Conservation is about saving wildlife and wild places in specific locales.
Steven Sanderson is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Wildlife Conservation Society, so he has to say that. But of course we all know that conservation is also saving crop varieties in genebanks, don’t we. Don’t we? Hello?
In a era of climate change, we have to hope that there is a “corridor” leading to a new appropriate environment. In many cases, at least for the crop diversity still found only in the field, the only corridor unlikely to be a dead-end will be the one leading to a genebank.
Wild places? “Humans have had an effect on nearly all environments of Earth” (first tenet of historical ecology).
Wildlife conservation is heavily biased in itself. But cuddly or beautiful, eminently “wild” species are often strategically used as flagships for whole ecosystems. “Saving the turtle” just sounds better than “sustainable coast management”. That we are dealing with heavily human-influenced environments is, however, hidden from view by current communication strategies.
I think it would be good to move to a communication strategy about conservation that makes a less sharp distinction between wild and domesticated landscapes/species. This would be closer to a historical ecology perspective and hence be more realistic. Being less misanthropic could make conservation (hopefully) also less prone to donor fatigue.
The recently deceased anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that what is sacred and protected in traditional cultures is what is anomalous because it does not neatly fit binary categories. So arguing for the protection of ambiguously wild/domesticated landscapes or species would make good sense in savage minds. (And aren´t we all savages?)