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Wildlife Conservation and ProtectedAreas: Darwin, Marx, and ModernScience in the Search for Patterns ThatConnectGeoffrey Wandesforde-Smith , Nicholas S.J. Watts & Arielle LevinePublished online: 19 Nov 2010.

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Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, 13:357–374, 2010Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1388-0292 print / 1548-1476 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13880292.2010.524592

Wildlife Conservation and ProtectedAreas: Darwin, Marx, and ModernScience in the Search for PatternsThat Connect

GEOFFREY WANDESFORDE-SMITH1

NICHOLAS S.J. WATTS2

ARIELLE LEVINE3

1. INTRODUCTION

The recent appearance in print of the first and so far only comprehensiveand critical assessment of the global proliferation of protected areas and,more importantly and more usefully, of their meaning and significance in themodern world,4 is a publishing event this journal cannot possibly fail to notice.Even though this contribution to the literature on wildlife and protected areassidesteps marine protected areas, and focuses instead, as do so many otheranalyses of protected areas, on the national parks and game reserves and othersorts of terrestrially demarcated units the world has long depended upon forwildlife and habitat conservation, the appearance of this work, it seems to us,is a landmark event.

Context is always critical in our view, and in this case the context is oneof substantial intellectual ferment. The publication of this first broad globaloverview of the origins, purposes, and limitations of protected areas, a workthat overall is admirably ambitious and audacious, occurs in an environment inwhich two other important new titles have also recently made an appearance,

1 Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. E-mail:gawsmith@ucdavis.edu. The authors acknowledge the helpful comments of Elizabeth De Santo.

2 Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, London N5 2AD, UK, EducationAdviser, Commonwealth Human Ecology Council, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. E-mail:nicholaswatts@mac.com

3 Fisheries Monitoring and Socioeconomic Division, Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. E-mail: arielle.levine@noaa.gov

4 DAN BROCKINGTON, ROSALEEN DUFFY, & JIM IGOE, NATURE UNBOUND: CONSERVATION, CAPITALISM AND THE

FUTURE OF PROTECTED AREAS (2008), hereinafter NATURE UNBOUND.

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one asking us to think more deeply about the past of protected areas and theother about their future.

The first of these two other new titles is a large, predominantly descrip-tive, and retrospective compendium of essays on the evolution of wildlifeconservation policies in southern Africa.5 It is a companion to an earlier col-lection more narrowly focused on protected areas and rural development.6 Thenew collection of some 26 papers makes the argument that in the countriesof southern Africa the prevailing theory and vision of wildlife conservationstand apart from those associated with Europe and the United States. The his-tory and methods of wildlife conservation practice are appreciably differentin southern Africa, too, and very much more rooted in rural ideas about howto advance the wise use of land than in urban or metropolitan notions abouthow to accomplish single species or wilderness preservation.7

In an earlier and quite separate and more scholarly work of comparativeenvironmental history, there is an even more convincing demonstration thatthe key to understanding the history of wildlife conservation around the worldmay lie more in the differentiation of national experiences rather than theirhomogenization.8 It would be going too far to claim that Nature Unbound9 seesthe history of conservation and protected areas as homogenized, stemmingfrom a single formative event, such as the designation of Yellowstone NationalPark in 1872, and then diffusing around the globe, albeit with marked nationalvariations. But that notion of a single diaspora has held great attraction sincethe appearance in 1999 of a comparative treatment of environmental history

5 EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION IN WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: PARKS AND GAME RANCHES TO TRANSFRONTIER

CONSERVATION AREAS (Helen Suich & Brian Child, assisted by Anna Spenceley, eds., 2009), hereinafterEVOLUTION AND INNOVATION.

6 PARKS IN TRANSITION: BIODIVERSITY, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND THE BOTTOM LINE (Brian Child ed., 2004).7 Any of the standard works on the evolution of American wildlife law can be used to trace the wayagriculture and its intolerance for predators and pests, as well as sport hunting, exerted their influence onthe designation and management of protected areas in the United States. See THOMAS LUND, AMERICAN

WILDLIFE LAW (1980); THOMAS DUNLAP, SAVING AMERICA’S WILDLIFE (1988); MICHAEL BEAN & MELANIE

ROWLAND, THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL WILDLIFE LAW (3rd ed. 1997); ROBERT FISCHMAN, THE NATIONAL

WILDLIFE REFUGES: COORDINATING A CONSERVATION SYSTEM THROUGH LAW (2003); DALE GOBLE & ERIC

FREYFOGLE, WILDLIFE LAW: CASES & MATERIALS (2nd ed. 2010)8 WILLIAM BEINART, THE RISE OF CONSERVATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: SETTLERS, LIVESTOCK, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

1770–1950 (2003). The editors of and contributors to EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2, acknowl-edge their intellectual debt to Beinart but do so rather curiously by citing a paper Beinart published in1984, 25 years before their own book was released. [William Beinart, Soil Erosion, Conservationism,and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration 1900–1960, 2 J. S. AFR. STUD. 52–83(1984)]. It is a mystery why they do not seek to align themselves with the power and sophisticationBeinart has now achieved in his arguments about the history of conservation in South Africa and its placein comparative environmental history. But then it is a mystery, too, why there is absolutely no referenceanywhere in EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2, where the experience of CAMPFIRE (CommunalAreas Management Program for Indigenous Resources) in Zimbabwe looms large, to a landmark workon CAMPFIRE, ROSALEEN DUFFY, KILLING FOR CONSERVATION: WILDLIFE POLICY IN ZIMBABWE (2000).

9 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1.

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in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.10 And the tendencyto imagine that problems with protected areas around the world not only havethe same origins but are also at the present time trending in the same directionis hard to resist, given the universalizing influence, for example, of such forcesas the extinction crisis, economic globalization, and climate change.

