American Scientist

WE ALONE: How Humans Have Conquered the Planet and Can Also Save It. David Western. 310 pp. Yale University Press, 2020. $30.

As an environmental historian with a deep interest in the history of conservation, I greeted David Western’s new book, We Alone: How Humans Conquered the Planet and Can Also Save It, with enthusiasm, hoping to learn cutting-edge lessons from a conservationist whose career has been marked by taking African peoples and communities as seriously as the animals with whom they share the landscape. Western is a renowned wildlife scientist and a pioneer in community-based conservation who has worked for more than half a century in East Africa, with a particular focus on Amboseli National Park and the Maasai lands of the Kenya-Tanzania border region. At its core, We Alone is a deeply personal book that traces the arc of his intellectual evolution from a hunter to a wildlife ecologist and conservationist, and it examines the lessons that he has learned from Maasai herders and other African peoples who have made a living from the land while also conserving its resources. The book is at its best when it springs from Western’s own experience and expertise, his thoughtful positions, and his own learning across time. But grafted onto that story is another book, much more sweeping in its ambitions and less successfully realized—a book that hopes to explain, as its subtitle suggests, how humans conquered the planet and can also save it.

We Alone is divided into three parts. Part I, “The Roots of Our Success,” takes as its primary purpose an examination of how, over the past several hundred thousand years, the human species evolved, grew in number so successfully, spread across the globe, and came to dominate the planet. The exploration of this question is peripatetic, a bit too evolutionary in its orientation, and, in the end, not entirely convincing. Central to this section, however, and ramifying throughout subsequent sections, is the defining question of the book, a much more interesting one to my mind: “Why, at the pinnacle of our ecological success, did we begin to conserve some of the very species we had conquered?” Western recognizes that this impulse is a product of a certain moment in history, and of a certain privileged place in that moment, and he freely admits that his Maasai friends and informants, though conservation-minded in their own ways, do not share his modern conservation sensibility. In this way, he thoughtfully interrogates his own evolving conservation commitments, questioning the role they ought to play in responding to human domination of the planet, and he clearly recognizes that the Maasai have other interests and struggles.

Part II, “The Human Age,” is the shortest section and purports to chart the more recent history of the epoch that some now call the Anthropocene and the forces of globalization that are driving it. Western explains many of the disturbing trends of this era, during which humans are diverting huge amounts of biological productivity to their ends and fouling their own nest (to use one of his favored metaphors). However, his discussion here is often quite derivative (he is overly fond of summarizing the many books he has read), and a bit too selective and superficial. He is also surprisingly fatalistic about these trends and at the same time sanguine that they may be our salvation. “Despite its leveling force,” he writes, “globalization is both inevitable and our best hope for bettering our lives and sustaining planetary health.”

Part III, “Our Once and Future Planet,” turns to ostensible solutions—ways of managing the Human Age for greater human and environmental well-being. As with the previous two sections, this one is most satisfying when Western is talking about his own rich experience and wisdom as a practicing conservationist and the many challenges that we now face in conserving other species. Western founded and chairs the African Conservation Centre in Nairobi, and his other career milestones have included heading the international programs of the Wildlife Conservation Society, establishing Kenya’s Wildlife Planning Unit and directing Kenya’s Wildlife Service, and serving as founding president of the International Ecotourism Society. His leadership in community-based conservation really shows in his complex understanding of the social and cultural challenges to be met in the world of species conservation, and in his recognition that social justice and human well-being are essential to success in conserving other species. Aware of the desires that many Maasai have for more comfortable and modern lives, he poignantly notes that “the rich world is expanding the meaning of conservation to include biodiversity and cultural heritage as the poor world is struggling to escape them.”

But the solutions Western proffers often seem naively optimistic. They partake too much of species thinking (the “We” in his title) rather than contending with social conflict and division, and they often ignore the political and economic channels of power that have most profoundly contributed to the problem. Capitalism, for instance, as a powerful historical force and the engine of globalization, is all but ignored in this book.

In the end, We Alone tries to do too much. It wants to be both a book about the history and prospects of ecological conservation in a radically changing world, and one that grapples with a set of sweeping historical problems that have led us into the Anthropocene and for which species conservation is only a small part of the solution. I wish Western had stuck with what he knows best, community-based conservation and its future, for those are the most insightful and satisfying parts of We Alone.

Western is admirably aware that modern wildlife conservation makes most sense to those in positions of modern material affluence. However, his solution seems to consist in bringing that level of material affluence to the entirety of the world’s population; he is confident that people’s values will then pivot to his form of conservation. He is to be applauded for linking conservation to development in this way, but in my estimation he has too much faith that development can solve the problems of global inequality and ease pressures on the global environment.