Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation
Sarah Milne
The University of Arizona Press: 2022
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In 2003, Sarah Milne found herself travelling along a remote road in southwest Cambodia en route to the Cardamom Mountains and a new job with Conservation International (CI). She could not have envisaged where this journey would take her. Down the line, she would come to document a conservation program as it unravelled in the very mountains she was headed to. Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation is her account of what came to pass.

The story is intriguing, especially for anyone with a passing knowledge of conservation in Cambodia at the start of the new millennium. Back then, the Kingdom was the ‘wild east’ of conservation, with a cabal of international organisations—World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society and Wild Aid, among others—jostling for territory, funds and credos. The decisions they made affected both the Cambodian landscape and the homes of millions. This was the era of ‘Big Conservation’, foreign non-profits operating as proxy state agents, fusing conservation and development across the country’s wild realms.

 

• Tags: Cambodia, Issue 31, Sarah Milne, Wayne McCallum