In other words, the new book about evolution and innovation in wildlifeconservation in southern Africa is contrarian. While it is not bereft of strongintellectual underpinnings in the normal science of conservation and the insti-tutional analyses of political economists,11 and also has enthusiastic supportfrom a large number of conservation practitioners,12 it cuts against the grain ofmore mainstream views that the history of protected areas has followed andis following much the same trajectory everywhere and that it now everywhereconfronts the same challenges for the future.13

As a guide to this future, the book invokes Charles Darwin and the qual-ities he “found essential to the adaptability of life on Earth—the variety andcompetition that drive evolution.”14 This is a quite different starting point forthinking about the future of wildlife conservation and protected areas thanthat offered by Karl Marx, whose ideas about the alienation and fetishizationof nature, and the underlying metabolic rift between commodities and theirecological context, others see as a preface for confronting one of conserva-tion’s main challenges, namely the discovery of “innovative ways of helpingpeople see the ecology of their consumptive practices through connections tothe environment.”15

10 THOMAS R. DUNLAP, NATURE AND THE ENGLISH DIASPORA: ENVIRONMENT AND HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES,CANADA, AUSTRALIA, AND NEW ZEALAND (1999). But see also WILLIAM BEINART & PETER COATES, ENVIRON-MENT & HISTORY: THE TAMING OF NATURE IN THE USA AND SOUTH AFRICA (1995).

11 The baseline reference is to ELINOR OSTROM, GOVERNING THE COMMONS: THE EVOLUTION OF INSTITUTIONS

FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION (1990). The literature on common property management regimes (CPRs) isnothing, however, if not vast, and it is shot through with confusing cross references to common poolresources (also often referred to as CPRs). See the identification and differentiation of both CPRs inNATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 99–104.

12 The key but not the only sustained network of professional practice within which the contributions toEVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2, have been developed is that of the Southern African SustainedUse Specialist Group (SASUSG), one of many such groups hosted by the Species Survival Commissionof the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Earlier, in the 1960s, the Southern African Commission forthe Conservation and Utilization of the Soil (SARCCUS) was also an important venue for networkingand learning.

13 In addition to the extinction crisis, economic globalization, and climate change, all of which are giventheir due in NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1, the book also sees challenges posed to protected areasaround the world from community conservation, the accommodation of indigenous peoples, and tourism(ch. 5, 6, and 7, respectively).

14 Brian Child, Innovations in State, Private, and Communal Conservation, in EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION,supra note 2 at 427.

15 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 190. We do not want to overplay the notion that the authors of NATURE

UNBOUND and the contributors to EVOLUTION & INNOVATION are directly and self-consciously engaged witheach other in an ideological contest over how to interpret the past of protected areas and project their

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This view that the future of wildlife conservation and protected areas isvery much bound up with a search for “patterns that connect”16 is at the coreof a third new book,17 more or less contemporaneous with Nature Unbound18

and Evolution and Innovation19 and from the same publisher,20 but not atall concerned with either Darwin or Marx. This book about connectivityconservation is somewhat descriptive and retrospective, because it includessummary case studies of experiences with the mapping and management ofnatural connectivity across large regions in various parts of the world, chieflythough not entirely in mountainous places. The iconic instance in a NorthAmerican context is the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y),but there are many others scattered throughout the world.21

future. We will, however, say two things. One is that ideological and scientific disagreements are nostrangers to the literature on protected areas. They do not, for obvious reasons, frequently surface in thescientific literature, but in the context of marine protected areas, for example, they are bravely treated inTundi Agardy, Dangerous Targets? Unresolved Issues and Ideological Clashes around Marine ProtectedAreas, 13 AQUATIC CONSERVATION: MARINE AND FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS 353–367 (2003). Secondly, thereare times when both of these books seem right on the edge of what might be a fascinating political dialogbut neither quite grasps the nettle. Child, who worked for wildlife authorities in Zimbabwe for 12 years,writes, for example, that the innovations he describes “stem from the policy insight that the interests ofwildlife are best served by placing it in the marketplace, and modifying institutions to ensure that itscomparative economic advantage is reflected in the day-to-day decisions of landholders. Wildlife liveson people’s land, and the best way to conserve it is to maximize the benefits that landholders are ableto derive from it—obviously including financial benefits from hunting and tourism, aesthetic values andenvironmental services, and less obviously, but importantly, proprietary rights and discretionary choicesover wildlife.” EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 434. But when Brockington et al. writeabout conservation in southern Africa their first observation is that in post-independence Zimbabwe “thenotion of privatized wildlife was politically controversial. . ., given the centrality of the land questionand the continued racial disparity in ownership. . . . The conservancies (or private parks) were to becomefinancially viable and profitable through the development of wildlife tourism, including sport hunting. . . [but] this form of wildlife ranching (as it is often called) . . . was really about sidestepping thepost-independence government’s stated commitment from 1990 to compulsory purchase of land thatwas defined as ‘underutilized.’. . . These concerns about the development of private parks and theirimplications for land redistribution have also arisen in the growth of private reserves in South Africa.”So, although private parks can be presented as an attempt to use the security of commodified land toadvance conservation goals, the land is actually taken from its previous social context, alienated, andsold, “precisely . . . processes that cause tension with former farm workers in South Africa.” NATURE

UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 183–184, 186.16 This memorable phrase is used at the very end of one of the books we review and comment on, here.

NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 200. The range and variety of connective relationships, “patternsthat connect,” imagined and embraced in the book as proper subjects for protected area and wildlifeconservation policy and management, however, go far beyond those that would be sanctioned or are evencontemplated in the other works we consider, here, embracing “connections and relationships betweenhuman beings, as well as between humans and non-humans.” Id.

17 CONNECTIVITY CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT: A GLOBAL GUIDE (Graeme Worboys, Wendy Francis, &Michael Lockwood eds., 2010), hereinafter CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT.

18 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1.19 EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2.20 Earthscan, Publishing for a Sustainable Future. Their titles are marketed and distributed in the United

States by Stylus Publishing, LLC, of Sterling, VA. There is universal online access to their list atwww.styluspub.com

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The principal intellectual thrust of this new book about connectivityconservation, however, is normative. It purports to provide people who careabout the future of protected areas and their wildlife populations with an entrylevel manual for connectivity conservation; a modern tool kit, grounded in themost up-to-date and sophisticated conservation biology and related sciencesand finely honed with modern environmental management concepts so asto link traditional protected areas more effectively with each other, as wellas with those adjacent and surrounding parts of nature that are corridors ofecological movement, migration, transition, and transformation.

