The Performance of Conservation: Narratives of Displacement
“ - You have in fact, yourself, saved a species.
- If I didn’t have this crazy idea, the whole species would have been gone, forever.”1
“Single species conservation is a form of fiction. (...) It requires a lot of orchestration, staging of some kind.”2
What and whose is the language of wildlife conservation? What kind of knowledge does it produce? Through which processes and by which standards does it create value? This article examines the cultural narrative of conservation and its relationship to issues of knowledge and value production. To do so, I will describe and problematize the conservation process of a waterlily endemic to South-west Rwanda, re-named Nymphaea Thermarum. The lexicon of wildlife conservation in Western media, sampled here by one of the many documentaries voiced by Sir David Attenborough, is disinterested, philanthropic and self-congratulating. It relies on particular concepts of precarity, urgency and saviorism to facilitate a discursive dissimulation of the complexity of its politics and justify the treatment of its other-than-human subjects and their entangled relationships with their Indigenous lands, organisms and peoples. While the conservation work at hand is described as “priceless,” I argue that it is not only a process by which value is created, it is also organized to funnel that value from its extraction site in Rwanda to ex situ centers of epistemic distribution in Germany and the United Kingdom.
Through the study of the language used in botanical fieldwork in Rwanda and in the subsequently narrativized information disseminated across Anglophone media, I therefore propose that the conservation narrative requires and indeed produces a choreography of dislocation - both of physical bodies and epistemic, symbolic and economic value - to sustain itself. In this sense I approach conservation as a performance: as a fabrication for cultural consumption and as a series of physical, discursive and epistemic movements. Building on concepts of animal colonialism, conservation violence and linguistic imperialism, I argue that this performance hinges on the de-valuation and invisibilization of Indigenous knowledge of and relations to the subject of conservation.
In order to emphasize the world-building power of narrative, propose a contrasting voice to the one of Western conservation and suggest parallels that go beyond my academic reach, a speculative short story is incorporated into this article. Written from the perspective of a water-borne parasite, the story raises questions of Western definitions of care, consumption and interspecies living with an emphasis on English nomenclature and etymology. This article aims to propose a new critical reading of the narrative of conservation and stimulate new ways of thinking and wording interspecies care at the intersection of language, knowledge and value.
1 David Attenborough, Carlos Magdalena, “Kingdom of Plants 3D: Solving the Secrets,” Sky Atlantic HD Broadcast, May 26, 2012, 49 min., 11 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tgpy9yQF8s&t=2982s
2 Agat Sharma, “David Attenborough: A Character Study,” De Balie, January 22, 2025, 29 min., 48 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtk41md2rU&t=3316s