Our Ancestors' Dystopia

Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene Kyle Powys Whyte Forthcoming. Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. Conservation in the Anthropocene The proposed Anthropocene epoch is understood geologically as a time when the collective actions of humans began influencing earth systems in marked, unprecedented ways. Some claim that the Anthropocene could have started in the year 1610 with “colonialism, global trade and coal” (Lewis and Maslin 177). Scientists and environmental ethicists often characterize futures in the Anthropocene in additional ways, one of the most common being as a future involving climate destabilization that will likely threaten the very existence of certain ecosystems, plants, and animals (Kolbert; Thompson and Bendik-Keymer; Vaidyanathan; Sandler). Ever-expanding human economic activities and consumer lifestyles are major drivers of climate destabilization through their dependence on burning fossil fuels and certain kinds of land-use such as deforestation. Some conservationists argue that we will inevitably have to learn to live with these changes, make careful decisions about conservation priorities, and, in some cases, learn to let go of certain ecosystems and species (Kareiva and Marvier). Yet others in the conservation community take an adamant position that these changes, especially extinctions, are morally dreadful (Vaidyanathan; Cafaro and Primack). Cafaro and Primack express this latter position clearly when they argue that “Anthropocene proponents” have “selfish and unjust” views that deem the extinction of species as morally acceptable as long as humans suffer no harm. Human expansion that extinguishes the “polar bear” and other species ends the value of these natural species as “the primary expressions and repositories of organic nature’s order, creativity, and diversity… Every species, like every person, is unique, with its own history and destiny…” To destroy species through human expansion is to bring a “valuable and meaningful story to an untimely end” (2014, 2). Conservation views à la Cafaro and Primack can help to explain why some scholars and writers have noted various strains of dystopian thought in Anthropocene discourses (Trexler; Singleton; Weik; Johnson et al.). For such views can be used as a basis for depicting futures in which many hundreds of “valuable and meaningful [stories]” (Cafaro and Primack) are irreversibly extinguished, leaving human societies to reckon with a world marked by greatly limited historical memories, biodiversity, and expressiveness. In an article titled, “Climate Change is So Dire We Need a New Kind of Science Fiction to Make Sense of It,” futures writer Claire Evans writes that “we need an Anthropocene fiction. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction… a form of science fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange reality...” (Evans). As a Neshnabé (Potawatomi) and scholar-activist at a U.S. university working on indigenous climate justice, I was initially struck by what seemed to be some similarities between the dystopian Anthropocene views and the views motivating quite a few indigenous projects to conserve and restore native species. Indeed, indigenous peoples have long advocated that the conservation and restoration of native species, the cultivation of first foods, and the maintenance 1