Human Endangerment Discourse

Abstract

Abstract The chapter presents a broad, global, overview of the emergence of the concepts of endangerment and extinction with reference to indigenous peoples and the environment. It argues that long before there was even scientific awareness that non-human species could become extinct, there was a growing acknowledgement that cultures coming into contact with Europeans in the age of empire were vanishing; by the early nineteenth century, while the phenomenon of species extinction was still disputed, the extinction of so-called primitive races was widely accepted. And by the late nineteenth century, the fates of those offensively labelled ‘wild tribes’ and ‘wild animals’ were frequently and explicitly linked in colonial discourse. Studying the history of this racist, imperialist analogy reveals that postcolonial era conservation efforts have roots in, and are often guilty of repeating, the colonial past. Tracing the interwoven tropes of human and wildlife endangerment from their colonial manifestations through to their postcolonial reverberations, clear connections between contemporary agendas and long repudiated positions emerge, particularly in the burgeoning field of biocultural diversity conservation.