Conserving nature: issues and perspectives

Abstract

The impulse to conserve wild nature is a distinctively western and urban one. It has flourished in diverse political environments. Marxist attacks on the destructive effect on nature of capitalism have found a niche here, as have conservative defences of the wildlife and ways of life of the countryside against encroachments from the city. Scientific approaches live side by side with more traditional outlooks criticised for their alleged emotionalism and anthropomorphism. Conservation of species and their habitats is seen on the one hand as integral to the survival of the human species, and on the other as having a profound irrelevance to human needs in developing countries. This diversity has its origins in the changing conceptions of nature to be found in western Europe from the late eighteenth century, in their turn a consequence of urban and industrial pressure on wild spaces, and of reaction to the casual ease with which rural landowners could tame their landscape for aesthetic effect. Variety is reflected in political organisation. There is here no one group for all seasons, but rather a continuous process of change, of fragmentation and consolidation, birth and extinction, harmony and rivalry. When conservation of nature has entered the agendas of interstate relations, or of intergovernmental organisations, it has often been difficult even to define the scope of the subject satisfactorily, let alone assure a degree of coordination among political actors.

Once, where detected worldlings now

Do penitential jobs

Exterminated species played

Who had not read their Hobbes.

W. H. Auden, Islands¹