In Paperback: Wildlife in the Anthropocene

In PaperbackWildlife in the Anthropocene:Conservation After Natureby Jamie LorimerUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2015Buried deep inside Oxford professor Jamie Lorimer's book Wildlife in the Anthopocene: Conservation After Nature (now in paperback from the University of Minnesota Press), buried under sometimes ten, sometimes fifteen layers of nearly impenetrable academese and conferenced-paper jargon, is an important consideration of the ways mankind's entire conception of the natural world must change in the dawning of the “Anthropocene,” the era in which mankind's own actions affect every tiny corner of the planet, altering the destinies of whole species in ways only the climate and rogue asteroids had done in previous epochs. The idea of “nature” that humans have reflexively used for millennia – an unruly and dangerously unaccountable place where homo sapiens is just one player on a crowded stage – is, Lorimer argues, now ending as we watch, being replaced by an entirely stage-managed simulacrum in which there might still be a huge variety of life, but all that life will be arranged and controlled by humanity. We'll all be living in a time “after nature.”The chief non-human beneficiaries of such a time will of course be those species that are either allied with humans, useful to humans, or admired by humans. One animal that belongs in all three of those categories, the elephant, gets a pleasing amount of attention in the pages of Wildlife in the Anthropocene, as does the entire concept of “charismatic” species – and one of the main vehicles by which their charisma is communicated to the world's population:

Disney's animations are incredibly successful at evoking sentimentality. They work off a lucrative formula that guarantees tear-jerking, heartwarming, and teeth-grinding moments to sympathetic audiences. Childhoods steeped in such viewings no doubt influence citizens' sensibilities toward charismatic animals in later life. Indeed, it could be argued that efforts to conserve species such as elephants, pandas, and tigers would have gotten nowhere without the moving images of Disney and his colleagues in the middle of the twentieth century. Sentimental appeals exert a powerful influence on the wallets and politics of the urban middle classes.

But much like a pristine ocean strand after a catastrophic oil spill, soon gunk is engulfing Lorimer's book, weighing it down, sludging its wing-pinions, clogging its lungs. For long stretches of the text, passages like this:

A fluid topology seeks to grant more lassitude to change and the dynamics of the relations that come to define the identity and location of an object over time and space. It thus gives scope to the difference of novel urban ecosystems and the nonlinear nonhuman becomings that I associate with an ontology of wildlife. It allows for hybrid ecologies inhabited and shaped by urban citizens and sensed as vernacular natures.

… are followed only by passages like this:

Distributive justice for wildlife conservation involves a more-than-human citizenry linked by affective relations that exceed those of production and exchange. It features subjects, forms of value, and affective logics beyond the narrow confines of human reason or interpersonal sympathies. It requires differentiated senses of responsibility to distant human and nonhuman others.

No book on so interesting a subject should be so turgid, but readers with a high tolerance for academic hyperventilating will find a lot of food for thought here, mixed in with the affective logics and nonhuman others.