Why Conservation Makes Such a Good Setting for Fiction Novels

There is a slightly romantic idea of conservation that tends to exist from the outside.

Sunsets. Elephants. Rangers in khaki. Beautiful stretches of wilderness where good people dedicate their lives to saving animals.

And yes, some of that is true.

But conservation is also land, money, politics, communities, egos, difficult decisions, competing priorities and, occasionally, people behaving very badly indeed.

Which, from a novelist’s point of view, makes it rather useful.

Conservation Already Comes With Conflict Built In

Every good novel needs something at stake.

Conservation has stakes everywhere you look.

Who owns the land? Who gets to decide what happens on it? What happens when protecting wildlife conflicts with somebody’s livelihood? What happens when enormous amounts of money become attached to an animal, legally or illegally?

Even among people who genuinely care about wildlife, there isn’t always agreement about what “protecting it” actually means.

That interests me far more than writing a world divided neatly into conservation heroes and villains.

People are rarely that convenient.

Someone can care deeply about one thing while being completely selfish about another. A decision can be legally correct and still cause damage. A person can believe they are protecting a place while refusing to listen to the people who actually understand it.

That uncertainty gives fiction somewhere to go.

The Wilderness Is Beautiful. It Is Also Completely Indifferent to You.

Africa is often treated as scenery in fiction.

I think that wastes it.

A reserve, a wilderness area or a working conservation landscape can influence a story almost as strongly as a character can.

Weather changes plans. Roads disappear under water. Animals refuse to appear on cue. Fires start. Fences come down. Vehicles break. People make decisions several hours away from the nearest convenient solution.

And nature does not care that somebody is having an emotional crisis.

There is something wonderfully useful about putting two characters in the middle of a complicated relationship and then giving them an injured animal, a missing person, a broken fence or a conservation emergency that absolutely does not have time for their feelings.

Suddenly, character is revealed by action.

What someone does when nobody is watching tells you far more about them than three pages describing their personality ever could.

Conservation Also Gives You Moral Grey Areas

This is probably the part I find most interesting.

Wildlife conservation is not simply about loving animals.

There are governments, private landowners, scientists, veterinarians, guides, reserve staff, neighbouring communities, donors, tourists, law enforcement officers and conservation organisations involved. Their priorities can overlap. They can also collide spectacularly.

Then there is wildlife crime.

Poaching and trafficking sound almost conveniently fictional until you start looking at the reality of them. They are not isolated incidents involving one poacher and one animal. Wildlife trafficking can involve organised criminal networks, money, transport routes, corruption and international demand.

That gives a writer an enormous canvas, but it also creates a responsibility not to turn conservation into a cartoon.

The animals should not simply exist to make the hero look heroic.

The people living alongside wildlife should not exist as scenery either.

And conservationists should be allowed to be complicated human beings rather than permanently noble people staring thoughtfully into sunsets.

Why Pangolins Worked for The Boundary Between Us

In The Boundary Between Us, a pangolin sits at the centre of a much larger mystery.

I chose it partly because pangolins are extraordinary animals and partly because their story demonstrates how quickly something seemingly small can connect to something much bigger.

There are eight recognised pangolin species across Africa and Asia, and all remain under significant conservation pressure. Illegal trade continues despite strong international protection.

They are also quiet, secretive animals.

There is something particularly unsettling about an animal most people will never see becoming valuable enough to attract organised criminal interest.

For fiction, that creates an interesting contrast.

The animal itself is unobtrusive.

The human behaviour surrounding it is anything but.

And once money becomes involved, a conservation problem can very quickly become a human one.

Conservation Makes Romance More Interesting Too

I write character-driven fiction, and The Boundary Between Us is absolutely a love story.

But I never wanted the conservation plot to be something happening conveniently behind the romance.

The two have to affect each other.

Alexis and Eric meet as two adults with their own histories, loyalties and ideas about how things should be done. Put them into a world involving neighbouring reserves, wildlife, land disputes and an increasingly uncomfortable mystery, and attraction is only one part of their problem.

They have to decide whether they trust each other.

They have to decide what they are prepared to risk.

And they have to work out whether protecting something sometimes requires letting somebody else inside the boundaries you have spent years building.

That, perhaps unsurprisingly, is where the title came from.

The Best Conservation Stories Are Still About People

A novel about conservation cannot survive on wildlife alone.

Eventually, every story comes back to people.

Love. Greed. Loyalty. Fear. Family. Ambition. Jealousy. Grief. Money. Pride.

Conservation simply puts those things somewhere the consequences become much harder to ignore.

A decision about land changes what happens to animals.

A decision about money changes what happens to a reserve.

One person keeping quiet can protect somebody.

Or destroy something.

That is why I keep coming back to wild places when I write.

Not because they make beautiful backgrounds.

Because they raise the stakes.

And once you put complicated people somewhere the stakes actually matter, you have the beginnings of a story.

Savana Scott-Douglas

The Boundary Between Us is a wildlife adventure romance set against the complicated world of conservation, private reserves and wildlife crime in Southern Africa.

Purchase the ebook here or read for free on Kindle+