A Conversation on Conservation

On a blue moon my medicine man messages to ask how I’m doing. I tell him I’m heartbroken, and when he calls he ever so sweetly breaks the pleasantries, “Loona, tell me, what has happened to you?”

“Amor, I fell in love and thought he was the love of my life. And he doesn’t see a future together, so I had to break up with him. And maybe it was cultural differences, but I think just a miscommunication, and now I am so heartbroken.”

He commiserates with a sigh, “But what do you mean by cultural differences?”

“Well he’s from Israel, and he’s conservative.”

Uproarious laughter, the most authentic laugh out loud I’ve ever heard. In a giggle he goes, “You fell in love with Netanyahu?” We’re laughing, but mine is more pathetic. I hear the streets of Rio as he sings "Strangelove" by Depeche Mode, laughing, “I’m still waiting for the part where you tell me it’s a joke.” And he laughs and laughs. “Of all the cultural differences, this is the last I would expect. Like I said, I’m waiting for you to tell me you’re joking.”

“Loona,” he settles down to soothing, “You are not a colonizer, and such a free spirit.” A twinge in his thoughtful cadence: “You with a conservative man—one of you will go crazy,” raising his pitch on that last word.

Life in the penetrating shadow of patriarchy flashes before my eyes. “I thought I could help him see how his views are harmful to himself and others.” And he tells me it could take a lifetime to unlearn the worldview of a colonizer.

I disagree, but still.

…………..

I figure this love would contest the box “conservative.”

A year or two before, I’m browsing a bookstore, my favorite bookstore, when I overhear the employees there. One of them is defining what it means to be conservative to the other; I think referencing a book, not sure. He explains that to be conservative is to want things to stay the way they are—that everything about conservative policy is fundamentally interested in maintaining the systems that govern us. I’m feeling defensive because it’s two white men chatting. I laugh it off, soak it in and over time consider how conservatism is closed-mindedness, and the (false) sense of freedom this (false sense of security) contains.

So, what does it take to keep things the way they are?

James Scott (1998) thinks it’s legibility: a standard system for measuring, recording, and centrally monitoring information from the top-down. State power emerges and strengthens in tandem, rendering land, people, and practices readable through uniform mechanisms of data collection and governance. And where the same *fair and equal* measures apply to everyone, we observe the creation, conditions, and maintenance of citizenship—the part and parcel of a state.

But within the standardized legibility of lands, people, and practices, the innate complexity of life becomes oversimplified. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019) shows how this standardization is not neutral, but foundational to imperial violence. For example, “citizenship” is defined by a differential principle, where rights are granted to some by way of denying them to others. This differential principle separates people from one another (e.g. by class, race, nationality (“legible categories”)), creates whiteness as property and non-white people as propertied (Harris 1993), and also enacts division between communities, their objects, and lands. The result is a schema where the environment is no longer kin or relation, but resource—something to be mapped, owned, and conserved through homogenous, bureaucratic abstraction.

Sylvia Wynter reveals how these organizing, differential logics of legibility encode themselves into our consciousness, cultivating an implicit inability to trend toward holistic thought (McKittrick 2014). From here, we see the articulation of “high-modernity”—a culture dissociated from the environment and rather dependent upon its manufactured systems, sciences, and technologies (Scott 1998). Where nature inevitably comes out from under, we come up with *new* means of order, control, and call it progress.[1] And over time we’ve come to inhabit a deeply violent, colonized world: the globe consumed by what is otherwise anthropocentrism (also white supremacy). Through what Wynter terms “the overrepresentation of Man,” we experience the western definition of what it means to be human as “reality-in-general” rather than a genre-specific position, whereas all other forms of knowing and being are thought of as irrational, unscientific, or “primitive.”[2]

And this is closed-mindedness, the conservation of legibility.

So, Wynter wants to unsettle and undo the category of Man-as-human… to refuse, reimagine, and rearticulate ourselves into nonlinear, communal, and careful relationships, like those within Indigenous, Black, and non-western cosmologies. To do so requires our opening to multiple coexisting knowledge systems and the realization of our enmeshment with the land and more-than-human. Similarly, Joseph Pugliese (2020) studies how imperial violence extends beyond people, the devastation of lives, and into the air, water, and soil (See also Na’puti 2022, 2024; Hernandez 2025). Addressing the environmental impacts of U.S. and Israeli military occupations, he urges that warfare disrupts complex ecological relationships and the distributed cognition therein. Pugliese turns to Indigenous thinkers who relate to the agency of nonhuman entities, including land as an active and meaningful participant in our common world.

Today we face a climate crisis. This emergency—particularly and immediately affecting Indigenous communities everywhere—corresponds with the rupture in relationality between humans and the more-than-human, as our dissociation from the land invariably affects all entities bound within the complex infrastructure of the entire ecology. While Pugliese argues for this geobiophysical understanding of warfare, whereas land experiences trauma just as humans do, Jessica Hernandez (2022) contends that even “conservation” is a western construct emerging from imperial violence. Nothing needs conservation before colonization because those who hold the land in balance know not to take more than they need.[3] Speaking alongside her Zapotec people, Hernandez teaches us that, in fact, many Indigenous languages have no word for “conservation,” as she calls instead for terms like "taking care" or "healing"—both for ecosystems, as well as the relationships and epistemologies that steward them. In other words, it’s past time to return the stolen land, decision-making, and research design to Native peoples. (Wildcat 2009, 2023).

Perhaps one can see how “conservation” inherits the “conservative” politics of legibility. Whereas conservation is often portrayed as empowering for everyone, Hernandez recognizes the lack of diverse voices in natural resource “management” (control) and reminds us that many initiatives merely create more borders and restrictions around who and what can be there—all while ignoring, displacing, and dispossessing the multigenerational, land-based thought of First Peoples.[4] She asks us to consider what lineage the narrative of conservation celebrates, for what’s rooted in racism and anti-Indigeneity inevitably reproduces its violent history. Disrupting history, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) introduces mestiza consciousness as a guiding solvent for rigid belief structures. Anzaldúa—at once sapphic, Native, Mexican, and American—embodies multiple conflicting identities and worldviews. Born into an inner war, she synthesizes herself in the cracks between categories and creates a new, transformative consciousness, one with understanding for contradictions, vulnerability, and ambiguity.

Those who navigate multiple oppressed identities dissolve closed-mindedness. Meaningfully born at this time, Anzaldúa notes how this intersectionality proves “that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls” (85). There, she knows her being mirrors the heterosexual’s fear of being different, reflecting what Man-as-human considered less-than-human; the shadow he projects of himself as imperfect, unruly, unregulated. What Man defines and thereby differentiates, dissociates, the queer and mestiza recovers, surrendering all confidence in the familiar. “Deconstruct, construct,” she says; see now the mestiza as a nahual, “able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small ‘I’ into the total Self” (83). Notice here the signal of a return to the geobiophysics of our very bodies: what anxiety and depression lie in the oppositional conviction that the work is done alone.[5] In understanding this, Anzaldúa trusts that white people, “will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead” (85).

…………..

And this is what the ex says: “Look at what you have because of colonialism. You’re an artist living in New York, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Not to mention modern medicine, sanitation—Are you not grateful?” How could I complain about what I’ve been given, and he’s right.[6]

I wasn’t complaining, though, but describing what happened and what we can do about it. [Free Gaza; Free Gaza; Free Gaza].

From Anzaldúa: “We need you to own that fact that you looked down on us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our personhood, our self-respect” (85).

Then from Daniel Wildcat (2023): “Indigenous Peoples practice a way of thinking that did not create the problem now facing the planet and, therefore, might just have some useful information regarding how we can make things better.”

& Azoulay ignites “a refusal to operate the technology of history.” If we demand human rights; sovereignty—may we demand the right not to be perpetrators; the inherent preexistent existence of shared freedom in a shared world. “Perpetrators,” she writes, “are the entire population of fully entitled citizens whose differential civil status within the body politic perpetuates the victimization of other groups” (524-525). And remember, citizenship is not shaped by sovereign power in the guise of a political regime, but rather by the allocation of rights & provisions among members: an individual asset to wield at the expense of others. The phrase, “American by the grace of God” comes to mind.

Put differently, we do not have to accept complicity in exchange for citizenship. Azoulay believes our rights can be reconfigured from a matter of supply & distribution to worldly relation, whereas “the violation of any person’s rights infringes on the rights of others” (526).

“This means partaking in the labor of reparation; resurgence and restoration—plight is no longer the problem of an individual claimant but rather an intolerable violence perpetrated against the commons” (524).

“It is a claiming that care for the shared world is a precondition for belonging to a community and a bid to be reintegrated back into that shared community” (526).

That is, letting go of the grammar of thoughts and things conserved at the expense of others is the beginning of unlearning imperialism.[7]

And I think about the time he said it scares him to fall in love with me,
the time he said open-mindedness is his highest value.

The way I can feel the contours of your
thoughts
The edges of your empathy

Your freedom in the security there
My animal instinct to join you here

(Watts 1951, 1966).
Nevertheless, “freedom is not from society but from an idea”(Krishnamurti 1976).
…………..

MM: “You deserve someone who cherishes your essence, Loona, absolutely everything about it, and that’s all the advice I have to give.”

But daddy, I love him! 

Maybe the purpose of this relationship was just to get me to read Dispenza (2012).

But never have I ever been so horny (I love your nature poem Pico 2017).

So I guess it was not you, it’s me
the mirror of my projection

Ahhhhhhhhh, the death that is discovering love.
(hooks 1999, 2002; Krishnamurti 1976)

Tell me, is this the “the transformation of violence into shared care for our common world” ? (Azoulay, 2019)
…………..

References

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza.
Azoulay, A. A. (2019). Potential history: Unlearning imperialism.
Deloria, V., Jr. (2004). Evolution, creationism, and other modern myths: A critical inquiry.
Dispenza, J. (2012). Breaking the habit of being yourself: How to lose your mind and create a new one.
Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707.
Hernandez, J. (2022). Fresh banana leaves: Healing Indigenous landscapes through Indigenous science.
hooks, b. (1999). All about love: New visions.
hooks, b. (2002). Communion: The female search for love.
Krishnamurti, J. (1976). Krishnamurti’s notebook.
McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2014). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis.
Na’puti, T. R. (2022). Disaster militarism and Indigenous responses
to super typhoon Yutu in the Mariana Islands. Environmental Communication.
Na’puti, T. R. (2024). “The ocean is our legacy:” Values of care and reciprocity. Environmental Communication, 18(1–2), 119–125. 
Pico, T. (2017). Nature poem.
Pugliese, J. (2020). Biopolitics of the more-than-human: Forensic ecologies of violence.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.
Watts, A. (1951). The wisdom of insecurity: A message for an age of anxiety.
Watts, A. (1966). The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are.
Wildcat, D. R. (2009). Red alert! Saving the planet with Indigenous knowledge.
Wildcat, D. R. (2023). On Indigenuity: Learning the lessons of Mother Earth.
1
Azoulay on the topic: “Progress is both the reason and excuse for destruction and its remedy, the preferable way to deal with the wreckage left behind while producing ever-increasing ruination” (18). Imperial forces work through the “normalization not only of the newly imposed procedures, but of the need to constantly and infinitely invent more of the new to justify the destruction of what exists” (26). That is, “the pursuit of the new defines imperialism” (17).

2
“We perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates” (Anzaldúa 78).

3
Hernandez: “Our lands do not owe us anything…our lands were not created to serve us.”

4
Also, conservation—a term coined by President Roosevelt—coincides with the creation of national parks, which are government entities directly responsible for the removal of Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands (Hernandez 2022).

5
“The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death” (Anzaldúa 79).

6
Vine Deloria Jr. (2004), on the contrary: “The benefits of these technical achievements are actually available to a very small portion of our species. The majority of people on the planet still live reasonably primitive and restricted lives. With the commerce in Western arms and munitions, they now live subject to dangers they could never have anticipated a century ago. The condition of the world today is hardly encouraging considering the various signs of ecological destruction we are now able to document. The claim of progress by a few fortunate millions in the Western industrial nations may also be seen as a claim to blame” (133-134). And, from Daniel Wildcat (2009): “The irony of our situation is that while modern medicine, with its wedding of biology and chemistry, has extended life expectancy for everyone in the United States, albeit for some more than others, we now live longer to face a host of diseases that are not pathogen borne, but lifestyle, or, more accurately, lifeway diseases.”

7
But really, from Wildcat (2009): “We have nothing to lose but the hubris that promotes the thought that somehow we, human kind, are in control. What is gained is an entrée to indigenous knowledges—implicitly complex systems of knowledge—that will never claim to know it all, but will claim to know something: something about our relations, the necessity for respect, and, most importantly, the inalienability of responsibilities human kind must accept if we and our relatives are to live well on Mother Earth.”