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Posts Tagged ‘conservation’

Will ‘Trump Part II’ be the wake up call needed toward more effective conservation?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on 8 November 2024| Leave a Comment »

Mongabay commentary by Robert Fletcher and me on the conservation implications of the re-election of Trump as president of the USA.

We wrote about the consequences of Trump becoming president the first time in our 2020 book The Conservation Revolution (Verso Books). There, we argued that, like the climate, biodiversity is very “likely to suffer under a Trump presidency” but that “this is not the only reason why his election is significant for conservation.” We argued that there is a much bigger challenge facing conservation, and we referred to this as the ‘Trump moment in conservation’:

“Basically, the Trump moment means that mainstream conservation refuses – at its own peril and that of the biodiversity it aims to conserve – to properly acknowledge the root causes of biodiversity loss and to support the radical types of responses necessary to halt and reverse this trend. Instead, […], many conservationists are content – often proudly or ‘pragmatically’ so – to join forces with the economic logics and institutions of destruction behind such terms as ‘natural capital’ or ‘ecosystem services.’ In doing so, they might occasionally slow down some biodiversity loss in some places. But at the very same time they strengthen the broader drivers of biodiversity destruction that completely undermine the small gains that might be made. This is the conservation equivalent of the ‘Trump moment,’ which can only be tackled by taking and supporting much more radical action.”

In the commentary, we urgently repeat our earlier plea: this second ‘Trump moment in conservation’ must be a wake-up call. Conservation must stop hiding behind its objective science, its pragmatic politics and its feel-good appeal to reorganize as a counter-hegemonic force in alliance with other movements around the world (climate justice, land back, Fridays for the Future and many more) that seek genuine system change.

We need a radical CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION movement, now more than ever. And we call upon the conservation sector to adopt, embrace and help build this.

Will ‘Trump Part II’ be the wakeup call needed toward more effective conservation? (commentary)

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VIDI grant proposal on ‘crisis conservation’ accepted!

Posted in Brazil, Conservation, Indonesia, Rhinos, Southern Africa, Violence, tagged , , on 15 May 2015| 7 Comments »

Some great news yesterday: my VIDI grant proposal for a project entitled ‘Crisis Conservation: Saving Nature in Times and Spaces of Exception’ was accepted by the Dutch Council for Scientific Research (NWO)! This means I will be able to appoint several PhDs and a postdoc and work together with them on new research in Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia for the coming five years.

The following summary gives an indication of what the project is all about:

This project will study the impacts of the current surge in large-scale resource extraction and wildlife crime, and the conservation responses they elicit. Recent political ecology iterature points at three reasons why this surge differs from earlier ones and why extraction and wildlife crime should be studied together. First, rising levels of affluence in Asian and other ‘emerging economies’ have triggered a sharp increase in the demand for fossil, mineral, timber and wildlife resources. Second, new extractive, military and information and communication technologies have rendered resource extraction and wildlife crime more effective, (potentially) lethal and destructive, and its impacts more visible to global publics. Third, they are increasingly overlapping in reality, thereby (further) blurring legal and illegal practices. The result has been a fertile ground for ‘crisis conservation’: high-pressure situations where urgent action is required to safeguard nature from destruction. The research will investigate and theorize crisis conservation situations as ‘spaces of exception’ where rules, norms and ideas about legality are violated by those perpetrating and those countering the threats. These spaces of exception often include violence and therefore dramatically change environmental governance, but exactly how and with what impacts on people and nature is ill understood.

Employing innovative multi-level ethnographic methods that connect the power and politics of actors through space and time, the project focuses on three countries where iconic species and ecosystems are acutely threatened by globally induced extraction and wildlife crime dynamics: Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. By investigating and comparing how actors respond to crisis conservation situations in these countries, the project will develop important policy-relevant knowledge on how better to deal with and respond to similar situations of exception while moving towards a novel theoretical synthesis that links political ecology literatures on violence, conflict and environmental governance with influential theories on exception.

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New video documentary on the link between social media and conservation

Posted in Conservation, Cyberpolitics, tagged , , on 24 June 2014| 3 Comments »

Kirsten Horne from Earth Touch TV made this great video documentary on the promise and peril of social media’s role in nature conservation. Kirsten interviewed me while I was doing my fieldwork in South Africa last April. I think the video is very powerful, but do let me know what you think by posting comments below or on Facebook!

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