The global conservation movement is divided but not diverse: reflections on 2020
E.J. MIL NE R-GULLAND
My title is a riff on that of the excellent article by Chris Sandbrook and colleagues from 2019, ‘The global conserva- tion movement is diverse but not divided’ (Sandbrook et al., 2019). In a survey of 9,264 conservationists from 149 coun- tries they showed that, although there were substantial dif- ferences in opinion regarding how conservation should be done, all shades of opinion were represented in their survey sample, rather than people clustering in one camp or an- other. Their study also highlighted two matters that came into stark focus in 2020. Firstly, there weremajor differences in viewpoint that broke along geographical and demographic lines (e.g. women and Africans were more likely to endorse people-centred conservation, whereas biologically-trained people and those from Oceania and North America were more likely to endorse science-led ecocentrism). Secondly, their sample was heavily biased towards the Global North, with Europeans (38%) and NorthAmericans (25%) outnum- bering Africans (5%) and Asians (8%). Twenty-twenty was a year like no other, for everyone,
and has brought some of the core fissures within conserva- tion into stark focus. It was supposed to be the biodiversity super-year in which the Global Biodiversity Framework would be ratified by the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity, setting us on a course over the next sev- eral decades towards the restoration of nature. This did not happen. Instead, a global pandemic slammed into us, for- cing societies around the world to re-evaluate their prior- ities. In addition, although so-called natural disasters in many countries have brought the dangers of climate change into sharp relief, some opportunistic administrations and resource-grabbers took the opportunity to step up the pil- laging of nature and weaken or ignore environmental regu- lations (e.g. in Brazil: Silva Junior et al., 2021; in the USA: Frumkin & Myers, 2020). One element of division relates to the sampling issue in
the research of Sandbrook et al. (2019). Global conservation is still overwhelmingly dominated by the same privileged, white, wealthy, Northern hemisphere voices. This is prob- lematic because it means the diversity of views that is needed for better conservation is not present, as eloquently stated by Ashish Kothari in the recent March editorial in
Oryx (Kothari, 2021). Worse, the entrenched injustices of colonialism and power imbalances continue to fester (Chaudhury & Colla, 2020). These came into sharp focus within conservation with the revelations in 2020 about human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of conserva- tion (WWF, 2020). These should give everyone who calls themselves a conservationist pause for thought. The Black Lives Matter movement in the USA has catalysed debate about the composition of our profession. I write from the UK, where there is a woeful lack of ethnic diversity within conservation. We are, however, also unrepresentative of wider society with respect to many other dimensions of privilege (e.g. disability, care-giving responsibilities, neuro- diversity, socio-economic background). This has to change. Another element of division relates to views on how con-
servation should best be done. The unprecedented opportu- nity for a seismic shift in global biodiversity conservation represented by the Global Biodiversity Framework and the post-COVID ‘build back better’ agenda has brought to the fore bitter divisions in the conservation movement and led us to fight among ourselves rather than focusing on the big picture. For example, the first COVID wave in April–May 2020 led to a major campaign to ban all wild meat from commercial sale for consumption (e.g. ExtincionEndsHere, 2021), and subsequent pushback from those who were concerned about the impacts on livelihoods, particularly in Africa (e.g. Roe et al., 2020). The two sides actually have large areas of agreement, but these tend to be lost in the rhetoric. Following on fromthis, arguments about banning trophy hunting raged on social media (Morss, 2021), often over-simplifying complex arguments about a type of land use that is relatively limited in extent compared to, for example, industrialized agriculture (Cooney et al., 2017). The intertwining of both of these fault lines—the lack of
E.J. MILNER-GULLAND (
orcid.org/0000-0003-0324-2710) Department of
Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK E-mail
ej.milner-gulland@
zoo.ox.ac.uk
diversity in conservation and passionate differences in views about how to do conservation—can be seen in the open let- ter of Agrawal et al. (2020) in response to the working paper ‘Protecting 30% of the planet for nature: costs, benefits and implications’ (Waldron et al., 2020). This letter highlights the dangers of focusing on the biodiversity and economic implications of a massive expansion of protected areas but also points out the disproportionate representation in the research team of people from institutions in wealthy coun- tries compared to the disproportionate impacts of such a policy on people within poorer countries. How can we take lessons from 2020, and move forward in 2021 so that conservation scientists and practitioners can
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(3), 321–322 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S003060532100048X
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