Buying time, buying hope: Making conservation futures through predator-proof fencing

The use of predator-proof fencing in protected area conservation has increased rapidly in recent decades. Often stretching for kilometres, predator-proof fences are an imposing form of infrastructure, attractive to conservation organisations and funders wanting visible investment, tangible impact, and technological innovation. Advocates promote fenced enclosures as a fast way to establish sanctuaries for threatened species in an extinction crisis. Despite growing use, and success in protecting endangered mammals, predator-proof fencing has attracted little critical scholarship. We examine the political effects of predator-proof fencing though a case study of a proposed fenced sanctuary in Wilsons Promontory National Park (the Prom), Victoria, Australia. Promoted as creating an “ark” safe from outside threats, this proposal is shaped by settler-colonial legacies and political economic power. Research has established that territorial logics of colonial, national and neoliberal governance offer a spatial fix for conservation. We focus here on how the Prom fence also promises a temporal fix within a linear, abstract temporality centred on sidestepping the present to recover the past and salvage the future. At the Prom, fencing serves as both a tool of practical management and a tool of conservation governance that captures public attention, attracts funding, and defines criteria for success. The conservation quest to hold back extinction is thus material and semiotic. Materially, fenced enclaves reconfigure human and more-than-human agency, creating novel socio-ecologies. Semiotically, fenced enclaves secure hope by buying time. While the sanctuaries produced by predator-proof fencing have an important role in protecting against extinction, we caution against a conservation politics grounded only in future-oriented forms of hope that can direct attention, care and investment away from the complex, messy politics of the present.