Working in conservation is fighting a war.
Waking up every day to fight a war you know you’re losing, on every front you can count.
And you’re doing it while working under geopolitical gag orders.
We’re losing in terms of both mortalities and morbidities - and counting the bodies that make it to a shelter or a sanctuary is only the tip of the iceberg. And the ones that live past their bullet wounds and witnessing the death of their mothers have lifelong effects of PTSD, malnutrition, and increased viral exposure from human contact.
We’re losing in terms of territory - parks, reserves, forests have their borders arbitrarily. Maps get redrawn to please industrial interests.
We’re losing in terms of public perception - begging for money on the other side of the world who see themselves as benevolent dictators with strings attached to every penny, at the worst, and an overwhelming desire for a photo op with an infant or their name on a plaque on a building in the forest at best.
We treat conservation as a luxury to be funded by philanthropy - rather than a necessity that must be structured into our economic and political system.
We treat conservation work as something to be done by volunteers - something pure and noble, but unsustainable or limited to the wealthy. Those of us without trust funds save up money to fund our own time in the field. We can’t afford more than a season or two, meaning there’s no continuity in the field as we’re an ever revolving door of newcomers on a learning curve.
We rationalize the disposability of the western volunteers as being for the best - their mental health is better served by short field stints, and we need to prioritize local development and local leadership. But we grapple with this dilemma in the framework of globalization, aware that conservation work has become the newest missionary arm of the western empire, aware of our role as colonizers.
We provide support to the national parks - helping to control the tourism, prevent the worst abuses and reduce contact, provide some level of education. But when our grants dry up and we have to pull out of that field season, the hole we leave behind is scarier than the mess we went in to clean up.
We work with local businesses to improve field practices in event of the inevitable wildlife contact their staff will have in the field and the west criticizes us as selling out or laundering dirty money.
We work with international organizations to raise funds and the local governments are appalled at our indiscretion.
We keep animals in cages and are criticized. We put them into an overcrowded forest and are criticized.
And forget how the outside world sees us, the things we say to each other are pretty horrific. When we’re not fighting for the same funding, we’re ripping apart each others methodologies.
We’re losing the war within our own ranks, failing to bring the organizations together as a coalition, failing to give the world a mission statement or reason to fund us beyond “eco tourism”, and failing to provide paid, sustainable career paths for the academics we’re training.
Working in conservation is fighting a war.
A war we know we can’t win. We can’t make any advances. We can’t even hold the line and stop the environmental destruction and animal cruelty at the point it is now. It’s getting worse, no matter how hard we fight.
We tell ourselves that what we’re fighting for is to slow down the destruction - flatten the curve - buy time. And we try to tell ourselves that’s enough of a win. Because it’s the only one we can imagine anymore.
And then you go home, with the data you can’t publish and the photos you can’t post and the stories you won’t tell, and all anyone wants to know is if you can hook them up to cuddle some baby primates.
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