In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term encapsulating the overwhelming impact of human activity on the Earth system. How are these debates reshaping conservation thought, strategy and practice? How are they manifested in and across diverse contexts? How, conversely, are global conservation developments and ‘Anthropocenic’ phenomena apprehended and reshaped on the ground? The GLO project explored such urgent questions through an unprecedented study of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in a planetary moment marked by flux and uncertainty. Combining in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled cross-context comparison, it approached orangutan conservation as a sprawling, uneven terrain across which the rapidly-evolving relationship between conservation and ‘the Anthropocene’ was playing out. Its objectives were 1) to examine if and how contemporary conservation was being ‘scaled up’ and re(con)figured in and for ‘the Anthropocene’; and 2) to cut ‘the Anthropocene’ down to size by exploring how it was experienced, conceptualized, contested or refused across multiple conservation settings.
GLO used synchronous, multi-sited ethnography to build a picture of the flows and tensions shaping one global conservation nexus. It constituted a rare multi-sited portrait of one global conservation nexus, tracing how images, idea(l)s, resources, people and policies moved across it. This was thus a snapshot of a conjuncture in which conservation was ‘scaling up’ its imaginaries, strategies and alliances to deal with planetary concerns, while simultaneously grappling with the inescapably anthropogenic dimensions of its work. These developments, however, were not easily reconciled with ground-level realities. Our research revealed deep tensions between the iconicity of orangutans in the Global North and their relative insignificance to indigenous/rural communities in Borneo and Sumatra. By extracting orangutans from local moral, social and environmental relations and according them special privileges, conservation can cause tensions and resentment among local stakeholders, who often see them as another external party with interests in their land. Such concerns disrupt the imaginaries of planetary commons and ‘the need to save’ that increasingly underpin conservation, laying bare its deeply political and unexceptional nature in these spaces. Indeed, the spread of Anthropocenic discourses and politics in international conservation can exacerbate inequalities in the places worst impacted by the Anthropocene (e.g. indigenous villagers displaced for orangutan protection).
These findings gave rise to four key analytics. 1) Responsibility unpacks the power dynamics and uneven stakes of orangutan conservation and/in/for the Anthropocene. Rather than thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene, we propose thinking the Anthropocene as responsibility in multiple senses, e.g. causality, effect, accountability, ownership. More than defining the Anthropocene, we thus raise more directed, relational questions about justice, care and repair. 2) Responsivity captures the processual, improvisatory dynamics through which human and nonhuman parties (inter)act in power-saturated spaces of the Anthropocene, without reducing them to moral exemplars or generic multispecies tangles. 3) In/visibilities highlights the contingent technologies, structures and processes through which responsibility is invoked, made in/visible, claimed and contested in Anthropocenic spaces. 4) Finally, we depict conservation as a frontier of care, foregrounding the geopolitical, interventionist, sometimes extractive nature of cross-species care and the intimate, affective dimensions of frontier spaces. Throughout the grant, we worked with conservation scientists and practitioners to explore how ethnographic research and methods could be used in conservation in critical, productive and transformative ways. Our outputs and activities were thus not solely academic but geared towards facilitating more just, contextually specific and effective conservation outcomes.
