A Compelling Ontology of Wildness for Conservation Ecology

Rick Elmore (bio)
Appalachian State University

A review of Lorimer, Jamie. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene is a bold, provocative, and compelling rethinking of wildlife conservation in the age of the anthropocene. Lorimer’s book is driven by the conviction that “the Anthropocene challenges the modern figure of Nature that has become so central to Western environmental thought, politics, and action” (1). In the anthropocene, Lorimer argues, the natural world is hybrid, nonlinear, and multiple in contrast to its traditional essential, circular, balanced, singular, and holistic image (2). Lorimer’s work takes its place alongside that of Val Plumbwood and Timothy Morton in arguing that the concept of Nature no longer helps us think the state of the world, presenting us with the need “to develop and illustrate a multinatural approach to conservation after the Anthropocene” (5). Lorimer develops “an alternative ontology of wildlife that environmentalists might use in place of Nature for conservation” (20). What excites Lorimer about the notion of “wildlife” is its inherently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, and ever-changing character; wildlife being a concrete instance of the multinatural, always “becoming” character of the natural world. Wildlife and the “ontological politics” associated with it “flags the degree to which any management decision is a biopolitical act,” a managing of life at the level of populations (33). In light of this biopolitics of conservation, Lorimer provides a wide ranging and thorough review of recent literature in conservation, philosophy, geography, and ecology, one that marks the complex transdisciplinary nature of conservation ecology, while proposing a fundamentally “optimistic,” clear, nuanced, and practicable way forward for conservation ecology.

The first chapter sketches Lorimer’s ontology of wildlife, drawing inspiration from sources in ecology, ethnology, and conservation biology, as well as from the “vital materialisms” of Latour, Deleuze, Haraway, and Bennett (21). It is the thinking of this later group, and particularly Deleuze, that most influences Lorimer’s ontology, “a concern for difference … [and] becoming” lying at the heart of his account (32). Adopting Deleuze’s distinction between “difference” and “diversity,” where difference concerns becoming and diversity concerns the given, Lorimer argues that much work in conservation focuses on given, “extant diversity,” capturing the diversity of an ecosystem at a particular historical moment and then universalizing and essentializing this snapshot as the basis of its conservation efforts (32). The central problem with this approach is that it “renders the present eternal at the expense of the generative processes that keep ecology alive” (33). To resist this focus on givenness, Lorimer proposes his “generative” ontology that, like many process and vitalist ontologies, takes the process of becoming as the reality of existence. However, the originality of Lorimer’s account is that it shows “wildlife” to be the reality of ontology. As he writes near the end of Wildlife in the Anthropocene, “Wildlife is […] multinatural. It is immanent. It is difference—where difference is intensive, concerned less with the diversity of current forms and more with the unruly potential to become otherwise” (181). In “wildlife,” Lorimer finds a more concrete, intuitive, and accurate figure for characterizing existence as a process, capturing the dynamic and substantive nature of reality in a less abstract sense than “difference” or “becoming.” For Lorimer, ontology is wildlife, and he develops the essential features of “wildlife” around four themes: “hybridity, nonhuman agency, immanence, and topology” (21).

Hybridity recognizes a complexity to the world that challenges any thinking of nature, “wilderness,” or “the human” as discrete or fundamentally separable entities, suggesting that all existence is always already an assemblage, a mixture. Noting Donna Haraway’s work on interspecies interactions, Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogeneis, and Kathryn Yusoff’s geological work on the essential biochemical entanglement of the bio and the geo, Lorimer argues that one simply cannot conceive ontology as dealing with discrete, essentializable, and more or less self-sufficient entities (21–25). What is important about the hybridity of ontology is that it undermines the applicability of categories like “purity” and “authenticity,” as well as disrupting conservation ecology’s reliance on an essential, pure, or authentic notion of nature to ground its conservation efforts. This lack of purity and ontological hybridity highlights, Lorimer argues, the underappreciated role nonhuman agency plays in ecology and ontology.

There is a long-standing, transdisciplinary critique of anthropocentrism that rethinks the privilege and distinction between “the human” and “the animal.” Yet Lorimer argues that the power of these critiques is measured by their ability to offer an alternative account of nonhuman agency. Lorimer takes actor-network theory (ANT) as a pioneering discourse of this kind of agency, the shift to a “flat ontology” in which all “actants” have a “generalized symmetry” in their ability to act providing the ground on which to develop a full blown account of nonhuman agency (26). Lorimer expands this account of nonhuman agency in the second chapter by developing the concept of “nonhuman charisma.” However, the importance of this ontological hybridity and non-human agency is that it pushes us towards a commitment to ontological “immanence.”

Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lorimer describes “immanence” as “an ecological assemblage composed of a single substance and characterized by emergent properties, rather than transcendence essences” (28). Immanence marks reality as composed of a single “matter” but a “matter” lacking any essential nature, immanence “suggest[ing] a speculative and multinatural ontology, sure of the existence of matter but perpetually uncertain as to what matter might become” (28). On Lorimer’s account, reality is a real, substantial plane of immanence that is never fully captured in any process, representation, or conception of it, and this constitutive, real “uncertainty” or “wildness” grounds both Lorimer’s critique of any essential, univocal, or clearly differentiated “topological” categories (for example, “alien/native, situ/ex situ, and wild/domestic”) and his insistent deprivileging of “the human,” since material immanence must be ontologically anterior to the very differentiation between the human and the nonhuman. Overall, it is these two basic assertions that Lorimer is most intent on establishing, his generative ontology of wildlife seeming not unlike Manuel DeLanda’s ontology of assemblages, even though he only mentions Delanda in a footnote (28). Although Lorimer’s account of ontology is somewhat schematic, it is justified not simply because Lorimer’s project aims to develop an account of conservation ecology rather than simply an ontology, but also because the goal of Lorimer’s ontology is to show how conservation ecology and particularly conservationists themselves are products of the very systems they study, a goal that does not require an exhaustive account of the ontological relationships between humans and the natural world. Additionally, Lorimer’s insistence on the central role humans have to play in conservation allows his ontology to side step the specter of anthropocentrism that often haunts immanent or flat ontologies.¹ Hence, Lorimer’s ontology presents reality as a wild, uncertain, complex, and immanent “assemblage,” in which nonhuman agency holds far more causal efficacy than human actions, and it is this final characteristic that marks the realism of Lorimer’s ontology, the deprivileging of human consciousness and thought unseating the basic idealism of the traditional, anthropocentric account of nature. This is admittedly a fairly minimal notion of “realism.” However, the primary strength of Lorimer’s ontology is its explication of the role of nonhuman agency in shaping reality.

Having argued that the fundamental litmus test of any ontology of immanence is its ability to account for nonhuman agency, Lorimer turns in the second chapter to argue that nonhuman species “configure” our “perception and subsequent evaluation” of them (39). More specifically, Lorimer expands the concept of nonhuman charisma, a notion long used in conservation ecology to “describe a set of species that have popular appeal” (39). Nonhuman charisma describes not just the aesthetic aspects of the nonhuman world that draw our attention but also “the material properties of an organism […] and the feelings engendered in proximal, multisensory encounters between a conservationist and their target organism” (40). Charisma, in a variety of forms, “ecological,” “aesthetic,” and “corporeal,” is the mechanism that circumscribes, directs, and structures the processes and forms of difference that grab our attention, move our bodies and minds, and call to us emotionally. Following the ethnological work of Jakob von Uexküll, Lorimer argues that “the physiological and phenomenological configuration of the human body puts a range of filtering mechanisms on our experience of the world that disproportionately endow certain nonhumans with ecological charisma,” our fairly limited range of sensory, olfactory, acoustic, and electromagnetic capabilities structuring what processes, objects, and entities can appear, move, and interest us. Appreciating the agency of the natural world requires the recognition that the world does not call to us or affect us evenly because of the physiological and phenomenological realities of human life. One of the key results of this recognition of ecological charisma and human enthnology is that it shows the inherently biopolitical nature of conservation ecology.

Once one recognizes the essential role of nonhuman charisma in shaping conservation ecology, one sees that conservation is best understood as “a biopolitics,” a concern for the health, diversity, and flourishing of ecosystems at the level of population (58). Lorimer argues that the popular notion of biodiversity is an archetypal example of this biopolitics: “biodiversity conservation seeks to secure the future health and diversity of life” through “panoptic knowledge, comprehensive accounting, and efficient, instrumental management” (58–59). The promise of biodiversity is to “secure the full diversity of life at the interconnected scales of genes, species, and ecosystems,” allowing for a maximal flourishing of life through panoptic knowledge and rational use of resources (75). This vision of conservation must obviously confront the realities of limited funding and incomplete knowledge, realities that necessarily force conservationists to prioritize certain projects, species, and ecosystems over others. For Lorimer, however, this is not the primary complication with this approach to conservation. Rather, he argues that biodiversity, while claiming to be driven by a rational interest in the maximal flourishing of life, is, in fact, governed by a “species ontology” guided by the kinds of nonhuman charisma outlined above.

The third chapter presents a case study of nonhuman charisma and its affective influence on conservationists and the science of conservation ecology by showing how it directs existing biological knowledge in the UK. For example, birds account for 65% of the total existing biological record, dwarfing all other categories (the next closest group, Vascular plants, sit at 22%). Similarly, with the exception of butterflies and beetles (which collectively amount to 3.6% of the existing record), “invertebrates have been largely neglected,” accounting for only 8% of the total existing biological record (73, 75). This distribution supports the notion that ecology and conservation have not been primarily driven by a rational, panoptic logic but have rather been directed by nonhuman charisma: the fact that we can see and hear birds more easily than other less dynamic and quieter entities explains their domination of the existing records. In addition, Lorimer contends that even “common definitions of species […] favor the classification of higher-order animal species with greater ecological charisma—for example, those that reproduce sexually and are more easily differentiated by the human eye” (69).

