What a week. The global biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia (COP16) had just concluded. And then Trump got re-elected as President of the United States. Clearly the latter puts an enormous damper on the former. That is, if one believes that the Cali conference actually made significant progress in terms of tackling the biodiversity crisis.
Surely, the conference produced some positive outcomes: Indigenous peoples have been granted permanent representation at the United Nations and companies need to pay more for ‘nature’s genetics’ to produce drugs. But overall, most agree that COP16 did not lay the groundwork for the dramatic action so urgently needed to address the biodiversity crisis.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. International environmental meetings consistently fail to halt the crises they are meant to address. And in the meantime, the biodiversity crisis keeps going from bad to worse. The massive, climate change-induced fires raging in the largest wetland on Earth, the Brazilian Pantanal, and their staggering impacts on biodiversity, are just one of the latest illustrations.
This is why a growing group, of which we are part, have been pushing hard for a systemic alternative, a ‘convivial conservation’ that confronts the root causes of the crisis: an unjust capitalist economy bent on continual growth through land use change, resource extraction and worker exploitation. To some, this seems radical. And if radical is defined etymologically as ‘going to the roots,’ then it is: convivial conservation goes straight to the roots of the biodiversity crisis. But in another sense, it is not at all. Radical in the common sense of ‘extreme’ is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
For conservation, this has meant increasing protected areas and appeasing, even embracing, economic ‘business as usual.’ And despite some more progressive nudges, these are also the continued cornerstones of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Most conservation leaders ultimately still believe that separating humans and the rest of nature while embracing capitalist market logics (through forms of ‘natural capital’ valuation) can be the basis for the solution going forward. The extreme consequences of this approach for biodiversity as well as climate change are visible all around us.
Trump, if anything, is another extreme yet logical consequence of capitalist business-as-usual, and conservationists will be wondering what this will mean going forward. And they know it will not be good. If we learned anything from Trump’s first presidency, it is that he was openly hostile to all environmental issues. And now he will come back with a vengeance and an even more extreme agenda.
We wrote about the consequences of Trump becoming president the first time in our 2020 book ‘The Conservation Revolution.’ 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.”
Now that we are facing a ‘Trump moment in Conservation, Part II,’ we can say it even more bluntly: conservation has never truly addressed the fundamental power structures that lead to biodiversity loss. And it let itself believe that under Biden it could go back to doing what it had always done: expand protected areas and work with business-as-usual economic interests. Basically, to ‘tweak’ the system instead of strongly opposing it; to intensify well-worn strategies rather than engage in radical experimentation that inspires real transformation. In so doing, conservation sometimes wins some battles, but it consistently loses the overall war.
The question is whether ‘Trump II’ will be the wake-up call that’s needed. The conservative, cautious and business-as-usual forces remain very strong in the conservation movement, despite its continuous apocalyptic messaging that the world is on fire and transformative change must happen now. But when push comes to shove, mainstream conservation tends to fall in line with the powers that be, regardless of how destructive they are. The first announcements by major conservation organizations that they will continue business-as-usual, including working with Trump, have already appeared.
We want to urgently repeat our earlier plea: this second ‘Trump moment in conservation’ must be a wake-up call to the futility of this approach. 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. Not doing so enables more Donald Trump, more Viktor Orban, more destruction, more cynicism, more inequality and more extinction.
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. If Trump II is not a wake-up call, then what is?
This article by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher was first published by Mongabay.com on 8 November 2024. Lead Image: A symbol of America, bald eagles like this one in Alaska came back from possible extinction with the aid of conservationists and legislation like the Endangered Species Act, which suffered many attacks during Trump’s first term in office. Image by Andy Morffew via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
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