Homo conservationensis WILLIAM M. ADAMS
The conservationist is a strange beast: Homo conservatio- nensis, the human who cares for the rest of nature (Sandbrook, 2015). As I step off the editorial board of Oryx, I have been thinking a lot about what Oryx has to say about us. How has conservation changed since its first issue in 1950? Three things in particular strike me. Firstly, the way we frame our concerns has certainly
changed. The original incarnation of Oryx was as the Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire in 1904. The society’s members were big-game hunters, and their idea of preservation reflected Victorian notions of land and game ownership, of sporting codes and the suppression of poaching (Prendergast & Adams, 2003). Before the second world war, their journal offered an explicitly colonial view of the world of conserva- tion and extinction: this was the metropolitan gaze of white men, looking out from the smoking rooms of London clubs or the residencies of colonial governors, remembering the crackle of camp fires and the view down rifle barrels. Now conservation is very different, seen through the lens of the natural sciences, structured by statistical analysis, shaped by modelling and GIS, powered by rafts of data from digital devices and automated research processes. Since Oryx began, conservation has lost much of its amateurism. It is now a major university subject, at undergraduate and graduate level, and is served by legions of conservation scientists. The result is greater rigour, greater attention to evidence, greater clarity and authority. At the same time, despite all the science, the conservation
gaze today remains Eurocentric—outsiders look at rural landscapes and societies, diagnose problems and prescribe rules to shape human relations with non-human nature. The knowledge of northern experts directs the flow of funds to protect wildlife. International agendas are domi- nated by Western ideas about humanity and non-human life (e.g. Kothari, 2021). Much has been written about the need to decolonize conservation, and about its diversity and divisions (e.g. Milner-Gulland, 2021), and this remains important. Open-access journals—like Oryx—enable pub- lished ideas to be read widely (Fisher, 2020), but it also mat- ters who gets to write about conservation and whose ideas receive attention. Efforts to diversify authorship can be ef- fective, and can work. In Oryx, the proportion of articles with first authors from countries outside North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa was 11%
wa12@cam.ac.uk Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, and Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
in 2000 but 55%in 2023 (86%if you include second authors; M. Fisher, pers. comm., 2024). This is not the pattern for most journals. The second thing that strikes me about the world of
Homo conservationensis is how little some things have chan- ged. The founders of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire were most concerned about the demise of large mammals. The journal’s first issue led with a memorandum to Lord Cromer (Governor-General of colonial Sudan) about a game reserve: its signatories were ‘deeply interested in the preservation of the larger animals, some of which are so rapidly disappearing under British Control’ (sic, SPWFE, 1904,p. 2). Justified by arguments about keystone or flagship species, large mammals still hold their place in conservation hearts (Walpole & Leader-Williams, 2002; Lorimer, 2015). They also remain key concerns of Oryx authors: over half the papers in vol- ume 57 (2023) concerned mammals. Although I share a cul- tural attunement tomammalian charisma, this predilection troubles me: wemay speak of biodiversity, but if people look closely at what we do they will see the continuing pull of charismatic megafauna. Fortunately, there are voices warn- ing of the dangers of taxonomic tunnel vision, and pointing out the worlds beyond charisma (e.g. Fisher, 2019), and be- yond multi-cellular life (Redford, 2023). Mammals have given some ground: Oryx has had recent sections on plant conser- vation (July 2019, and this current issue of September 2024) and reptiles and amphibians (January 2023 and May 2024). But the issue persists:we remain as besotted with our flagships as any retired admiral. My third observation about Homo conservationensis is
how much more attention is now being given to the social dimensions of conservation. When I started my involve- ment in Oryx, conservation journal papers rarely explored how people live alongside wildlife, or how their economies or societies worked. Papers were about wildlife, and humans appeared mainly as threats, to be opposed, outwitted, di- verted or controlled. Understanding them was secondary. In time, calls to make wildlife pay its way (e.g. Eltringham, 1994) or debates about community conservation (e.g. Adams & Hulme, 2001) evolved into work on markets for wildlife, or how inequality, ethnicity, gender and power shaped biodiversity and social outcomes. Yet no human ap- peared on the cover of Oryx until 2005 (volume 39(4)). It was an understated debut—a tiny Brookesia chameleon on a rather grubby human thumb (Carpenter&Robson, 2005). People now feature more often (e.g. once each in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 volumes). This is possible because more authors now wish to write about people and conservation
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, provided the original article is properly cited. Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 545–546 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001285
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