Modern wildlife conservation commonly takes the form of protectionism: an approach that seeks to protect nature (i.e. certain faunal species and populations) from society (i.e. humans) in order to preserve it. Rooted in the ideas of equilibrium ecology, protectionism views direct human presence and interaction as a major threat to the ‘balance of nature’. Therefore it advocates the creation of Protected Areas (PAs) to contain the wild populations of interest and the strict, often forcible, exclusion of humans from them. Since many human communities have a deep cultural and economic connection to nature, the protectionist spatial imagination has been criticised as being reductionist and its practices as socially unjust.