ETHNOMAD
Dr Tom Corcoran.
Published by ETHNOMAD, January 2026
The forest around Makira Natural Park closes in gently as we walk. It is not empty or silent. It breathes. Leaves shift underfoot, cicadas rise and fall, and the path bends around places governed by rules no signboard records or enforces. This is Betsimisaraka country, forest people of the north, whose lives have long been shaped by what the forest allows and what it forbids.
Beside me, Henry Mani walks at an easy pace. He is a teacher at the small school in Ambodivaohangy. He knows this forest as a lived place, not a protected one. Since Makira was declared protected, conservation arrived as an occupation rather than a partnership. Offices, patrols, and projects followed. Many men have left, Henry tells me, moving south or to the coast when farming, hunting, and forest use were restricted, leaving no viable alternatives to sustain a family.
We reach a small tavy clearing cut back from the forest edge. A man kneels in the soil with his children, sowing rice by hand. He tells me he is poor. Then he pauses and corrects himself. Before, he says, he never thought of himself that way. A researcher from a conservation agency once explained to him that he was poor by external measures, measured it, named it, and moved on. Now it is all he thinks about.
Henry listens intently. Later, he tells me that when conservationists from WCS first came, they promised tourism, visitors, and money. None arrived. What did arrive were laws. With each new regulation, he says, they created new criminals. People who had lived within the forest’s limits for generations suddenly found themselves breaking rules written elsewhere. Protection came. Belonging did not.
Across much of the world today, conservation is treated as a moral absolute. Protect nature. Save biodiversity. Establish reserves. Enforce regulations. These aims are rarely questioned, and when they are, the questioning is often dismissed as obstruction or ignorance. Yet on the ground, far from policy documents and global summits, conservation is rarely experienced as neutral. It is experienced as disruption, negotiation, loss, and quiet resentment that rarely reaches policy rooms.
In forests, wetlands, grasslands, and mountain regions where people have lived for generations, conservation is not an abstract good. It arrives as new boundaries, new rules, and new bureaucratic languages of management. It reshapes who can graze, fish, gather, move, and remain. It changes how land is known and who is allowed to speak for it.
Conservation ethnography emerges from this tension. It begins not with opposition to conservation, but with a refusal to treat its human consequences as secondary. It asks what happens to cultures when conservation shifts from a relationship with land to a system imposed upon it.
At its core, conservation ethnography is the study of how communities, landscapes, and cultural knowledge shape one another under pressure from conservation, development, and climate change. It is grounded in long-term fieldwork and patient attention. It listens before it measures. It takes seriously the ways people understand animals, forests, rivers, and seasons not as resources, but as companions, teachers, and sometimes adversaries woven into everyday life.
Where conservation science counts species and models ecosystems, conservation ethnography attends to meaning, memory, and moral consequence. It records how knowledge is carried through story, ritual, labour, and restraint. It asks questions that policy frameworks often avoid. Who decides what protection looks like? Whose knowledge counts as expertise? What is lost when land becomes a category rather than a lived place? How do people adapt when conservation rules collide with survival?
I have worked alongside conservation agencies and forest communities long enough to see how easily good intentions harden into rules, and how rarely those rules are revisited once written. Modern conservation inherited much of its structure from a fortress mentality. Nature was to be protected from people. Boundaries were drawn, parks fenced, and access criminalised. Communities were relocated or marginalised in the belief that ecological integrity required human absence. Culture became collateral damage in the pursuit of purity.
This approach has repeatedly failed. Biodiversity continues to decline. Conflict between authorities and communities intensifies. Conservation agencies become enforcers rather than stewards. In many places, removing people from the land has also removed the practices that sustained biodiversity in the first place. Controlled burning, rotational grazing, seasonal harvesting, and spiritual taboos vanish, replaced by management plans that struggle to replicate what was once embedded in daily life.
The problem is not conservation science itself. It is its incompleteness. Conservation ethnography exposes this blind spot by insisting that ecosystems are not empty. They are inhabited, remembered, worked, and watched. Landscapes carry social histories as much as ecological ones. When those histories are ignored, conservation becomes brittle.
In recent decades, many conservation initiatives have attempted to address this gap through consultation and participation. Meetings are held, surveys completed, and community engagement is claimed. Yet consultation is not understanding. Ethnography is not a checklist exercise. It requires time measured in seasons rather than funding cycles. It demands attention to how elders read weather in wind and soil, how herders decide when to move, how fishers know when not to fish. It means learning why a shrine matters as much as a census of trees, and why access to a path can carry more significance than a boundary on a map.
Without this depth, conservation risks becoming extractive in a new form. Land is taken for protection. Knowledge is extracted for reports. Communities are left with regulations they did not shape and futures they did not choose.
The urgency of conservation ethnography today lies in the convergence of crises. Climate change, mass displacement, biodiversity loss, and accelerated development now land in the same places, often on the same communities. Those who have contributed least to these crises bear their highest costs. At the same time, traditional ecological knowledge is disappearing faster than it can be documented. Languages fade. Practices erode. Younger generations are severed from land-based learning systems that once anchored identity, responsibility, and restraint.
Conservation ethnography matters because it slows us down. It insists that protection without belonging is fragile. It reminds us that sustainability is cultural before it is technical. Long before conservation became a discipline, people learned how to live with limits. That knowledge was not written in policy language. It was embedded in habit, belief, and social consequence.
This work is not advocacy, nostalgia, or opposition to science. It is an attempt to restore proportion.
Conservation ethnography does not promise simple solutions. It offers something more difficult and more durable. Understanding. Understanding how people make sense of land. How they negotiate risk and restraint. How they adapt without severing continuity. It shows that conservation succeeds not when humans are erased, but when relationships are repaired.
If conservation is to endure in the century ahead, it must learn to listen. Not as an afterthought, but as a foundation. Conservation ethnography provides the tools to do this, bridging science and story, policy and practice, ecology and ethics. Landscapes are not only habitats. They are homes. Protecting one while erasing the other is not protection at all.
Gurjar leaders sit together, discussing the day, the forest, and the coming rains. Their knowledge of weather, the grazing land on the plateau, and the season is not abstract data but lived practice, passed through conversation and memory. Conservation ethnography begins here, where land is understood through relationship rather than regulation.
Girls carry bundles of firewood through Nduta Refugee Camp, fuel for the day’s cooking and a daily negotiation with risk, distance, and exhaustion. Here, carbon is accounted for elsewhere, offset, traded, neutralised on paper. On the ground, the smoke still fills lungs, forests recede, and labour falls on young bodies. Conservation ethnography begins by tracing this gap between policy and lived reality, asking who carries the cost when environmental responsibility is displaced rather than reduced.