The overarching goal, then, of conservation connectivity management inits present state of development is to use modern science as the basis for verylarge-scale initiatives in wildlife and habitat protection and management.22

Advocates believe conservation biology and its associated disciplines providea firm but flexible framework for coming to grips with a nature that has, on theone hand, no respect for the delimitations of political jurisdictions, whethernational parks or private game preserves, and with a set of protected areasthat have, on the other hand, boundaries largely out of sync with those ofthe biomes, bioregions, and ecosystems that are now regarded as the buildingblocks of extensive natural landscapes and seascapes.

21 Harvey Locke, Yellowstone to Yukon Connectivity Conservation Initiative, in CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT,supra note 12 at 161–181. The number and distribution of the various initiatives other than Y2Y is worthsummarizing, because it underlines the extent to which connectivity management has become a globalphenomenon even while relying almost entirely on scientists for articulation and support. They includethe Cederberg Mountains, Cape Floristic Region, South Africa; the Greater Virunga Landscape on theboundary of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda; the Maloti-Drakensberg Trans-frontier Conservation Program, spanning the boundaries of Lesotho and South Africa; the AustralianAlps national parks; the Alps to Atherton conservation corridor stretching roughly from Melbourne,New South Wales to Cairns, Queensland; the Gondwana Link in southwestern Australia; the BhutanBiological Conservation Complex; the proposed Sacred Himalayan Landscape; the proposed Seulawah-Leuser-Angkola corridor in northern Sumatra; the southern Appalachians; the several initiatives in thenorthern Appalachian bioregion stretching from New England into Canada; the Mesoamerican bio-logical corridor; the Andean Paramo corridor; the Vilcabamba-Amboro corridor spanning Bolivia andPeru; the Serra do Espinhaco Biosphere Reserve, Brazil; the Munchique-Pinche Corridor, Colombia;the Llanganates-Sangay corridor, Ecuador; the protected areas system of the Venezuelan Andes; theAltai Mountain Knot, principally in southern Russia; the tri-national Mont Blanc Massif; the CantabrianMountains-Pyrenees-Massif Central-Western Alps Great Mountain corridor, and the Appenines.

22 Charles Chester & Jodi Hilty, Connectivity Science, in CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 12 at22–33. Their concluding summary is worth quoting: “Scientists and ecologists have generally defined theconcept of connectivity as the extent to which a species or population can move along landscape elementsin a mosaic of habitat types. Large-scale connectivity conservation includes landscape, habitat, ecologicaland evolutionary process connectivity, and connectivity conservation areas include the interconnection(and potentially embedding) of key protected areas or refugia areas. With the threat of climate change, anincreased attention to connectivity largely results from a belief that the retention of natural environmentsbetween such protected areas offers species the best possible chance for survival in the long term.” Id. at33. So, there is a measure of belief mixed with the science, but nothing rising to the level of Darwinianor Marxian ideology. See also John Terborgh, Why We Must Bring Back the Wolf , 57(12) N. Y. REV.BOOKS 35–37 (July 2010), reviewing CAROLINE FRASER, REWILDING THE WORLD: DISPATCHES FROM THE

CONSERVATION REVOLUTION (2009).

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Connectivity conservation is, if you will, an attempt to compensate forthe increasingly awkward limitations of traditional protected areas. Althoughwe relied heavily upon them in the past, and have invested much of ourconservation treasure in them since the latter decades of the nineteenth century,they rather poorly sample and represent and, therefore, conserve the valuablebiodiversity of the world. Among other things, then, connectivity conservationis a way of giving protected areas new roles and relevance, not by tryingto increase their numbers or by improving the way they delimit, contain,and fiercely protect nature in a “fortress conservation” sense,23 but rather byintegrating them into a larger network of conservation practices scaled toembrace the ebbs and flows of nature, and now ever more pressingly thevicissitudes of climate change bearing down upon those ebbs and flows.

This is, in and of itself, an engaging proposition. But there is more tothis book about connectivity management than its scientific underpinnings.Inasmuch as the important patterns that connect on a large scale often liebeyond the reach of individual sovereign states and their major civil divisions,the future development and implementation of connectivity conservation hasto rest on new forms of governance, where action is “characterized by collab-orative arrangements such as networks, partnerships and deliberative forums[that can be] used to coordinate and guide decision making.”24 In this future,the old model of centralized, state-led conservation, sometimes accompaniedby prohibitive wildlife regulations, will necessarily be challenged by new in-stitutional arrangements and incentives for sustainable conservation, whichis why the followers of Darwin and Marx can find some common groundhere.

Because connectivity conservation offers a heady marriage of good sci-ence and institutional experimentation, it is palatable to the Darwinians insouthern Africa, who are inclined to see it as opening the door to a muchlarger market for and acceptance of devolved, incentive-led conservation.25 Itcan also be tolerated by students of Marx, who can be critical of the fact that

23 DAN BROCKINGTON, FORTRESS CONSERVATION: THE PRESERVATION OF THE MKOMAZI GAME RESERVE, TANZANIA

(2002). To put this formative contribution in context, see WILLIAM M. ADAMS, AGAINST EXTINCTION: THE

STORY OF CONSERVATION (2004), especially ch. 5. The recent resurgence of fortress conservation as aresponse to the perceived weaknesses of community conservation is noted in NATURE UNBOUND, supranote 1 at 164.

24 Michael Lockwood, Scoping the Territory: Considerations for Connectivity Conservation Managers, inCONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 12, 34–51 at 38. But by way of counterpoint to the currentlyfashionable elevation of partnerships and networks vis-a-vis the firm hand of the state, see JUDITH LAYZER,NATURAL EXPERIMENTS: ECOSYSTEM-BASED MANAGEMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT (2008).

25 A vision sketched in EVOLUTION & INNOVATION, supra note 2, at 7–10 but seen to be not without problemsin some transfrontier conservation areas in Webster Whande & Helen Suich, Transfrontier ConservationInitiatives in Southern Africa: Observations from the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area,id. at 373–391. There is also a thorough and critical treatment of the political context for transfrontierconservation in William Wolmer, Transboundary Conservation: The Politics of Ecological Integrity inthe Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, 29 J. S. AFR. STUD. 261–278 (2003).

