Population Projections, Species Conservation, and Ecumenopolis
Conservationist thinkers need to imagine problems and possibilities in a potential “ecumenopolitan” planetary future. This need is especially pronounced for conservationists concerned with megafauna.
Composing an abstract for an upcoming (and depressingly Zoom-based) academic conference on elephants, I wound up inadvertently writing something of a mini-manifesto, on the subject of population projections and species conservation. Abstracts are supposed to be 250 words and this is 750 words, so, for the conference, I’ll eventually have to compress this. The long version seemed just right for the Bell Riots Review.
“Mahuto-Futurism: Human-Elephant Cohabitation in the Ecumenopolis”
Jacob Shell, Associate Professor, Temple University USA
Many conservationist studies concerned with the future viability of the Asian elephant species (Elephas maximus) focus their attention on the short-term horizon, analyzing various land-use, legal, or funding possibilities for the next decade or two. While this temporal framing is certainly valuable and merits continuing emphasis, it misses a looming problem for the elephants, as well as for a great many other species: the plausibility that the planet-wide human population will increase so dramatically over the next century and beyond, that certain habitats such as temperate and tropical forestland will be entirely displaced by urbanization and agriculturalization. Some conservationist and environmentalist thinkers may find the question of long-term human population growth to be non-urgent, due to the prevalence in recent decades of certain demographic projections which have the global human population plateauing at around 11 to 15 billion by 2100. This projected population is sufficiently similar to the present-day population of 8 billion that, for many, it may seem appropriate to proceed as if the challenges faced by non-human species in 2140 will be similar to those faced in 2040—that is, as if a short term orientation already “covers” the long-term. But these projections are in fact highly questionable and suspect in their core assumptions, as they’re premised on the idea of a kind of permanent techno-social and political-economic stasis emerging—a permanent stasis which would in fact be quite unprecedented.
An alternative current of thinking, what I’d loosely term “futurism,” begins from a premise that radical shifts in the techno-social and political economic organization of the planet will in fact take place. From this vantage point, the concept, or specter, of “ecumenopolis,” developed by 1960s urban planning theorist Constantinos Doxiadis, merits attention within environmentalist discourse. Doxiadis imagines human urbanization proceeding from being contained to an archipelago of urban dots and megalopolitican corridors (i.e., the late 20th century and early 21st century situation), to eventually spilling beyond these spatial containers and filling up entire continents and eventually the whole planet. This planet-wide city is the “ecumenopolis.” There is no demographic plateau in Doxiadis’ scenario, at least not until the ecumenopolis has been realized.
Conservationist and environmental thinkers should not dismiss this scenario as mere sci-fi fantasy; they need to imagine problems and possibilities in a potential “ecumenopolitan” planetary future. This need is especially pronounced for conservationists who are centrally concerned with species whose biospatial needs, in terms corporeal size and ranging, exceed those of the human corporeal unit around which urbanization has conventionally been organized: conservationists concerned, that is, with megafauna like elephants. Will there be room for elephants in an ecumenopolis?
As a mode of academic discussion, futurism is fraught with certain difficulties, such as the problem of pure fantasism. In one kind of pure fantasy, we could imagine saving the elephants by finding a suitable planet for them in a different star system. Such a scenario has rather limited theoretical value for our purposes, and so the conference presentation will seek to avoid this current of imagining. Instead, my discussion will be partially grounded in the scope of possibility for human-elephant sociologies and geographies which has already been empirically established. This empirically grounded segment of the discussion will look in particular at studies on elephants who have been absorbed into certain human working communities, assisting in tasks like flood-time transport and logging (such practices persist in some parts of Burma and northeast India). The pivotal human figure who provides the elephant with access to the human work environment, and thus who widens the scope of future possibility for human-elephant co-species cohabitation, is the elephant rider: the mahout. Though the mahout is oftentimes presented as an archaic, or outdated figure, the presentation stresses the futuristic potential of the mahout and of the certain aspects of the mahout-elephant dynamic.
Beyond this empirically-grounded discussion of the mahout-elephant duo’s practical socio-geographical abilities, the presentation highlights various works of art (such as the illustration of mid-20th century science-fictional artist Frank B. Paul) and works of literature (such as the “megadonts” and “mahout unions” of Paulo Bacigalupi’s vision of 23rd-century Bangkok) which can begin to visually and narratively articulate a “mahuto-futurism” to elephant conservationists and planetary futurists alike. Finally, the presentation will redirect both the empirically-grounded and the futuristic segments of the discussion towards a re-framing of how we conceive of elephant conservationist discourse in the present day and onward.
Frank B. Paul artwork in 1961 Amazing Stories:
More “mahuto-futurist” imagery here: