Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, visual culture has played an active role in naturalizing fortress conservation—a colonial model that began with the founding of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and still shapes biodiversity and land policies around the world. Just as fortress conservation created a sharp divide between wilderness and human society, visual images—historically and today—traffic in tropes of untouched land to disavow Indigenous presence and to marginalize other ways of protecting nature. For the 2022 Venice Biennale, we worked together to create an exhibit of twenty-two postcards reflecting on the global legacies of fortress conservation. Even though our project is grounded in a critique of visual culture, we also believe that critique is not enough. The postcards document actual practices on the ground to show surprising, everyday examples of contemporary conservation. Challenging conventional myths, the photographs and accompanying texts layer history and critique with stories of sustenance and survival. For this essay, we share some examples from the show and also extend our analysis to connect the postcards to broader narratives of environmental history and visual culture. Ranging from the American West to the transnational Arctic and India, we trace connections across vast distances and explain how grassroots visual culture offers vistas beyond fortress conservation.