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while it follows or tries to follow a neutral scientific rationale it neverthelesshas the potential to justify highly political and interventions in places broughtunder the rubric of transfrontier conservation.26

But no matter which way you look at it, whether through the lens ofDarwin or Marx or through the ostensibly neutral eyes of good science, thepast, present, and future of protected areas and their value and relevance forwildlife conservation are being vigorously and productively contested in thenew literature we flag.

We are compelled to observe, of course, that our field of view encom-passes no more than the tip of an iceberg. We shall leave out of account inwhat follows, for example, except for some passing references, an intriguingnew account of the multiple benefits protected areas provide for conservationand use.27 It is also important to say that in recent years the reassessmentof protected areas has taken a number of different directions, some of themclearly anticipating the terms of the current debate about the history of wildlifeconservation and its future28 and some pushing the envelope in rather differentways,29 but we shall not follow all these twists and turns.

The questions that most intrigue us are these: How did we get to a pointwhere we seem to need the help of Marx, or Darwin, to comprehend thehistory of protected areas? And if, going forward, there is to be an increasingpreoccupation with patterns that connect, just how good a guide to this futuremight modern science be?

26 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 164–167; Rosaleen Duffy, Global Governance and EnvironmentalManagement: The Politics of Transfrontier Conservation Areas in Southern Africa, 25 POL. GEOG.89–112; (2006).

27 ARGUMENTS FOR PROTECTED AREAS: MULTIPLE BENEFITS FOR CONSERVATION AND USE (Sue Stolton & NigelDudley eds., 2010). This book is important in part because of the association of one of the editors withGUIDELINES FOR APPLYING PROTECTED AREAS MANAGEMENT CATEGORIES (Nigel Dudley ed., 2008).

28 One earlier contribution focused on marine protected areas, for example, takes the science-based,normative approach of CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 12. See ERICH HOYT, MARINE PROTECTED

AREAS FOR WHALES, DOLPHINS AND PORPOISES: A WORLD HANDBOOK FOR CETACEAN HABITAT CONSERVATION

(2005). The grounding of connectivity conservation and landscape-level wildlife management in soundscience and good professional practice is the preoccupation of JODI HILTY, WILLIAM LIDICKER, & ADINA

MERENLENDER, CORRIDOR ECOLOGY: THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF LINKING LANDSCAPES FOR BIODIVERSITY

CONSERVATION (2006). The history of trans-boundary or transfrontier conservation as a way to rise abovethe limitations of the “territories of chance” making up traditional protected areas, with detailed attentionto the International Sonoran Desert Alliance and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, is thesubject of CHARLES CHESTER, CONSERVATION ACROSS BORDERS: BIODIVERSITY IN AN INTERDEPENDENT WORLD

(2006).29 One especially unusual and imaginative approach to the connectivity management of wildlands and their

plant and animal populations, focused on Britain and growing out of the work of the British Associationof Nature Conservationists, argues the case not just for protecting nature as it now exists but also forrestoring and repairing damaged habitat and ecosystems. See PETER TAYLOR, BEYOND CONSERVATION: AWILDLAND STRATEGY (2005).

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2. DARWIN, MARX, AND THE STRUGGLE OVER ORIGINSAND HISTORY

The diversity of interests seeing value in protected areas over the last severalhundred years is so large30 and the variety of designations they have invented isso imaginative31 that generalization about their origins and histories is difficult,and both Nature Unbound and Evolution and Innovation try hard to eschew it.Behind the superficial claims that protected areas serve the abstract interestsof nature itself and of anonymous future generations who might value it,however, there do lie more specific, limited, and readily identifiable interestsseeking to advantage themselves by bringing protected areas into existenceand by shaping the distribution of benefits and costs they entail.32

Indeed, without putting too fine a point on it here, not all of the storiesthat can be told about the origins and histories of protected areas, and ofthe way in which they “distribute fortune and misfortune”33 are easily spokenabout in polite company.34 It is a hallmark of most accounts of protected areasthat such sharp, distributional interest analysis rarely gets the same attentionas ostensibly more neutral questions about the conservation effectiveness ofprotection that focus on resources, rather than and separate from people.

In a very large sense, however, and confining our attention to the mod-ern period, conventionally dated from the designation of Yellowstone NationalPark in 1872,35 the origins and histories of protected areas are clearly inter-twined with the history of economic change. The earliest efforts to designate

30 This is true whether we rely on the official histories of protected areas bequeathed to us by powerfulstates with written records or whether we look at the learned conservation practices of smaller and moretraditional human groups. NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1at 19–20.

31 Despite several revisions, the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA), maintained by the WorldConservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, England, in association with the United Nations Envi-ronment Programme, fails to capture this diversity. Id. at 21–28.

32 Much is made in the literature we review, here, of the desirability or undesirability of treating natureand wildlife as if they were economic commodities. Surprisingly, nothing at all is said about natureand wildlife as political commodities, although we think this a powerful idea and one pursued to greatadvantage in CLARK GIBSON, POLITICIANS AND POACHERS: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WILDLIFE POLICY IN

AFRICA (1999). Stripped of the overbearing theoretical pretensions in which Gibson wraps his work inZambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, the same idea is used to good effect in DUFFY, supra note 5, who focusesjust on Zimbabwe. This treatment of nature as a political commodity is, however, to be distinguishedfrom and has nothing at all to do with the ostensibly neutral auditing of the benefits and costs of protectedareas essayed by Stolton & Dudley, supra note 27.

33 This phrase appears several times in the book after first surfacing in NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 6.34 Most of the contributors to EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2, abjure, for example, explicit or

detailed discussion of the racially imbalanced distribution of land ownership in southern Africa or linksbetween the history of protected areas and racial discrimination policies, most extremely apartheid.Indeed, it comes as a shock when Jane Carruthers observes that “African–white interaction in mattersrelating to wildlife preservation has been crucial to the history of South Africa’s protected areas andit remains a burning issue” (emphasis added). Id. at 44. The treatment of this subject in Zambia andZimbabwe is much more forthright and telling in GIBSON, supra note 32 and DUFFY, supra note 5.

35 Even after acknowledging that it is a mistake to begin histories of protected areas at Yellowstone that iswhat the authors of NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 21, do, as indeed do most others.

