Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation

  • William M. Adams
Earthscan: 2004. 328 pp. £55 (hbk), £16.95 (pbk) 1844070565 | ISBN: 1-844-07056-5
Deep trouble: turtles, once a common sight on Caribbean reefs, have been destroyed by hunting. Credit: STEPHEN FRINK COLLECTION/ALAMY

I recently observed a UK delegate at a conference lecturing a representative of a developing country's wildlife ministry on how they should be doing conservation. The question under discussion was not the one that might have been asked a few decades ago — “What are you doing for the species?” — but rather, “What are you doing about rural poverty?”

Bill Adams' book Against Extinction encourages us to reflect on the continuities and upheavals in the way we do conservation. As Adams insightfully points out, most conservationists have three time-frames: the long term, for comparing extinction rates, for example; their lifetime, for nostalgia about paradise lost; and the immediate crisis, for most of their interventions. He wants us to look at conservation on another time-frame — the past century — to help us understand the route that led to our current conservation philosophies, and, in so doing, to reflect on our unwitting prejudices and assumptions.

Ignorance of recent history, described by Daniel Pauly as the “shifting baseline syndrome”, is a pernicious and prevalent problem in conservation. J. B. C. Jackson has pointed out that current observations of Caribbean reefs are of an ecosystem that has already been fundamentally altered from its natural state by human intervention. Observers in the fifteenth century, before turtle populations were ravaged by hunting, described densities so high that it seemed ships might run aground on them. Jackson memorably described present-day Caribbean reef systems, which have few turtles, as being like the Serengeti without the ungulates. There are many examples in which our ignorance of human and ecological history clouds our understanding of contemporary events. So I applaud Adams' insistence that we look back to obtain a true perspective on the conservation movement today.

Adams' definition of conservation is narrow, and he makes it clear from the start that he is considering only the birth of conservation among Western colonial nations, starting around the middle of the nineteenth century. Central to the book is an organization now called Fauna and Flora International, which celebrated its centenary last year. It has led the way in Western conservation thinking throughout the past century, changing from its origins as an influential group of colonial hunters primarily focusing on game animals in Africa to its current role, working through local, non-governmental organizations and concentrating on in-country capacity-building.

I can sympathize with the need to tell a manageable and coherent story, but it is frustrating to have such a narrow view of the roots of conservation perpetuated, particularly by someone who is well aware of this view's limitations. To take just one example, the Mongolians pride themselves on having set up the world's first National Park in 1778 — as do the Americans in 1872. Clearly there are issues surrounding the definition, but it is a shame that the latter view of history is ubiquitously and uncritically repeated in conservation texts.

One of the pleasures of the book is Adams' explanation of the complex inter-twining over the past century of the concepts of sustainable use, hunting and wildlife preservation. Some concepts, such as biodiversity and sustainable development, are recent additions; others have shifted in and out of fashion, metamorphosing as they went. Although the early conservationists tended to be exclusionary in their outlook, they were well aware of the potential of sustainable use as a conservation tool. We can be sure that most of the ‘new ideas’ of conservation were actually reawakened as the dynamic culture of conservation shifted again.

Most of the book is determinedly factual and full of detail, with many interesting examples and case studies — although readers will be hard-pressed to find them again, as the book has no bibliography or visual aids such as chronologies, relying instead on chapter-based endnotes and an inadequate index. The book will also be frustrating for those who wish to find scientifically based analyses of the pros and cons of different conservation approaches; that is not the book's aim. The final chapter, in which Adams outlines his vision for conservation, seems to belong to a different book. The ideas in it are challenging and raise fascinating questions, but seem strangely disengaged from his previous careful historical analysis.

One of the things that makes conservation interesting and challenging is that its practitioners have many perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. This cultural diversity is growing as social scientists become more fully engaged. One of the great hopes for conservation in the future is this need to look at issues through others' eyes. Just as ecologists now need to be able to perform quantitative analyses, so recently trained conservationists cannot get by without learning social science. This book is a major contribution towards opening conservationists' eyes to another world of historical and cultural understanding, which I welcome wholeheartedly.