Conserving Human and Other Nature
This article supports a concept of “convivial conservation”, here conceived as “efforts to establish vital interdependencies between humans and ecosystems, toward the mutual regeneration of both”. Building from ethnographic research we have carried out among subaltern Latin American communities, indigenous and otherwise, we focus on rural Brazilian squatter communities that arose in the 1990s in opposition to plantation economies that have degraded both human and non-human life. In discourses and writings of conservation and environment workers, members of such non-indigenous squatter communities are sometimes marked as ignorant, if not hostile, adversaries of nature, and their reliance upon slash-and-burn techniques condemned as destructive. As these families redress long-standing distributive injustices that have injured their lives, we find novel commitments to conserving nature, as expressed through squatters’ efforts to cultivate native tree species within their agroforests. These non-utilitarian commitments to conserve native trees defy presuppositions of an ideological field informing various approaches to nature conservation—whether “fortress,” “participatory,” or “development”-directed—which variously renders different human populations into either quasi-natural “guardians” or “enemies” of nature. Seeking to move beyond this ideological field, we examine possibilities of nature conservation outside of formal conservation areas. We argue that redressing long-standing distributive injustices can foster human practices that jointly reproduce sociocultural and biophysical processes.