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protected areas can be understood as antidotes to the excessive environmentaldepredations associated with both industrialization36 and the spread of agri-culture in the latter part of the 19th century.37 They represent attempts by avariety of groups and interests, increasingly dominated over time by the main-stream conservation movement,38 to save lands and resources like wildlife fromthe threats and damage of capitalist development and its resource-intensivetechnologies. In other and for the most part more recent cases, the origins ofprotected areas seem to be better understood as products less of confrontationsbetween mainstream conservation and the needs of capitalism than of initia-tives marked by compromise and conciliation, of working with the capitalistsystem rather than against it.39

In both these sets of circumstances, the essential relationship betweeneconomic change and conservation interests is reactionary and oppositionaland, we note, comes very close to being over-determined. So, as economieschange and people around the world see the environmental impacts of thesechanges demands arise for protection. The more economic change there is,the more demands for protection are mobilized by conservation interests, themore government responds, the more the interests of capital are forced toconcede or conciliate, and the more protected areas are created. Is that theway it works?

In fact, the period of most dramatic growth in the designation of protectedareas, roughly the period from 1985 to 1995,40 coincides with the period inthe history of capitalism known as neoliberalism, a period in which strenuousefforts were made to reduce government initiatives, free industry and businessfrom regulation and controls, and liberate free market forces in the service ofeconomic globalization.41 Why during this period would governments, some

36 The designation of Yellowstone was an attempt by railroad companies to stimulate tourism and traffic,rather than an offset to or mitigation of the depredations the American industrial revolution was visiting onnatural resources in the western states and territories. The more or less contemporaneous designations(reservations from entry under federal public land laws) of forest reserves, later the nucleus of anationwide system of national forests, or of the first wildlife refuges, were more clearly motivated bymitigation. GEORGE CAMERON COGGINS ET AL., FEDERAL PUBLIC LANDS AND RESOURCES LAW (6th ed. 2007),ch. 2. The perception that American national parks were first designated in places no one wanted, becausethey were useless for farming even though they might be attractive to tourists, originated with ALFRED

RUNTE, NATIONAL PARKS: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE (1979).37 In South Africa the first reserves and parks were a response to what “Carruthers describes [as] the

long-established settler attitude, particularly among Boer trekkers, that destroying wildlife was not acriminal offence, indeed it was considered ‘immoral and unpatriotic not to exterminate wildlife, becauseclearing land in this way encouraged agriculture and expedited the progress of civilization,”’ EVOLUTION

& INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 21, citing JANE CARRUTHERS, THE KRUGER NATIONAL PARK: A SOCIAL AND

POLITICAL HISTORY (1995), at 11.38 The shades of meaning of this term (“conservation is an incredibly broad church and one that is riven

with conflict”), and its principal organizational manifestations, are the subject of NATURE UNBOUND, supranote 1 at 6–14.

39 Examples are given in id. at 3–5 and 167–170.40 Data derived from the World Database of Protected Areas are displayed in id. at 2, 30–31, and 40–42.41 A standard introduction is DAVID HARVEY, A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM (2005).

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in the developing world laboring under the burden of neoliberal structuraladjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and theWorld Bank, participate in a veritable orgy of protected area designations?

One answer is that the relationship between conservation and capitalismis no longer reactionary and oppositional. Rather, it is marked by subtle andpervasive links and continuities. All sides, now, are interested in influencingmass public attitudes to wildlife and landscapes, in treating nature as a marketcommodity, in molding the expectations of tourists who visit protected areas,as well as the expectations of those living close to valuable nature, and in fun-damentally reshaping the role models and sources of inspiration that persuadepeople to think of themselves as conservationists. In sum:

Conservation is [now] not merely about resisting capitalism, or about reaching nec-essary compromises with it. Conservation and capitalism are shaping nature andsociety. . .in partnership. In the name of conservation, rural communities will reor-ganize themselves, and change their use and management of wildlife and landscapes.They ally with safari hunters and tourist companies to sell the experience of newtourist products on the international market. In the name of conservation, miningcompanies, governments, international financial institutions and some conservationorganizations work together to achieve common goals that suit the interests of con-servation and capitalism.. . . As these types of [relationships] spread and become more sophisticated, it be-comes increasingly difficult to determine if we are describing conservation withcapitalism as its instrument or capitalism with conservation as its instrument. . . .

While it is debatable whether this alliance of conservation and capitalism is capa-ble of saving the world, there is no doubt that it is most capable of remaking andrecreating it.42

One way to understand the origins and history of protected areas, then,is large-grained and structural. It claims them as the achievement primarilyof mainstream conservation and particularly of the ways in which conser-vationists have adjusted their political message, along with their tactics andstrategies, to chronic shifts in the pattern of economic activity around theworld since the middle of the 19th century, as well as to the consequent re-alignment of social classes, political elites, and economic interests in bothdomestic and international politics.

Looking back, it interprets the power of conservation, inherently a rela-tively weak and under-resourced political interest,43 as the result of a brilliantand entirely rational alignment with the economic and developmental forcesdriving the broad sweep of economic history. There is no need to explainthe struggle to establish protected areas and make them work in more fine-grained terms—by depicting it, for example, as the handiwork of particular

42 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 5–6.43 MANCUR OLSON, THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION (1965).

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or particularly well-placed or particularly well-networked individuals, or asthe aftermath of acute episodes of political conflict over a favored species ora special place.

Above all, the key to the success of conservationists over many decadesis their increasing and quite self-conscious44 willingness to accommodate andeven to exploit the idea that nature is an object. This opens the door to treatingwildlife, for example, as a commodity with an exchange value that can beset, just as Marx imagined, without regard to the relationships, social orecological, that produce it.45 Moreover, it opens the door to recalibrating thevalue of wildlife repeatedly, making it into a new product at every turn, basedon what people are willing to think and believe about it (and pay for it); basedon its image, if you will, rather than its actual place or condition in the world orthe processes and relationships that sustain it.46 For conservation purposes inthe context of contemporary economics and politics virtual images of wildlifemay, thus, be as valuable as or more valuable than the real thing.

