Intro to Volume 2

Problematizing Conservation: Nativity and Invasion in Appalachia

There are many subterranean concepts knitted into the discourse on ecology and conservation: colonization, land ownership, the use of herbicide and pesticide, governmental failures, private and public land designations, agriculture, labor issues, race issues, borders, economic extraction, suburban development, urban design, and the list goes on.

One of our central goals as a publication is to push these concepts to the surface to problematize them as we seek to reimagine and restructure the place of human society within the natural world. There are many theories, practices, and institutions that should be preserved when it comes to conservation. Yet, many are also rooted in white supremacy and labor exploitation, and others have been subject to the purchase of multinational fossil fuel companies and developers—leading to corruption that rots those organizations from the inside out.

It is hard to know how to start this process. There is so much material that needs to be covered.

It feels endless, and it feels hopeless without the institutional support of the academy, permanent capital, established non-profits, or extant governing bodies.

Sadly, many of these institutions are degenerating rapidly, if not founded upon nefarious foundations. Many of these institutions are becoming both inaccessible and hollow as the stench of profit motives sinks deeper and deeper into their halls.

With all this in mind, we have done our best to distinguish a starting point.

In our first year, we problematized the modern concept of nature—a novel worldview that we believe emerged during the period known as the Enlightenment, and has accelerated exponentially since the first Industrial Revolution.

We laid a conceptual foundation for our readers with the help of many voices from diverse backgrounds, practices, and fields of study.

Throughout the year, we learned that without acknowledging the death of something, we trap ourselves in a liminal ambiguity that breeds fear, inaction, and complacency—a state commonly referred to as “analysis paralysis.”

We bore witness to and mourned the loss of a vision of nature that may have never truly been with us, a nature that may have only existed as a fantasy in the minds of the architects of enlightened society.

We described this myopic vision of nature as one from which human society is excluded. In this framework, humanity primarily relates to nature in one of two ways: nature as the site of extraction, or nature as wholly other wilderness.

We also acknowledged that any image of a future ecology must take seriously the fact that human society is emergent as one element in the complex and diverse system of life on our planet.