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The introduction engages the Anthropocene, identifying the deficiencies in existing accounts before outlining the approach that is developed in the book. It sketches the theoretical framework before detailing the empirical materials through which the argument is developed.

The conclusion summarizes the argument developed in the book to synthesize an approach to conservation after the Anthropocene. It then reflects on three significant challenges that face the model developed in the book.

Chapter one develops the concept of wildlife as a replacement for Nature for conservation. It does so through a discussion of the four themes of hybridity, nonhuman agency, immanence and topology. It presents wildlife as a multiple, subsuming a number of discordant ontologies. This argument is illustrated with reference to Asian elephants.

Chapter five compares conservation as composition with rewilding, an alternative model concerned with ecological processes. Through a critical examination of the use of large herbivores on a polder landscape in the Netherlands, this chapter presents conservation as comprising wild experiments involving open-ended deliberations with multiple and discordant humans and nonhumans.

Chapter six examines the role of moving imagery in conservation. We live in an age of the screen in which media play vital roles in framing and governing human and nonhuman life. Focusing on elephants, this chapter critically examines four prevalent affective logics in the genres that characterize wildlife media.

Chapter seven develops the concept of nonhuman charisma to explore how encounters between people and wildlife are valued in conservation. It explores the commodification of charisma in captivity and in-situ. It examines the deleterious consequences for people and wildlife of contemporary forms of neoliberal conservation focused on charismatic species.

Chapter eight explores questions of space. It traces the binary understanding of conservation territories that informs Nature conservation. Focusing on urban wildlife and recent enthusiasms for ecological connectivity it examines the potential of other topologies for wildlife including network and fluid geographies that appreciate the mobilities of nonhumans themselves.

Chapter three examines prevalent practices of biodiversity conservation as biopolitics. Focusing on the UK, it explores how biodiversity conservation seeks to secure life through identifying, counting, researching and nurturing populations of species. It presents conservation as oligoptical – framing and performing the world in the shape of partial databases and skillsets.

Chapter two examines how conservationists come to know wildlife. It explore field science as processes of learning to be affected in which embodied, skilled practitioners tune into the world. It examines the character and role of nonhuman charisma in shaping the conduct of conservation.

Chapter four examines a common mode of conservation biopolitics concerned with saving species from political and ecological change – or conservation as composition. It focuses on the conservation of corncrakes and crofters in the Scottish Hebrides. It traces the scientific, political and economic practices through which their fate has been secured, before identifying some of the problems with this static model.