Clearly, while this way of thinking about the origins and histories ofprotected areas resolves the question of “who really made it happen?” in favorof the mainstream conservation movement, the unmistakable implication isthat, while treating nature as an object has yielded impressive cumulativeresults—a protected area estate now approaching twelve percent of the surfacearea of the planet—it is fundamentally misconceived and in the long run willbe counter-productive. The message of Nature Unbound is that the dallianceof conservation with market ideology needs to end.

The contrarians in southern Africa beg to disagree. At the very outset ofEvolution and Innovation we read that:

The purpose of this book is to provide an opportunity for many of the scholar-practitioners who have spent years (or more often decades) developing innovativeconservation models to share their experiences. . . . Put briefly, these are encapsulated

44 Anticipating a counter to the argument that conservationists did not create the neoliberal environmentin which they work but must nevertheless contend with it and, therefore, “creatively engage withcorporations to raise money to protect nature,” the response in NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 198,is two-fold. The first is to say the assumption that conservation stands apart and can be separated fromcapitalism is now false and, secondly and more vehemently, to insist that “mainstream conservation hasnever stood outside of [the] processes” commodifying nature and alienating people from it (emphasisadded). Id. See also Johann Hari, The Wrong Kind of Green, THE NATION (March 4, 2010), accessibleonline at www.thenation.com/article/wrong-kind-green

45 Two important points need to be made, here. One is that, while the authors of NATURE UNBOUND borrowMarxian concepts to establish a framework for understanding contemporary conservationist behaviorvis-a-vis protected areas, the book is not an exercise in Marxist environmentalism nor does it call forsocialist revolution. And second, for those who want to persevere with the book’s uses of Marxianterminology, the critical pages are NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 185–190.

46 The use of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard and their terminology to establish that images of naturecan be more powerful than the real thing is even more labored than the use of Marx, but again, for thosewho want to persevere with the jargon, the relevant pages are in id. at 190–197.

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by the “price, proprietorship, subsidiarity hypothesis”: in other words, if wildlife isvaluable, if this value is captured by the landholder, and if rights are devolved to thelowest level, the probability of successful wildlife and natural resource conservationis greatly increased (citation omitted).47

This approach to wildlife conservation and protected areas is “under-represented in the peer-reviewed literature”48 where, except for Marshall Mur-phree in Zimbabwe, “universities have played a surprisingly minor role in thislearning process.”49

Later, the argument is that the innovative models described in the book“stem from the policy insight that the interests of wildlife are best servedby placing it in the marketplace, and modifying institutions to ensure thatits comparative economic advantage is reflected in the day-to-day decisionsof landholders.”50 If this happens, if protected areas are made to “serve thesocieties to which they belong [and] if these societies value them, the benefitsto global society will automatically follow.”51

The price, proprietorship, and subsidiarity hypothesis is not actually asstraightforward and self-executing as this makes it sound, either in southernAfrica or elsewhere. Several other things have to fall into place: principally aset of committed and hard-working individuals who are interested in drivingchange, and are good at it;52 a set of knowledge networks through which “smallgroups of like-minded people [can provide] a critical mass for change;”53 andan institutional context in which authority for protected areas, instead of beingconcentrated in a central state agency, is divided between national, provincial,and even local decision makers.54 This last factor is especially important,because it constitutes the institutional “substrate for Darwinian evolution”55 inprotected area designation and management.

47 EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 4. The unconventional references to landholders rather thanlandowners in the book are odd and raise the question of exactly who does own the land in southernAfrica.

48 Id.49 Id. For an overview of Murphree’s thoughts and contribution, see Marshall Murphree, Communal

Approaches to Natural Resource Management in Africa: From Whence and to Where? 7 J. INT’L WILDLIFE

L. & POL’Y 203–216 (2004). This forms part of Arielle Levine & Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Wildlife,Markets, States, and Communities in Africa, 7 J. INT’L WILDLIFE L. & POL’Y 135–216 (2004).

50 EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 434.51 Id. at 428.52 Progress with conservation, the book notes, is invariably associated with individuals, people who have

“driven change, including many of the authors of this book, [and who] combine strong qualificationswith a passion for wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods and a long track record of dedication tomaking their ideas work.” Id. at 434–435.

53 The main examples relied on are SARCCUS and SASUSG, supra note 9. The outlines of the relevanthistory are in id. at 8–11.

54 This institutional context is broadly sketched in Brian Child, The Emergence of Parks and ConservationNarratives in Southern Africa, EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 19–33.

55 Id. at 23.

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But, assuming all these factors do fall into place, we then seem to belooking at a very different answer to the question of “who really made ithappen?” for protected areas in southern Africa than the large-grained andstructural explanation offered in Nature Unbound—even though the commod-ification of wildlife and of protected nature features prominently in both. So,what is the relationship between the two accounts?

Although the contributors to Evolution and Innovation believe that theconservation model they have very deliberately articulated and vigorouslypursued in southern Africa since the 1950s and 1960s56 represents the work-ing out of universally applicable principles, what we really see in their storyis a case of specialized adaptation. In southern Africa, the turn to a conserva-tion policy based on markets in wildlife goods, the vindication of landholderproperty rights, and local political control of wildlife, and the consequent pro-liferation of game parks, is to be understood, first and foremost, as a responseto the dismantling of colonial administrations and the impacts independenceand black majority rule would likely have on land ownership.57

The struggle of white farmers and large landowners to hold on to theircolonial privileges, to “use or lose” their land and its resources,58 did not playout the same way in all the newly independent nations of southern Africa in

56 One critical impetus to changing conservation philosophies in southern Africa appears to have comewhen Reay Smithers, a famous mammalogist and Director of Museums in Zimbabwe invited threeFulbright Scholars to visit Zimbabwe and South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The essentialdetails are in EVOLUTION & INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 8, reinforced at 75–77.

