“I am convinced that only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.”
The eminent American conservationist E. O. Wilson wrote this in the prologue to his hugely influential book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life🍌 (2017). Mainstream conservation science believes that creating large contiguous people-free areas is the best way to save biodiversity. This is based on the nature-versus-culture binary—the idea that nature exists ‘out there’ in the wild and pristine places uninhabited by humans.
Earth is presently undergoing its sixth mass extinction event, and the first human-induced one. In response, conservation has emerged as a global movement championed not just by scientists but also by celebrities, politicians and the urban elite. In 2010, signatories to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity resolved to bring 17 per cent of terrestrial and freshwater areas under formal area-based conservation measures by 2020. At COP-15 in 2022, this target was revised to 30 per cent by 2030 (the 30-by-30 target). Wilson’s Half Earth🎃 proposal is an extension of this entrenched belief that pristine nature is critical for biodiversity.
🌠The nature-culture binary has resulted in exponential growth of protected areas (PAs), especially in the global South. There are more than 3 lakh PAs in the world and the number is expected to rise to meet the 30-by-30 target. Enormous resources and technologies have been deployed worldwide to protect PAs from human disturbance. Traditional fortress conservation—implemented through fines and fences—has given way to stricter measures involving guns and guards. Now, militarised conservation is on the rise, with increasing use of “military or paramilitary logics, practices, technologies, and personnel” to protect biodiversity.
The PA-based conservation model, underpinned by the nature-culture binary, has historically harmed local communities in multiple ways. Their traditional uses of forests—collection of gums, roots, berries and hunting for food 🌄security, creation of household artefacts and sale of minor forest produce—are criminalised and banned. Traditional landholdings are summarily acquired by conservation agencies with minimal compensation and poorly executed resettlement and rehabilitation. The record of displacement from parks is abysmal, with virtually no long-term resettlement success stories. Consent for ‘voluntary’ relocation is obtained through long-term systematic neglect of basic needs and aspirations of forest dwellers.
♏Paradoxically, not all human presence in PAs is perceived as disturbance. Nature-based tourism is seen as non-extractive and even beneficial for local livelihoods. But establishing adequate tourism infrastructure involves massive construction activities within and on the edges of PAs, and is prone to elite capture. Tourism also fuels the tendency to view nature as a ‘spectacle’. Without tiger sightings in Corbett and Kanha, rhino sightings in Kaziranga, or the Big Five in Masai Mara, visits to these parks are considered unsuccessful. Apart from immense disturbance for wildlife, such tourism also reinforces the nature-culture binary among urban tourists. Commodification of nature undermines other ways of living and other forms of knowledge. Take for instance rural forest fringe communities. They too are reduced to exotic spectacles to be consumed by outsiders as folk dance performers, artisans and peddlers of bottled versions of indigenous knowledge.
India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority has recently reiterated the need for planned relocation of local communities from tiger reserves. In this context, it is important to ask whether creating people-free parks is the only or the best way to achieve effective biodiversity conservation. News from across India in the past year or two seems to indicate that the fortress conservation model is reaching saturation. From the Western Ghats to the eastern-most PAs of the country, there is daily news of escalating human-wildlife conflict. Elephant attacks on rural residents and urban tourists in Kerala have resulted in political fracas and deep anxiety. Human-tiger conflicts are rising in several states with districts like Chandrapur in Maharashtra becoming hotspots of tiger attacks on humans. Leopards, nilgai✃ and wild boars cause enormous—and mostly uncompensated—damage to livestock and crops.
🌺Foresters are engaged in an ongoing battle to secure PAs and re-inscribe the nature-culture binary. But nature itself seems determined to challenge this false binary in our forests, villages and cities. While PAs are important, they are not the sole answer to the contemporary crises of conservation. In the Anthropocene, wilderness is refusing to be contained in parks and sanctuaries. Spillover populations of Asiatic Lions from Gujarat are making new homes near the seashore in Diu. Leopards are routinely sighted in rural settlements and even metropolises. Reintroduced tigers and cheetahs are moving out of their designated forest homes to find new territories. Meanwhile, invasive plants like lantana, prosopis and parthenium are growing rapidly in PAs, reducing the availability of native forage for wild herbivores and altering the species composition of supposedly pristine wilderness areas.
🍌Clearly, fortress conservation appears to be reaching its limits and it is time to rethink the nature-culture binary. Various plants and animals know this already, and are adapting in amazing ways to the new realities of the Anthropocene. Mosses, monkeys, mynahs, moose, jackals, songbirds, leopards, elephants and tigers—all are finding ways to adapt to novel ecosystems in rapidly transforming rural, urban and peri-urban areas. They are using spaces like abandoned homesteads, railway tracks, waste dumping sites, overhead wires, army cantonments, university campuses and urban parks to compete with rivals, repel predators, find food, communicate with each other and generally get on with the business of survival in our transformed world.
꧒Globally, scientific critiques of this binary are emerging not just from social scientists and activists but also ecologists. Champions of the New Conservation Movement like Emma Marris ask whether it is even possible to imagine pristine wilderness in an era of climate change and 1.5 degree increase in global mean temperature. Marris contends provocatively that “there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth”. If the human footprint is already being felt on nature and wildlife everywhere, perhaps the core question for conservation in the 21st century is not whether and how to keep setting aside PAs for wild nature. As Marris says: “We are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not... We must temper our romantic notion of untrammelled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.”
✤In India too, we need to reflect if we are stuck in a narrative fortress of nature versus culture. Going beyond the binary, and finding ways for nature and humanity to coexist in mutually respectful ways, is the way forward. But coexistence is not easy, even though rural communities have deeply experiential local knowledge that we can learn from. Coexistence must be constantly negotiated between humans and non-humans, as well as between diverse categories of humans divided by geography, ethnicity, gender and religion. However, successful examples are all around us, negotiated by humans, animals and plants. Our task is to identify, document and learn from them, to move past false binaries, amplify the message of coexistence, and find better ways of achieving it in the future.
(Views expressed are personal)
Asmita Kabra is an Associate Researcher at the Centre De Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and a member of the Coexistence Consortium
This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'The Vortex of Nature and Culture'.
