minus nature) and the logic of nature versus humans. Lorimer’s call for multispecies justice is persuasive. This will mean not defending nature as best we can, but forming new multispecies alliances to navigate away from dystopian futures and to take us beyond the Anthropocene towards a brighter future.