people in such supposedly ‘wild’ places has
seemed an increasingly significant concep-
tual and practical problem. As people have
been discovered in, or have intensified
their use of land set aside for nature in
reserves and national parks, those people
began to be seen as unnatural, threaten-
ing the balance of nature.^20 Most indige-
nous and pre-colonial conservation prac-
tices and protected areas went unrecord-
ed, and most are forgotten by contempo-
rary conservation planners.^21The concept of protected areas suggested
that ‘nature’ could in some way be isolated
from environments transformed by human
action, but in doing so it
outlawed numerous rural
livelihoods. In the USA as
much as in Africa, it re-
classified hunters as poach-
ers, wood-cutters as law-
breakers, and small farm-
ers as the destroyers of
natural vegetation.^22 Local
subsistence and market
uses of living resources in
‘natural’ or ‘wild’ areas has
been judged a problem not
only because it is done in
supposedly ‘pristine’ nature, but also for
the manner of such hunting (the whole
issue of the cruelty of low-technology
hunting and trapping) and because it has
not been based on scientific analysis of
sustainable levels of harvest.Since 1950, conservationists have tended
to imagine that ideas of wilderness are
universal, and are bound to touch some-
where on indigenous ideas about nature.
There is no reason to expect this to be the
case, because ideas about the value of the
wild are the products of human culture.^23
Ideas of wilderness as something wonder-
ful are culturally specific. A conservation
ethic based on the standard Western tran-
scendental and Romantic idea of wilder-ness, for example, can be quite meaning-
less to people of different tradition and
ethnicity.^24 The concept of ‘wild’ nature,
like ‘proper hunting’ is a product of
thought among certain classes of people in
industrialised countries but has been
adopted wholesale by the conservation
movement.Hunting, and the romance of
“poaching”
European hunters abroad took with them a
long tradition of opposition to subsistence
hunting, and a long tradition among British
and other European landowners ofConservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
The cconcept oof ppro-
tected aareas ssug-
gested tthat ‘‘nature’
could iin ssome wway
be iisolated ffrom
environments
transformed bby
human aaction, bbut
in ddoing sso iit oout-
lawed nnumerous
rural llivelihoods.
Figure 2.Arguably, humans have been the most
discussed and the least understood species in
conservation through the twentieth century.
(Courtesy Juan Moreias).