The conservationist is a strange beast: Homo conservationensis, the human who cares for the rest of nature (Sandbrook, Reference Sandbrook2015). 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, Reference Prendergast and Adams2003). Before the second world war, their journal offered an explicitly colonial view of the world of conservation 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 dominated by Western ideas about humanity and non-human life (e.g. Kothari, Reference Kothari2021). Much has been written about the need to decolonize conservation, and about its diversity and divisions (e.g. Milner-Gulland, Reference Milner-Gulland2021), and this remains important. Open-access journals—like Oryx—enable published ideas to be read widely (Fisher, Reference Fisher2020), but it also matters who gets to write about conservation and whose ideas receive attention. Efforts to diversify authorship can be effective, 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% 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 changed. 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, Reference Walpole and Leader-Williams2002; Lorimer, Reference Lorimer2015). They also remain key concerns of Oryx authors: over half the papers in volume 57 (2023) concerned mammals. Although I share a cultural attunement to mammalian charisma, this predilection troubles me: we may 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 warning of the dangers of taxonomic tunnel vision, and pointing out the worlds beyond charisma (e.g. Fisher, Reference Fisher2019), and beyond multi-cellular life (Redford, Reference Redford2023). Mammals have given some ground: Oryx has had recent sections on plant conservation (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 involvement 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, diverted or controlled. Understanding them was secondary. In time, calls to make wildlife pay its way (e.g. Eltringham, Reference Eltringham1994) or debates about community conservation (e.g. Adams & Hulme, Reference Adams and Hulme2001) evolved into work on markets for wildlife, or how inequality, ethnicity, gender and power shaped biodiversity and social outcomes. Yet no human appeared 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, Reference Carpenter and Robson2005). 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 (e.g. sections in Oryx on gender in November 2021, human rights in May 2023, and human–wildlife interactions in July 2023).
So, has Homo conservationensis learned to ‘think like the human’ they are (cf. Adams, Reference Adams2007)? Somewhat. Most conservationists still study biology first, but they are often now taught about human society, and how to research it (especially in graduate courses). There is a considerable literature on conservation social science for them to read (Scales et al., Reference Scales, Miller and Mascia2023). Yet conservation research remains narrow and empirical in the questions it asks about human society. Papers on people in conservation journals tend to be quantitative and not qualitative in method and often appear without any discussion of theories about how societies work. Many are relatively narrow in disciplinary terms, drawing on economics, sociology or psychology more than on anthropology, political science, human geography or political ecology—let alone the humanities, where debates about being human and non-human (fundamental to conservation) are both rich and compelling.
So, although Homo conservationensis has certainly started to try to understand humans and their societies and economies, we do so with the caution of laboratory scientists poking a novel virus in a containment lab. We are also more comfortable using social science to look out at society than to look in, at ourselves (social science for conservation not social science on conservation; Sandbrook et al., Reference Sandbrook, Adams, Büscher and Vira2013). This is understandable, but short-sighted. The comparison with development studies, a discipline predicated on the eradication of poverty, is instructive. Critical analysis of development policy and its powerful institutions (the World Bank for example) is regarded as essential to keep development efforts moving and on course.
If I am allowed one last observation, it is about how Homo conservationensis writes, and for whom. Conservation debates, at least within academic journals, too easily become a dialogue among relatively privileged researchers (Gossa et al., Reference Gossa, Fisher and Milner-Gulland2014). The promotional games beloved within universities reward so-called impact, but too many papers are speculative, outlining methods, procedures and tools for people on the ground who don't have the time to read about them, or the freedom, money or power to try them. Moreover, the clipped, passive–aggressive style of academic writing often serves, as Latin did for medieval clerics, to distance ordinary people. Yet conservation depends on such people utterly, both conservationists on the ground, and the many other individuals, communities and interest groups affected by what they think, say and do.
So it is important to write in ways that non-academics will understand. Complex ideas, and complex data, do not need to be unreadable (as the Economist demonstrates on a weekly basis). And while we are thinking about communication, surely formal research papers are only one way to get ideas across: how about poetry, song (Veríssimo, Reference Veríssimo2024), fiction (Brockington, Reference Brockington2024) or satire (Adams, Reference Adams2010)? Not all ideas are best expressed in stilted academic prose. Greater diversity of conservation writing (with all it risks in terms of potential loss of scientific authority and power) seems to me an important part of speaking, and thinking, like a nature-caring human.
This Editorial and the Oryx articles cited are available as a virtual issue at cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/virtual-issues.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Martin Fisher for many years of wisdom and sound advice.
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