MacDonald, Graham A.

English

University of New Mexico

Volume 21 
Issue 4 Symposium on the Management of Nuclear Wastes 
Fall 1981 
The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, John A. Livingston 
Graham A. MacDonald 
Recommended Citation 
Graham A. MacDonald, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, John A. Livingston, 21 Nat. Resources J. 961 
(1981). 
Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol21/iss4/21 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UNM Digital Repository. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Natural Resources Journal by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For 
more information, please contact amywinter@unm.edu, lsloane@salud.unm.edu, sarahrk@unm.edu. 
BOOK REVIEWS
THE FALLACY OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION
By JOHN A. LIVINGSTON
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1981. Pp. 117. $14.95.
John Livingston's impassioned The Fallacy of Wildlife Conserva-
tion stands in relation to the cool and lucid analysis of philosopher
John Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, in roughly the
same manner in which John Ruskin's Unto This Last (1862) stands
to T. H. Huxley's Man's Place In Nature. Huxley and Passmore im-
press us by means of an appeal to our common sense, while Ruskin
and Livingston scream at us that we are all in a state of intellectual
and moral default. To decide which of these approaches is the more
effective depends largely upon one's view of the end of literature: is
it a call to action, or a disinterested investigation of the truth of
things? Often, it is both. The relative success of an author may well
hinge upon how firmly he keeps a foot on each of these tightropes.
Mr. Livingston has written a book which attempts to incorporate the
two polarities, but the reader will not always find it easy going. This
can be attributed, in large measure, to the author being much more
at home as a naturalist than as an historian of ideas.
Livingston is a man of considerable talent as a naturalist, a writer,
and a producer for the media, but there are large areas of this book
in which he fails to convince. Often what is asserted about general
patterns of recent or ancient history, man-nature relationships, and
the modern environment are no more than assertions, although they
are treated almost at the level of self-evident fact. For example:
Livingston seems to feel that there is something inherent in western
civilization, largely theologically based or expressed, which has im-
pelled modern man on a continuing course towards the domination
of nature. It has become a familiar theme. There are many instances
in the book however, where he seems to be pointing at a fundamen-
tal human flaw. Certainly many of his examples do not admit of any
easy east-west or north-south splits in the history of the domination
of nature. Suffice to say that the literature of debate on this topic is
vast, controversial, and ongoing. These excursions into intellectual
history seem to bring out the Ruskinian side of the author. A severe
editing of the highly personal judgments, assertions, and asides would
assist greatly in allowing the reader to focus on the precise arguments
being made.
These are distracting features in a book which nevertheless deserves
to be read, for it has a coherent viewpoint. The author's thesis is that
the standard arguments for wildlife conservation and the practices
which they spawn have largely failed. They have failed at the political
NATURAL RESOURCES JOURNAL
level because the same arguments were never perceived as being very
convincing at the personal level, i.e. in the minds of those who first
posited them as arguments. These all have at their core a highly utili-
tarian and man-centered viewpoint, rather than a wildlife-for-its-own-
sake view. Livingston has covered the various kinds of arguments
well, but it is not so clear that all of these traditional conservation
positions are so utilitarian and man-centered as he would have us be-
lieve. But this, after all, is the point of his book.
In suggesting that all arguments of a logical, utilitarian, practical,
long-term humanitarian, or scientifically-justifiable nature, are really
something other than a satisfactory ground for a wildlife conservation
rationale, Livingston has tossed out a rather large gauntlet. His posi-
tion is that these arguments have not done the job, and that individ-
ual human beings need to readjust their own vision of their own
place in nature and in particular, their relations with wildlife. The
author has a suggestion. Livingston employs the term compliance to
describe a fundamental quality inherent in the living world. Modern
man utilizes it in his day to day relations with his fellow man, but is
grossly lax in extending any kind of cooperative ethic to the non-
human world. A shift in viewpoint would do much for the cause of
wildlife conservation.
Illustrating his position are passages taken from personal reminis-
cense and these are often quite the best passages in the book, worthy
of comparison with some of the writings of the late Loren Eisely.
Here it is the naturalist speaking, telling us what he has seen and
knows.
This is a deceptive book, and its title is possibly wrong, for it
seems to promise more than is delivered. It will not be so evident to
many readers that wildlife conservation, as practiced, has been falla-
cious. It may be that Mr. Livingston has merely argued, eloquently at
times, for the incorporation of one more plank in the platform of
conservation. Livingston may not be so far removed from certain tra-
ditions of the west as he thinks. St. Francis of Assisi would have read
this book and approved.
GRAHAM A. MacDONALD
Parks Canada
Winnipeg, Manitoba
[Vol. 21


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