A major biodiversity conference, recently concluded in Montreal, Canada, was billed as the event that will decide the “fate of the entire living world”. All well then that the meeting closed with what has been hailed as a “historic” breakthrough: a deal to protect 30% of all land and water on Earth by 2030.

How historic is this deal, really? Judging from the effect of protected areas and major environment meetings over the last few decades, we should not get our hopes up. In fact, this deal may force us to reconsider the usefulness of such meetings altogether.

Read the opinion piece written with Prof. Rosaleen Duffy here:

New opinion piece with Han Wiskerke

Nederlandse boeren hebben keihard gewerkt om zich in een aantoonbaar onduurzaam landbouwsysteem overeind te houden. Dit zichzelf ondermijnend succes is nu zichtbaar aan zijn einde. Boeren moeten perspectief krijgen om naar een duurzaam systeem om te schakelen. En wetenschap en politiek moeten hieruit lessen trekken voor de nog veel grotere maatschappelijke omwenteling die ons te wachten staat. De stikstofcrisis is het spreekwoordelijke topje van de ijsberg van wat ons allen te wachten staat.

Stikstofcrisis iets van boeren? Slechts een teken van wat ons allen te wachten staat

The German translation of the Conservation Revolution (Die Naturschutzrevolution) has been published by Passagen Verlag in October 2022! Order your copy here.

Prof. Reinhard Loske wrote a generous review of the book: Das Ende des alten Naturschutzes and a longer version here: Das Ende des harmlosen Naturschutzes.

I am delighted that the special section on political ecologies of extinction was published in the Journal of Political Ecology, Volume 28. Issue 1. 2021. Download the entire SI in one PDF file here:

CONTENTS:
Political ecologies of extinction: from endpoint to inflection-point. Introduction to the Special Section 696-704

Bram Büscher

The biopolitics of private conservation: jeopardizing labor and rhino to optimize capital? 705-720

Lerato Thakholi

Extinction in transition: coca, coal, and the production of enmity in Colombia’s post-peace accords environment 721-740

Hannah Meszaros Martin and Oscar Pedraza

Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: a pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal 741-759

Adrian Nel

Between overstocking and extinction: conservation and the intensification of uneven wildlife geographies in Africa 760-781

Bram Büscher

Ice and Ivory: the cryopolitics of mammoth de-extinction 782-803

Charlotte A. Wrigley

Enjoying extinction: philanthrocapitalism, jouissance, and ‘excessive environmentourism’ in the South African rhino poaching crisis 804-822

Stasja Koot

Populist authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil: making sense of Bolsonaro’s anti-environment agenda 823-844

Sierra Deutsch

Monitoring extinction: defaunation, technology and the biopolitics of conservation in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil 845-863

Thomas Kiggell

Crisis conservation and green extraction: biodiversity offsets as spaces of double exception 864-888

Philippe Le Billon

In December 2021, I did an interview with the great Evgeny Morozov of the Crypto Syllabus on Nature3: https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/bram-buscher-on-nature3/

As Egeny writes: “Do crypto technologies offer a radical new way to fix the problems related to climate change and other forms of environmental destruction? Or are they just another set of “non-transformative” solutions that feed off technological optimism and solutionism? Making sense of claims advanced by climate-focused projects in the crypto space could be difficult: while many of them do sound well-intentioned and benign, they are also keen to invent new (and often bombastic) terms to describe practices for which older, already discredited terms do exist.”

My core argument: “Though they talk about tokens, blockchains, and NFTs, crypto projects that aim at conservation still rely on monetizing biodiversity and trading its ‘services’ and basically seem to render more complicated what was not working in the first place”.

By Bram Büscher, author of The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism

Environmental organizations have become fully dependent on social media platforms. This is not just getting in the way of meaningfully tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. It will make them worse and more complicated. It is time for environmentalists to rethink digital media and start organizing counterpower.

Read the entire blog on: https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/55422/why-tackling-environmental-crises-requires-challenging-big-tech-power/

Available as from today, 15 December 2020, around the world!

Get your copy via The University of California Press website, or any other bookshop!

Coming soon with University of California Press:

New blog post By Robert Fletcher, Bram Büscher & Kate Massarella, Wageningen University, the Netherlands

When 2020 was declared a “super year” for biodiversity conservation, no one suspected that a particular form of this biodiversity would proliferate to such an extent as to bring all of this fanfare to a screeching halt. With species and ecosystems in dangerous decline the world over, there is growing recognition that previous conservation strategies have been largely inadequate to the challenges they face, and that something radically different will be needed. A series of global meetings to address this deficiency were scheduled to take place in 2020. Most centrally, the IUCN’s quadrennial World Conservation Congress, slated for June in France, was intended to feed into the 15^th Conference of the Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity to be held in October in China, during which the global biodiversity targets for the next decade would be established. Concurrently, the 26^th COP of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would meet in November in Scotland to plan for the future of climate change intervention, upon which biodiversity conservation crucially depends.

See the entire blog post on: https://t2sresearch.org/output/close-the-tap-covid-19-and-the-need-for-convivial-conservation/

Out now and available worldwide:

Reviews:

“In our era of unprecedented conservation needs and challenges, this hard-hitting, clear-sighted book offers a radical and timely way forward. Two eminent and committed political ecologists cut a path through old and new conservation debates and dichotomies—people vs. nature, capitalism vs. post-capitalism—to offer a new paradigm and politics around conviviality. Vital reading, and a vital manifesto for all concerned with how people and non-human natures can live well together.”
– Melissa Leach, Director, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

“Buscher and Fletcher significantly advance radical alternatives to mainstream conservation, especially by locating them within the need for systemic alternatives to capitalism (and hopefully by implication, though not explicitly stated, patriarchy). Their notion of convivial conservation, building on innovative traditions that have broken away from dominant notions of progress and development, helps envisage an end to the human domination of the earth, so desperately needed.”
– Ashish Kothari, co-author with A. Shrivastava of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India

“This book is a remarkable intellectual and political achievement, demonstrating nothing less than how to organize and practice revolutionary conservation beyond the Anthropocene, but within the ruins of uneven socio-ecological capitalist development. A razor-sharp analysis of conservation and how to politicize its futures.”
– Erik Swyngedouw, Professor, University of Manchester

“The debate over the conservation of creation is necessarily deep and contentious–this new approach deserves a careful reading from everyone who cares about human and more-than-human nature!”
– Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature