Conservation and Diversity
By Keir Chauhan & Arjun Dutta, Current Students
For the conservation movement to expand its reach and importance within society, it must embrace human differences and the benefits that come from having a multiplicity of perspectives. In turn, improving the capabilities for organisational decision-making and planning. By ‘human difference,’ we mean the multiple ways individual people are unique from one another. Though this goes beyond race and class, these will be the focal points of discussion throughout this article. By exploring the ways differences interact, it will subsequently be argued that only by acknowledging and paying for the labour of people from diverse backgrounds will the conservation movement truly become diverse in the UK.
Among 91 organisations working across climate, nature, and sustainability, only 7% of full-time staff come from an ethnic minority group. The biggest barrier to access is the lack of support for career progression with limited opportunities outside of volunteering or low-paid conservation work for ethnically diverse staff. This speaks to the need to recognise that to truly tackle racial inequalities, such inequalities must be seen as tied to class. In the process, it highlights that to address these issues conservation must ensure that the barriers of class do not become insurmountable, especially when combined with barriers associated with race.
If diversity is important to organisations, then the economic model of relying on unpaid/underpaid labour – especially in the environmental sector – needs to be challenged. In effect, organisations need to put their money where their mouths are. We say this because diversity should be about the multiple ways in which people are unique from one another, rather than merely one underrepresented difference with an easily solvable solution. Indeed, for good reason are terms such as ‘virtue-signalling’ often attributed to the cheap, ineffective ways in which ‘diversity’ can be addressed. Until multiple overlaying factors are recognised and considered together, conservation will change only superficially.
Budgets for conservation work need to be made with paid labour priced in rather than solely relying on graduate or even postgraduate volunteers. If the UK models of conservation are so dependent on the labour of young volunteers, then it will ultimately not be able to shake the biggest diversity barriers facing the sector. Conservation is typically perceived as, and remains, a predominately white, middle-class activity. Even among young people who are from diverse ethnic backgrounds, the class issue remains largely the same.
Not everyone can utilise free time for volunteering and/or on minimal pay, emphasising class influencing the ability of some to pursue an interest, rather than express one. We can highlight our own experiences here to demonstrate how other characteristics differentiate us from our peers and make us more similar. It is about the types of privilege to be privileged in some senses and others not. On the one hand, we are ethnically diverse (in that we both come from Asian ethnic heritage), but we are also both middle-class, Russell Group-educated students. So, while on the one hand, we might represent a diversification by being in conservation, we also recognise we are not a full reflection of what diversification can and must do.
Lack of investment in people is a key reason why those from lower-class, ethnic minority backgrounds struggle to make it in the conservation sector. That is to say that without being aware of how class affects the makeup of who is hired, there is ultimately an issue with measuring diversity by categories such as race alone. It should go beyond more than a tick-box feature exercise and instead reflect the multi-dimensional identities people carry with them. In the process, privileging cognitive diversity (for its emphasis on thinking about the world differently) over merely one form of identity. In that way, conservation can move forward to challenge the systemic class inequality inherent in the sector that is supposed to conserve all people and wildlife in the UK.
The United States has started to reckon with this trend, with Audubon spotlighting the issue in an article that calls for more paid opportunities for field biologists. After all, how can conservation attract the best and brightest if it systematically excludes those who cannot afford unpaid or low-paid work? Innovative solutions to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change require a diversity of perspectives at all levels of UK conservation. This is important to make sure that a broad coalition of support is created, and that conservation can legitimately represent the UK population.
Ultimately, without an emphasis on tackling the economic model’s systemic barriers, conservation’s diversity may largely remain superficial. The model in which young people are placed in a system that benefits unpaid or low-paid work has the effect of ensuring only those who can afford it can enter the sector. It is hardly surprising that this leads to less differentiation between the experiences of individuals. Small incremental changes, largely led by more people from ethnic minorities entering the middle classes, will not alone aid progress toward meaningful diversification.
Both of us have been extremely lucky to represent organisations as volunteers, benefiting from the expertise of staff which only boosted our confidence, skills, experiences and much more over the past few years. Thus undoubtedly, volunteering holds an incredibly important place in society, and we do not wish to understate its value. In the process, expanding the opportunities available to young people to include more paid work as well as unpaid work facilitates the involvement of more groups within society which organisations rarely reach. More than just this, it gives more agency to future generations. If organisations are not willing to invest in the future of conservation, then what does that say about meeting conservation goals and tackling issues at a far larger scale? Conservation must be place, people and wildlife-centred if it is going to successfully protect UK nature in the wake of ecological and climate crises.
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