Though Anglo writers may have romanticised albatrosses, Japanese attitudes toward the birds were brusquely unsentimental. Indeed, the Japanese name for Steller’s albatross translates simply as ‘stupid bird’, and by the eve of World War II Japanese bird-hunters had pushed the species to the brink of extinction. But in the post-war period Japanese attitudes toward albatrosses changed utterly. The birds became the object of a sustained conservation campaign: in 1958 their nesting grounds on Torishima were designated a ‘natural monument’ of the nation, and Japanese ornithogists successfully lobbied to have the species added to the IUCN’s embryonic biodiversity database.

Conservationists have generally framed this sea-change in atitudes toward albatrosses as part of a trajectory of national moral renewal. But this framing omits the class politics that often characterise wildlife conservation in practice, as well as the post-colonial context distinctive to post-war Japan. Bird conservation provided a way for Japan’s overwhelmingly aristocratic ornithologists to carve out a new public role for themselves in post-war society. They did so by consciously fashioning the fall and rise of Torishima’s albatrosses as an allegory for mid-twentieth-century international relations, exploiting ambient anxiety about Japan’s compromised sovereignty following defeat in World War II.

Many nations have developed policies and enforced legal approaches for addressing the needs of species at risk of extinction. Generally, however, conservation reliance is not acknowledged legally and is therefore ignored. Increasingly, legal approaches reflect the importance of (1) values in addition to hunting and fishing, (2) wildlife as a shared resource, (3) intrinsic rather than instrumental value, (4) helping species to become self-sustaining, and (5) long-term support for imperiled species. The International Union for the Conservation of Naturehas provided an international standard for recognizing species status. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act provide a legal framework for species conservation that has been effective (although these acts have also spawned many legal challenges that have consumed the time and resources of stakeholders). The effectiveness of imperiled species laws depends on funding that can vary, leading to varying implementation and enforcement. Conservation reliance is seldom addressed explicitly. Responsibility for implementation may be spread across national, state or province, and more local entities.

“Decolonizing Ecology,” addresses environmental recovery efforts after WWII leading up to the explosion of environmental movements in the 1960s. With a pivot to rhetoric of “recovery” and “regeneration,” nature protection gained national validation with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy. Coinciding with this inward turn, however, the formation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ensured the United Kingdom’s continued involvement in foreign lands. I look to Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel No Longer at Ease to complicate the unevenness of environmental recovery in relation to decolonization. Through a juxtaposition of main character Obiajulu, whose name means “the mind at last is at rest,” and Mr. Green, a 1950s counterpoint to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz, I explore modernism’s environmental legacy in regard to the end of colonialism and a newly emerging “green imperialism” that seeks to manage natural spaces on a global scale.