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The term biodiversity was introduced in the 1980s as a novel framing for the human dependence on the Earth's biosphere. 'Biodiversity loss' became the way to capture a major dimension of global environmental problems. The chapter describes stages of this process. The first phase of the spread of the term was its enthusiastic reception among environmentalists. Second, concern was integrated into international environmental policy at the Rio Conference in 1992 through the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Efforts to implement the convention have created an environmental regime both internationally and within different countries. However, due to its broad coverage of processes of living nature and its huge ambition to regulate human modification of nature and exploitation of natural resources, there have been major difficulties with implementation. In particular, how to integrate specific issues manifested in local contexts, and the global concern, has proved problematic.

This chapter focuses on preservation and public land policy. It is now understood that undeveloped wilderness serves as the last refuge for many of the most imperiled species, making it both the real and symbolic heart of any ecosystem management strategy. The traditional enclave strategy of nature conservation does not meet contemporary biodiversity concerns and ecological needs. The chapter reveals that public land preservation decisions are inherently political decisions, and that Congress has routinely deferred to local political preferences in shaping new wilderness legislation, effectively devolving this power to local congressional delegations. It argues that large-scale wilderness preservation proposals must surmount major political obstacles, which often leaves them languishing in legislative limbo, and also presents a discussion on the Montana wilderness debate.

Chapter three moves the narrative forward to the early twentieth century when fears about mountaineering’s environmental impact revealed the inherent conflicts of nature tourism. Two divergent trends developed within climbing circles: Alpine populism and mountaineering elitism. Both animated emerging youth movements and nature conservation groups in Germany and Austria during the years before the First World War. Meanwhile, the growing popularity of downhill skiing and motorcars commercialized the Alps and threatened traditional mountaineering norms. Mathias Zdarsky popularized downhill skiing when he published his training manual in 1896. When the Wendelsteinbahn opened in 1912, the first cogwheel train in the Eastern Alps, even more people swarmed the mountains. Some believed that the only way for climbers to secure the future was through youth education and nature preservation, while they emphasized the importance of the Alps to the strengthening of Germans and Austrians, the Volk. These developments were not innocuous.

The chapter reconstructs two major changes in the ways in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has legitimated itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, IUCN’s focus first shifted from conserving nature for nature’s sake to conserving nature for the sake of the people. This rise of human well-being norms was subsequently reinforced by the increasing emphasis of stakeholder participation, local knowledge, and, with some time lag, indigenous peoples’ rights. Since the early 2000s, we then observe the rise of a complementary legitimation strategy that centres around the economic benefits of conservation. Analytically, the chapter shows that changes in membership structures as well as in the ideational environment of international organizations provide windows for change, that these are used by strong norm entrepreneurs in the organization’s secretariat, and that normative changes have a tendency to be self-reinforcing, a phenomenon we term normative path dependence.

This chapter considers India's success in protecting wildlife despite rampant poverty. Its success can be attributed to a triangular playing field in which social, economic, and ethical factors figure into the equation of conserving nature. India has a strong historical component for the preservation of nature based on the principles of ahimsa and the spiritual, ethical, and moral code of dharma. Thus, protected areas for wildlife had increased to 5 percent of the country's surface area by the year 2000, a tribute to the strong yet visionary policies and laws of the land.

This chapter examines the meaning of ‘environmental consciousness’ in the context of nature conservation and environmental history. At its fullest, environmental consciousness might be described as a respect for species not our own and a love for the beauty of all natural things. It encompasses a sense that living things comprise a web governed by nature's ecological and physical laws, and an awareness that what we do to modify the operations of any of these laws may impact on other species, perhaps all other species, including ourselves. It is argued that unless we have a love and respect for the natural world that is widely diffused both among our leaders and the rest of us, conserving nature will not occur except as an accidental consequence of humanity's other preoccupations.

This chapter investigates the bio-geographical imaginations behind the animal 'back-breeding' programs carried out by Lutz and Heinz Heck - two influential German zoologists who ran Berlin and Munich zoos. Partly with close connections to and patronage from the National Socialist elite, the Heck brothers sought to resurrect the wild cow (aurochs) and horse (tarpan) by breeding out the degeneration they associated with domestication. These back-bred animals were released during the war to roam the expanding territory of the Third Reich, and figured in propaganda films and newspaper articles legitimating that expansion. Drawing on archive material, this chapter situates these back-breeding initiatives in relation to the emerging field of geopolitics. It traces how the project to recreate extinct primordial wildlife functioned as part of discourses and practices of nature conservation that emphasized the ideal Germanic character of the European landscape and required ethnic cleansing as a form of ecological restoration. The chapter describes how back breeding of primordial wildlife was part of a legitimation of the violent Eastern expansion, emanating from a particular combination of mythological, geographic and ecological imaginations, not merely aiming for industrial and agricultural autarky but also to extend the Nazi governance of landscape conservation.

This chapter discusses the first series of transnational nature conservation efforts that were launched in Yunnan Province in the 1980s, focusing on the role of various individuals such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) staff, Chinese experts and scientists, and state officials. It argues that Yunnan did not become part of the global circuits of conservation interest and capital merely because of natural endowments or as a result of Western agency. Instead, it shows that a small but dedicated group of Chinese intellectuals and in-country staff from WWF undertook what it calls “transnational work.” It suggests that these made-in-China efforts were part of the structures by which global environmental winds were harnessed, gathered, and transformed—a level of engagement that is absent in most models of globalization.

This chapter examines how non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government ministries, Chinese experts and scientists, and local villagers responded to the new opportunities and difficulties presented by environmental projects, funds, and regulations. More specifically, it considers how globalized environmentalism came to the village of Xiao Long and how the art of engagement was practiced not only by villagers but also by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) representatives and officials. It shows that villagers experienced the WWF’s nature conservation project as the most concrete manifestation of the environmental winds and that they tried to work with these winds by negotiating their lives and futures with NGO workers, nature reserve staff, and government officials. It also highlights the struggles that affected the project long after WWF left the site, giving rise to new social divisions and ways of political engagement and indicating the ways that winds continue to shape social landscapes.

This chapter discuses conservation challenges in Kenya. The country has a number of projects aimed at protecting endangered species and maintaining biodiversity. Those taking precedence include protecting rhinoceroses and elephants, preserving wetlands and forests, and educating youth. The particular challenges faced include economic and social-cultural ones, the destruction of wildlife habitats, security, inadequate incentives, and climate change. Political corruption is also a major problem. A recent study showed that political corruption and bad governance, rather than human population pressures and poverty, may be the greatest threat to wildlife in developing countries. Community involvement in resource management is an essential component of conservation projects, and local people—the ultimate owners and guardians of natural ecosystems—must be the direct beneficiaries of the income that accrues from the use of ecosystems. Ecotourism should also be promoted in reserves and parks due to its overall benefits to both the people and the environment.

This chapter investigates the consequences of the border regime for landscape and wildlife. The ecological impact of the inter-German border has become widely known through the work of a postunification conservation project, the Green Belt. The chapter not only looks at the final ecological footprint of the Iron Curtain as evident in 1989–1990 but considers the effects of the East German border regime on landscape over time. It argues that these effects were neither purely detrimental to nor exclusively beneficial for nature and wildlife; hence neither a narrative of declension nor a narrative of creation adequately captures the dynamic influence of the border regime. This chapter introduces the term “transboundary natures” to refer to the landscapes shaped by the border, a concept that highlights the role of the border in landscape change, regardless of whether such change was embraced by contemporaries as advantageous for or rejected as deleterious to nature.

This chapter explores the role of wild animals such as elephants in global environmental efforts. More specifically, it examines how the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) last remaining wild elephants—approximately 200 in the year 2011—helped shape the environmental winds that were blowing through the country beginning in the late 1980s. It shows that both humans and nonhumans were swept up in these winds, resulting in a massive campaign involving the confiscation of guns to eliminate hunting. It considers how elephants helped humans carry out transnational work to build networks, foster attraction, and connect China with nature conservation organizations around the world. It also explains how elephant violence gave rise to new challenges for managing the increasingly politicized relationships between nature and humans.

