Abstract
Across the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, millions of newly planted trees struggle to survive amid adverse ecological conditions. They were planted by a wide variety of actors in an attempt to protect, restore, or modify the local environment, despite evidence of their negative consequences upon local ecosystems. This paper investigates how these afforestation projects both challenge and affirm recent theoretical work on conservation, while also providing key insights into the decision-making framework of land management across the world’s third largest desert region. This analysis, supported by evidence from corporate practice, government policy, and participant observation, builds primarily on the work of Jamie Lorimer and other authors who identify the charisma of certain species as a primary driver of contemporary conservation. But the case of afforestation in the Gobi is inadequately explained by a desire to protect individual species; rather, I show how the charisma at the level of the landscape influences conservation practice. I extend this analysis to suggest that the management of deserts worldwide may be mediated by their perception as absent or empty spaces, thus explaining projects like afforestation which seem to re-place rather than conserve. Using the framework of absence and presence to better understand land use and environmental governance could have implications extending well beyond the Gobi Desert.
Highlights
In recent decades, the practice of environmental conservation has become the subject of sustained ethnographic inquiry
In the Gobi, where afforestation efforts are largely unconcerned with inter-species distinctions, what underlies conservation decision-making instead is an epistemology of ecological wellbeing situated at the scale of the landscape itself
The discussion section of this paper addresses this in further detail by considering whether the landscape-level charisma of the Gobi is an exceptional case, or whether it might generalize across more regions and biomes, those landscapes perceived of as absent before human eyes
Summary
The practice of environmental conservation has become the subject of sustained ethnographic inquiry. I examine the widespread practice of drylands afforestation, which is supported by individual, corporate, and public actors across the Gobi region This analysis suggests that environmental conservation in the world’s third-largest desert is inexplicable by recent critical scholarship that focuses rather narrowly on the role of charisma in individual species as the drivers of conservation management practice [1,2,3]. Conservation actors are engaged in projects to promote landscape-wide flourishing, with little regard for the welfare of constituent species. In this context, the role of charismatic organisms—usually upheld as central to the “conservation assemblage” [1]—is secondary at best. Perhaps critiques far have paid so much attention to the proverbial trees that they’ve failed to see the forest
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