57 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 182–185; GIBSON, supra note 32 at 22–46.58 Sometime in the 1960s, although it is not clear exactly when, meetings growing out of the work

of SARCCUS [supra note 9] “quickly shared information about the emerging science of ecosystemmanagement, and developed new ideas about [conservation] policy, enabling institutions and wildlifeutilization that still reverberate today. Scientists and heads of wildlife agencies, including [those in]Zimbabwe . . . Namibia . . . and Mozambique, began to articulate and champion the ‘use it or loseit’ philosophy that underpins the southern African sustainable use movement today.” EVOLUTION &INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 8–9. This” idea of conserving wildlife through sustainable use [that] emergedin the 1960s, almost two decades before the World Conservation Strategy [announced by IUCN in 1980,shows that] southern Africa’s practical experience influenced, as much as it was influenced by, importantnarrative-setting forums [about protected areas] such as the 1982 World Parks Congress held in Bali,the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and [IUCN’s subsequent] shifttowards people and sustainable use.” Id. at 5. And at another point we learn that “Under [an FAO]project, the role of wildlife in the future economy of rural people was promoted scientifically, and Riney[Thane Riney, who studied under Starker Leopold at the University of {California at} Berkeley and wasa Fulbright Scholar in Africa in the 1960s] and others. . .developed a philosophy of sustainable use thatbegan to be reflected in the global discourse” [as eventually reflected in IUCN’s 1980 World ConservationStrategy and the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired byGro Harlem Brundtland, beginning in 1983]. Id. at 8. This is about as clear an indication as we are likelyto find of the stakes involved in properly unraveling the origins and history of the struggle to createprotected areas as a prime strategy of modern conservation. The contrarians in southern Africa believethat the mainstream conservation movement owes them an enormous and unacknowledged debt—owesthem, in fact, the origination of sustainable use as a basic doctrine of modern environmental policy.

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the 1960s and subsequent decades.59 And it did not play out anywhere else inthe world in quite the same way that it played out in southern Africa.

The occurrence of this struggle is coincident, however, with major struc-tural changes in the organization and financing of international conservation,60

and we find it entirely convincing that some of the remarkable individualswho helped fashion the commodification response to changing conditions insouthern Africa took their ideas with them when they moved on to inter-national organizations at the nerve center of protected areas policy aroundthe globe, such as the World Conservation Union (IUCN), and then furtherdiffused them61—and this precisely at the moment when neoliberalism wassowing the seeds of its ascendancy.62

What we are left with, then, is less of a substantial intellectual disagree-ment over the origins and history of protected areas than an uncoordinatedreading of the literature might suggest. We pretty much know who made ithappen, and why and how seemingly contradictory explanations of the waythe struggle played out in different parts of the world might be reconciled.Appeals to Marx and Darwin to interpret and rationalize the struggle bothprovide expedient fig leaves to cover a more profound truth, albeit one thatis difficult for most advocates of protected areas to talk about absent someintellectual cover. The long-term sustainability of wildlife and habitats is gov-erned by politics, not by science. Or it is governed at the very least by amixture of the two63 in which choices with major distributional consequencescan have alternative post hoc and exculpatory rationalizations—as “survivalof the fittest,” for example, or as structural adjustments to the “contradictionsof capitalism.”64

If in the future the focus for protected areas is going to be on enhancingconnectivity, questions need to be asked about who will be making thosechoices and what pattern of fortune and misfortune is likely to result.

59 GIBSON, supra note 32.60 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 157 and 165. See also Dan Brockington & Katherine Scholfield, The

Work of Conservation Organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa, 48 J. MOD. AFR. STUD. 1–33 (2010).61 EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 8.62 Whether neoliberal capitalism is in quite the same ascendancy as it was before the global economic

recession that began in 2008 is, perhaps, debatable, but it is not a matter taken up in any of the workcited, here.

63 A concluding observation made in EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 436.64 There is a great deal of confusion about how to reconcile the evolution of conservation and protected areas

policy in southern Africa, for example, with arguably related intellectual developments in the literatureon property and on regimes for common property resource management. This shows up, for example,in the discussion of the origins in southern Africa of community-based natural resource management[EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION, supra note 2 at 10], a development that is eventually claimed as a case ofindependent but parallel intellectual invention with the work of Elinor Ostrom, supra note 8, as if thetwo were coincident, which they were not. The highly constrained relevance of Ostrom’s work aboutregimes for common property resource management to the origins and history of protected areas is muchmore convincingly dealt with in NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 99–104.

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3. SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE OF PATTERNS THAT CONNECT

Providing answers to these questions is not the strong suit of Connectiv-ity Management.65 As we noted earlier, the book is a guide or manual forwhomever might be interested in working toward the creation of connectivityconservation areas.66 It touches on some two dozen connectivity initiatives.67

These are mostly in mountainous areas and turn out to be in various stagesof realization. They have been described and examined at some length oversix years at international conferences,68 and the book now tries to distill fromall this talk and activity lessons learned, best practices, key tasks to be ac-complished, management guidance, and challenges and opportunities that lieahead.

This is a tried and true formula for IUCN, the principal organization in allof this, a masterful practitioner of the art of international conferencing, and notjust in the context of wildlife and protected areas.69 Its work bonds the faithful,promotes experiential learning, rallies the troops, and encourages the belief,and not unreasonably so, that goals are shared, interests are coincident, andaction is both imperative and feasible. It is a very powerful form of leadershipand mobilization in the international conservation community, although tooutsiders looking in at this book it has the feel of hearing a well-scripted butvery dull bishop preach to those already converted.

The impetus for this latest surge of enthusiasm about connectivity con-servation is climate change.70 Assuming that climate changes, there will beshifts in the distribution of habitats and of flora and fauna and, unless plantsand animals now protected can move in the face of climate change betweenhabitat patches, using corridors, greenbelts, and habitat stepping stones, theirviability is threatened.71 Connectivity management, then, promotes amongother things large, regional animal movements and other essential flows be-tween different sections of the landscape. If it works for wildlife, it is a basisfor adaptation to climate change. Does it work?

We limit ourselves to saying that the relatively new science of connectiv-ity conservation is young, debated, and contested.72 IUCN has tried to pour oil

65 CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 14.66 The term connectivity conservation area has a special meaning, which is explained along with a great deal

of other specialized terminology in a glossary of connectivity conservation terms in id. at xxxi–xxxiv.The development and introduction of this terminology is presumably part of the proto-development ofprofessionalism in connectivity conservation management and among practitioners of that science (orart). We do not find it either necessary or helpful and suspect many will agree.

