The WCPA’s natural sacred sites taskforce : a critique of conservation biology’s view of popular religion

The environmental anthropologist, Anna Tsing (2005:12), refers to modern-day nature conservation as a form of ‘globally circulating knowledge’. In this chapter I focus on the way local religious systems have attracted the interest of conservation biologists who have come to see that in many parts of the world – and their attention is particularly on the developing world – religious beliefs and practices turn out to have ‘conservation outcomes’ (e.g. Verschuuren 2007; Mallarach 2008; Wild and McLeod 2008; Verschuuren and Wild 2010). These take the form of sites and landscapes which, primarily because of their religious significance to particular cultural groups, have retained ‘high conservation value’. There are, for instance, sacred mountains like Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka (Wickramasinghe 2003), the lulic (sacred) forests of East Timor (McWilliam 2003), and the sacred groves of India (Boraiah et al. 2003), all of them being situations where forest environments have been preserved (though usually not in a primary state). Increasingly, knowledge about these places and the religious beliefs and practices that have sustained them flows along international circuits, particularly under the auspices of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with the direction of flow mainly being from the south to the north and from the east to the west. There tends to be a reverse flow of conservation management and protected area management expertise.