Re-Placing the Desert in the Conservation Landscape: Charisma and Absence in the Gobi Desert

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.

Environmental ethnography

“…Historically, species have been regarded as stable categories “that exist in nature independently of their discovery, or naming, by humans” (Dupré 1992, 312). More recently, the logic of the species has become the subject of fraught debate among interdisciplinary scholars (Wilson 1999). To speak of the species-whole can sometimes result in performing the “god trick” (Haraway 1988, 581) that slides carelessly from the partial perspective into a universal claim.…”

“…Landscapes that appear visually and sensorily crowded to humans are more clearly home to interconnected forms of existence. By contrast, deserts (of sand, ice, water, or urban space) are often described as empty or relatively lifeless (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 382;Lezak 2019). In such spaces, life more readily appears as a collection of individual creatures interacting on a passive and flat stage.…”