The history of conservation is fraught with conflict between strategies employed by powerful actors (i.e., experts, governments and capitalists) and local actors (i.e., farmers, fishermen, herders, indigenes and other marginalized groups). Conservation memories of experts derived from the writings of literary, journalistic, and scientific publications can be compared to local memories drawn from ethnographic research, or in the case of this study, an auto-ethnography of the author's childhood to expose the perceptions and practices that influence the broader forces directing landscape change. Utilizing a landscape biography approach that weaves together the conservation memories of locals and experts it becomes apparent that high-profile actors marginalized the conservation practices of locals in their quest for something new. Local conservation landscapes and their memories were maligned or ignored while the literary memory of experts directed landscape change. Texts act as memories given that people will remember places and landscapes derived from their readings (Delyser 2005). Finally, this study demonstrates there is a niche to be found in a cultural geography that focuses upon environmental conservation.