The Wild & Scenic North Fork American River in Placer County, CA benefits from decades of conservation efforts stemming from its recognition as a place needful and deserving of protection. This study utilizes GIS, cartography and the critical examination of both, along with discussion of landscape conservation literature, to discuss what the North Fork has to teach us about the conservation efforts undertaken in its name and (potentially) what those lessons may have to offer about conservation efforts in general. It asks what we mean by conservation. The definition matters because it dictates the way spatial data related to conservation is collected, attributed, displayed, perceived or understood and then acted upon. Maps of the North Fork are examined utilizing data from multiple organizations. Each group‘s data purports to exhibit conservation in the drainage. Depending upon whose inherently political definition of conservation one uses, vastly different maps are generated. A posthumanist approach to mapped entities’ affective capacity to shape perception and action related to their subject matter buttresses a political ecology inquiry of variant definitions of “conservation.”
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