This chapter discusses the scaling up of social progress on a global scale. It provides as case examples environmental conservation stories from two of the most densely populated areas on the planet—New York City and China. The populations of both areas engaged in a people-oriented action plan to demonstrate that conservation of nature and urban economic development are not mutually exclusive.

This chapter examines the ground-level debates over pastoral land rights that lay outside the aerial camera’s frame in Serengeti Shall Not Die. When the British gazetted Serengeti National Park in 1951, Tanganyika’s colonial government had guaranteed the Maasai rights of occupancy because they did not traditionally hunt and were deemed part of the natural landscape. Yet a prolonged drought brought increasing numbers of Maasai into the parklands in search of better-watered highland grazing, causing conflict with park officials. Such movements, coupled with scientific and administrative misunderstanding of transhumance and savanna resilience, led the British to propose excising the Ngorongoro region from the park to accommodate local land use. The Grzimeks and a “green network” of international allies asserted that cattle herding and wildlife conservation were incompatible due to livestock’s overgrazing. They buttressed this ecological claim with fears of racial degeneration, claiming that there were no more “true-blooded” Maasai left in the Serengeti. The Grzimeks’ advocacy helped to transform a colonial debate about “native” rights into an international scandal. The green network had discredited British imperialism yet inherited many of its paternalist assumptions about traditional African land use and modernist development.

This chapter examines how globalized formations of indigeneity were shaped and made in relation to environmental winds in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It begins with an overview of the ethnography of an indigenous space, paying attention to how nature conservation efforts in the PRC opened up space for the emergence of indigeneity. It then discusses official and popular conceptions of ethnicity in the PRC, along with the articulation of environmentalism in the creation of an indigenous space in Yunnan Province by Chinese experts and scientists. Focusing on the controversy in Yunnan over the issue of “sacred lands,” the chapter explains how Yunnanese scientists started to argue for sacred lands and indigenous knowledge and eventually expanded these arguments to foster a broader sense of environmental justice for all (rural) people.

The closing chapter focuses on two events at Dove Cottage in 1935: a transatlantic radio broadcast of Grasmere sounds to North America, and the opening of a new museum at Dove Cottage. These two events offer us perspectives through which to assess the multiple threads that run throughout this book: globalism and nationalism; accessibility and preservation; the progress of technology and a growing sense of cultural heritage; the pressures of modern life and the quest for rest and recreation; national defence and nature conservation. The chapter then gives a final consideration to the engrained traveller / tourist antithesis: how the district’s cultural landscape has been constructed through a series of competing dynamics, broadly represented by ‘democratic’ ideas of enlarging public accessibility and more ‘exclusive’ conceptions of how we should ‘worthily’ enjoy nature. Throughout, Wordsworth’s vision and language have continued to be adapted both to promote and protect, culminating in the establishment of the Lake District National Park in 1951 and, most recently, to its designation as a World Heritage Site in 2017.

If We Turn To The Environment and its protection, the contrasts between the United States and Europe are less stark than the debates over Kyoto and global warming suggest. Popular attitudes across the Atlantic appear to be quite comparable. A smaller percentage of Americans than any Europeans are fearful that current population trends are unsustainable. The percentage that fears strongly that modern life harms the environment is at the lower end of a very broad European spectrum. But a higher percentage of Americans than anyone other than the gloomy Portuguese are very worried about the environment. Already long before Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth, proportionately more Americans considered global warming extremely dangerous than do the Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns. Relatively more Americans than anyone but the Swiss claim to be very willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment. Proportionately more Americans than any Europeans are prepared to pay higher taxes for the sake of nature. Americans also claim willingness more than anyone other than the Swiss and the Swedes to accept a cut in living standards to achieve such ends. A higher percentage of Americans think that government should pass laws to protect the environment than the British, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and all Scandinavians other than the Danes. American executives are more convinced that complying with government environmental standards helps their businesses’ long-term competitiveness than their colleagues in Germany, Iceland, Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. In a recent comparative ranking of environmental policy conducted by Yale and Columbia universities, the score assigned the United States was not impressive. But that of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece was worse. The Achilles’ heel of America’s environmental policy is its energy inefficiency, which is partly related to the size of the country and the extremities of its weather. On most other measures, U.S. rankings are better