After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans ed. by Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne (review)

After Preservation has arrived at the precise time that conservationist thinking is undergoing a sea change. Some of this change is of its own design, embedded in the project of conservation, exposing the ideological fissures — the focus on anthropocentric or biocentric modelling, for instance — that threaten to overtake one of the central normative tenets of the American environmental movement. Other aspects of change that have increasingly shaped the conservation agenda are inspired by outside influences such as money, politics, and influence. As a result of this new conservation paradigm, environmental scientists have been forced to adapt to changing policy regimes and university funding models while big tent environmental organizations have tailored their approach to accommodate big-ticket donors and government agencies that see value in the kind of accountable metrics that the New Conservation can provide. The question at the heart of the book, and ultimately at the heart of modern conservation and environmentalism, is what form of nature are we trying, or ought we try, to preserve? After Preservation is filled with wildly disparate answers, opinions, and rejoinders from scholars and practitioners who have devoted their professional lives to understanding the problem of nature. The book is important, then, not least because it exposes rifts, tensions, and contradictions within the modern environmental movement but also because it ultimately shows that a conservation approach based in plurality might be best positioned to yield constructive results in the age of the Anthropocene.

Indeed the question of the Anthropocene is firmly positioned at the heart of the book. Contributors were given very little editorial guidance; instead they were encouraged to submit reflections on “the future of nature preservation in the Anthropocene” (7). It is clear that the Anthropocene is a polarizing concept. Some authors took the carte blanche opportunity to expand on new currents in the social and environmental sciences, to propose new engagements with the preservation agenda, or to offer new readings of the old nostrums of American conservation. Emma Marris writes about the “emergent properties” of nature as a “rambunctious garden” to rival the “sunny pro-development technophilia” (44–46) of the new conservation, and Bill McKibben mobilizes the language of the social sciences — “power structures” and “networks” (195) — to argue that ecology, not nuclear physics, will soon be regarded as the greatest modern invention. Marris, McKibben, and others develop the Anthropocene as a productive metaphor that can be used to educate and provide a platform for imagining the twenty-first century natural/cultural world.

Others cannot countenance a view of nature based in human intervention, one that necessarily detracts from the possibility of nature as a pristine object outside of the social and economic relations that have imperiled it. Dave Foreman, dipping into the deep ecology well, rails against the “anthropoceniacs” (50–58) who, in his vision, have sacrificed any possibility of protecting a pristine nature with their technocratic rationales, market-based metrics, and scientific orthodoxies. We are offered more measured appraisals in this vein by Ben Minteer, one of several commentators to invoke promethean lessons in his critique of the “environmental pragmatists” (101) seeking to harness technology and geoengineering to better shape nature to favour human fortunes. Or we could turn to John Vucetich, Michael Paul Nelson, and Chelsea Batavia who suggest that the Anthropocene is a “disturbing name [with] limited insight” (66) in order to take its originators, Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen, to task for emphasizing aspirational technological solutions over the social and economic problems at the heart of the conservation crisis. For all of its injunctions to take the problem of saving nature seriously, there is some axe grinding in the pages After Preservation.

It is clear after reading this volume that there is a need to historicize the concept of the Anthropocene. There are several useful contributions from eminent...