67 We earlier listed these by name, supra note 18.68 CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 14 at xviii–xxi and 18–20.69 ROBERT BOARDMAN, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION & THE PROTECTION OF NATURE (1981); LYNTON KEITH

CALDWELL WITH PAUL STANLEY WEILAND, INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: FROM THE TWENTIETH TO

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (3rd ed. 1996).70 CONNECTIVITY MANAGEMENT, supra note 14 at 31–33.71 Id. at 22.72 Id. at 25–29.

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on these troubled waters by saying that “the weight of scientific opinion” nowsupports the efficacy of connectivity conservation and that in the absence ofbetter alternatives the precautionary principle argues in favor of pursuing it.73

In the section of the book setting out things prospective connectivity conser-vation managers should consider, however, as they learn what IUCN and itspartners clearly hope will be an emerging new profession, there are ominousportents.

There is a general warning, for example, that making decentralizationa chief feature of connectivity conservation governance arrangements canproduce fragmented, unrepresentative, and undemocratic institutions and pro-cesses. This works two ways. While decentralization can potentially empowerthose who have had no effective voice in connectivity governance, it can also“make it more difficult for non-local interest holders to effectively expresstheir values and have them considered. . . .”74 On the other hand, the big inter-national NGOs promoting connectivity areas have such an impressive abilityto mobilize scientists and other supporters that their power to delineate nature,divide it into use zones with structured rights of access, and set the rules forinteracting with it is so truly formidable it can be hard for local people andtheir representatives to negotiate or resist.75

In more specific terms, analysis of the Mesoamerican biological cor-ridor shows that participants in governance were not representative of theircommunities, that their participation was meaningful only in the very earlystages of decision making, and there was no basis for sustained trust anddialogue between the promoters of the corridor and local interests.76 In thesame context, “an emphasis on market-based instruments and the power oflarge international conservation NGOs [has] led to claims that local peoplehave been marginalized, inequities between the rich and poor reinforced, andinternational conservation NGOs [are benefiting] while local environmentalgroups struggle to survive.”77

Overall, there is clearly a sense, here, that as the international conserva-tion community strives to promote connectivity management as a necessaryand sensible adaptation to the effects of climate change on wildlife it is tread-ing on an awful lot of toes deserving of more consideration and respect.Equally clearly, it risks creating serious power imbalances between itself and

73 Id. at 29 and 33.74 Id. at 39.75 Id. at 40, citing William Adams & Jon Hutton, People, Parks, and Poverty: Political Ecology and

Biodiversity Conservation, 5 CONSERVATION & SOCIETY 147–183 (2007).76 Id. at 39–40.77 Id. at 40, citing Liza Grandia, Between Bolivar and Bureaucracy: The Mesoamerican Biological Corri-

dor, 5 CONSERVATION & SOCIETY 478–503 (2007).

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other and particularly local political actors. This is disturbing, but it is notnew.78

The idea that the global promotion of public-private networks to developvery large-scale ecosystem or ecoregional approaches to wildlife managementand if necessary spanning national boundaries, can be traced to the observationin East Africa that large wildlife migrations occurring after rainfall are notcontained within park boundaries.79 Migrating wildlife also use the private andcommunal lands lying between parks and this leads conservationists to lookfor ways to make wildlife valuable to landholders outside parks. The outcomeis a major shift in conservation thinking; formation of a powerful series ofalliances among international NGOs, national governments, the private sector,and donors of development aid to implement ecoregional conservation; and apolitical challenge to developing country governments that is still very muchin the process of unfolding.80

To be clear, there is a plausible scientific rationale for connectivityconservation areas,81 and the imperative to create them cannot and should notbe dismissed out of hand. The science allows them to be presented as if theirimpact on the distribution of fortune and misfortune is neutral. To counter theargument that change is bound to benefit some more than others, the sciencecan be buttressed with appeals to a rhetoric depicting ecoregional conservationas part of a much broader and arguably highly desirable contemporary processof “decentralizing power to multiple stakeholders by shifting responsibilityfor conservation out of state hands and into the hands of public–private [andin many cases] transnational networks.”82

In the last analysis, however, the drive to make connectivity conservationareas a viable means of safeguarding the “patterns that connect” in natureagainst the vagaries of climate change cannot be justified on the grounds thatscience demands it. Nor can it be legitimized on the basis of a claim thatthe dominant and in some cases, clearly, overbearing actors in transnationalconservation networks have everyone’s interests at heart.83 Although climate

78 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 164–167.79 Id. at 43; David Western, Ecosystem Conservation and Rural Development: The Case of Amboseli, in

NATURAL CONNECTIONS: PERSPECTIVES IN COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVATION 19–52 (David Western & R.Michael Wright eds., 1994).

80 NATURE UNBOUND, supra note 1 at 167.81 It is nicely summarized by Charles Chester & Jodi Hilty, Connectivity Science, in CONNECTIVITY MAN-

AGEMENT, supra note 14 at 22–33.82 Id. at 166.83 There is a nicely critical introduction to the rise of networks in international environmental governance,

part of a general trend in international relations in recent decades, and to understanding the interestsdifferent sorts of networks are likely to favor, in Charlotte Streck, Governments and Policy Networks:Chances, Risks, and a Missing Strategy, in A HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY:NATIONAL GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONS IN A GLOBAL ARENA 653–686 (Frank Wijen, Kees Zoeteman, & JanPieters eds., 2005).

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change may very well turn out to be a deadly serious business for wildlife,and the people desperately anxious to protect wildlife are understandablyimpatient to get on with the job, the little we know so far about how theyare proceeding and who they are affecting leaves a deep residue of anxietyabout transparency and accountability.84 And from our point of view, at least,in thinking through these problems, the ways in which the perspectives ofDarwin, Marx, and science, among others, might be reconciled need muchmore thought.85

84 The trail that leads to a fundamental and overdue reappraisal of conservation networks and of the valuethey offer vis-a-vis governments or state actors in environmental problem-solving, in part touching onissues of transparency and accountability, is blazed in JUDITH LAYZER, NATURAL EXPERIMENTS: ECOSYSTEM-BASED MANAGEMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT (2008). Her examples deal with landscape-scale connectivityareas but are regional rather than international.

85 In a future essay, we shall return to this challenge in the context of marine protected areas.

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