Conservation as a Territorial Ideology

Growth machine theory has typically interpreted successful contemporary conservation efforts as rare victories of elite liberal factions to protect their own use values or, alternatively, as greenwashing for growth. By studying an elite coalition dedicated to land conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, I probe whether growth theory can be used to understand conservation as a territorial ideology in its own right. Intensive interviewing and qualitative content analysis reveal that the conservation coalition uses backstage networking to promote conservation as a homegrown civic virtue. Comparing newspaper coverage of conservation and development projects opposed by the coalition, I demonstrate that the conservation coalition’s policing of conservation-related profiteering has occasionally put it at odds with the larger public and its own ideological framing. The conservation coalition’s inversion of dominant cultural scripts of growth promotion demonstrates that growth theory can be productively applied to unusual cases.