Lorimer spends most of the rest of the book showing in detail how his ontology of wildlife and its concomitant notion of nonhuman agency allow us to think differently about existing conservation practices, particularly the dominant models of “composition” and “rewilding” ecology. Lorimer turns in later chapters to two elements unique to contemporary conservation ecology: the media representation of animals as an affective logic “mobilized to cue strong emotional responses” (120), and the “commodification of conservation” in the “selling of privatized encounters to save nature” (143).

For Lorimer, the mediatization and commodification of conservation are underappreciated yet profoundly powerful elements in current conservation practice, increasingly structuring how we both understand and enact conservation efforts. These two sites also develop the role of affect and nonhuman agency central to Lorimer’s account, showing how the general experience of conservation is mediated by representations and capital. In particular, a focus on these sites acknowledges that most individuals in contemporary industrial societies rarely encounters the animals, areas, or processes to which conservation is directed except through print, online, and television media or relatively expensive ecological tourism (119). This gives these forms of media and commercialization immense power to shape most people’s understanding and relationship to conservation. Lorimer looks at the role of “[s]entimentality, sympathy, awe, and curiosity” in wildlife films as particularly fecund sites at which our “preferences” for some species and processes are cultivated (136). This is a logic that obviously establishes and privileges certain charismatic, “flagship” species, yet it is also a site that has the potential to “open thinking and feeling spaces for the mobile, mutable, and emotional dimensions of difference […] and thus push for different, more convivial political/ethical sensibilities towards (non)human others” (124). Hence, this media logic is not simply a negative fact of contemporary conservation but a site that conservationists should be thinking through directly.

In the eighth chapter, Lorimer takes up the growing field of urban ecology. He is particularly interested in the way urban ecology contests the figuration of nature as “protected spaces,” and in “the spatial and topological dimension of conceiving wildlife” (162). What are wild spaces? What makes them wild? And how does changing our conception of nature change our conception of wilderness and wildlife? One of the primary changes wildlife offers to our thinking of conservation is to contest the importance of the figure of the “island” as the spatial model of conservation, a change that also contests the practice of “fortress conservation,” in which, in the name of protecting areas, inhabitants of those areas are evicted or regulated (163). Hence, urban ecology offers us a way of thinking a more “open-ended conservation,” which Lorimer characterizes as “a fluid topology of wildlife,” one that recognizes the dynamic, moving character of wilderness. Lorimer is quick to acknowledge that this model is “playing with fire,” replacing “a qualitative model” of stability with a “quantitative model” of changing magnitudes and rhythms (176) Yet, for him, urban ecology offers the clearest existing model for a rethought ontology of the natural world as becoming.

In his conclusion, Lorimer frames his new ontology and thinking of wildlife and ecology as a response to the anthropocene. He suggests that the dominant models of conservation (composition, rewilding, control, fortress, etc.) must be rethought, not simply because they can be made to work better but also because, as his book shows, current forms of conservation ecology start from a thinking of nature and the conservationist’s relationship to nature that fail to acknowledge deeply enough the affective, charismatic, nonhuman, and ontologically “wild” character of the world. Hence Lorimer ends by outlining what he calls a “cosmopolitics for wildlife”: a conservation ecology that acknowledges that “[l]ife in the Anthropocene is too strange to be human and afforded rights. It is too social and multiple to be objectified and given a price. And it is too feral to be pure or risky to be liberated in the wilderness” (179). He compares this cosmopolitics to the notion of the “rambunctious garden” developed in the urban ecology of Emma Marris, and follows Marris in the conviction that the “novel ecosystem of the Anthropocene” requires a thinking of ecology that is, because of the role of nonhuman agency, more “exuberant and unruly” than previously thought.

Lorimer also stakes out several concrete implications of his cosmopolitics, not the least of which is that, given his conviction that conservation is inherently biopolitical, there is no one “Natural” way “of cutting up” the diversity of life, meaning that, for him, “there are legitimate reasons for conservationists to submit animals to pain and death and even to let animal cultures and species go extinct” (188). In this sense, conservation, for Lorimer, always appears as a mode of “biosecurity”: “nurturing relations and cultivating abnegations in order to enable companionship between humans and other species,” a project that is not without its violences nor without a certain figuring of “the human” and “the animal” (190). Lorimer proposes that the immense role of nonhuman agency shows conservation to be at root a “democratic” and necessarily “public” endeavor, as this recognition forces the acknowledgement that reality, ecology, and conservation are “the property of a more-than-human citizenry unable or indisposed to participate in relations of commodified consumption” (192). While charting the way in which a conservation ecology based on an ontology of multinatural wildness and becoming might seem to cohere all too well with the flux and flow of a neoliberal understanding of the world, Lorimer insists convincingly that Wildlife in the Anthropocene is a book that, while not denying that the anthropocene is a “disaster,” encourages us to ask what possibilities might still remain for the practice of conservation ecology.

Footnotes

1. Brassier provides an excellent summary of this problem.

Works Cited

Brassier, Ray. “Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’.” Under Influence – Philosophical Festival Drift (2014). Eds. Channa van Dijk, et. al. Omnia, 2015. 64–80. Web. 12 Sep. 2016.