In their critique of new conservation, neoprotectionists commonly point to problems of ‘growth’, ‘development’, and ‘consumption’ as key threats to conservation. What they often fail to make explicit – with important exceptions – is that the (socially and environmentally) unsustainable forms of growth, development, and consumption they decry are essential to the sustenance of the capitalist economy itself. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that capitalism is an inherently expansionary system driven by a demand for continual growth in order to overcome the cyclical stagnation that afflicts it. Hence, the last five centuries during which the world has been increasingly – though extremely unevenly – integrated within a single global economy and its resources progressively exploited should be understood, in large part, as a function of the demands of capital. One of the main means of sustaining this growth is through stimulating ever-increasing consumption of an expanded range of products that are often quickly rendered obsolete in order to spur still further consumption. Seriously addressing development, growth, and consumption must therefore lead to a critical focus on the capitalist economy itself.
This, however, is more easily said than done. The ‘capitalist economy’ is a tremendously complex and contested set of dynamics, ideas and practices that far exceeds those around commodity production, consumption and circulation. Capitalism is decidedly not one-dimensional, in other words, and we must be careful not to ‘dichotomize’ reality into capitalist versus non-capitalist forms.1 Alongside these real-world dynamics, complex and extensive debates have developed that are beyond the scope of this book. What matters here is the broader point that capitalist economic development has proven to be profoundly destructive and unsustainable – socially and environmentally. This chapter seeks to explain why this is so, how different actors within the Anthropocene conservation debate have engaged with this important issue and why a shift to a postcapitalist form of conservation is necessary.
Building on the discussions of the metabolic rift in the previous chapter, we start by explicating why this leads to a fundamental contradiction between capitalism and sustainability. Based on recent literature, we emphasize two points. First, that the central problem in the relation between capitalism and sustainability cannot be attributed to the metabolic rift in isolation but must equally emphasize the problem of alienation. Second, that both of these deeply relate to the question of the dichotomy between humans and nature,2 but that we cannot resort to ‘hybridist’ monism (seeing the world essentially as one) to move beyond this issue, despite current theory suggesting precisely this. Following recent critiques, we assert that making meaningful distinctions between otherwise integrated parts (‘nature’ and ‘society’) is critical for an effective ecological politics to address the unsustainability of capitalism.
At the same time, we show that the role of conservation in global capitalism that these recent critiques neglect is critical to bolster this argument. As we already pointed out in the last chapter, conservation often posits itself directly as a solution to the problem of alienation by allowing humans to experience a connection with a wild, ‘autonomous’ nature, seemingly unchanged by capitalism or ‘humanity’. Neoprotectionists, especially, come back to this point time and again, arguing that this type of nature is critical both for human sanity and for the survival of our planet. Yet, while they seem to suggest that this implies taking political economy seriously, their bold, new proposal to turn half the planet into protected areas actually achieves the opposite, or so we will argue. Through a critical discussion of the ‘half earth’ idea, we will show that neoprotectionists contradict their own scepticism regarding capitalist growth and consumerism by drawing attention (and serious discussion) away from these issues to, once again, focus exclusively on some idealized form of autonomous nature.
This has serious consequences. Not only would ‘half earth’ dramatically widen the rift between humans and the rest of nature, it also does little to solve historical deprivations caused by both conservation and development, including mass poverty. This idea demands that we refocus attention on the close links between conservation and development. Not only is this crucial in order to do justice to the – very real – poverty caused by conservation, but also to demystify development’s history and potential. After all, capitalist growth and consumerism are often referred to as – or even replaced with – the more general and positive-sounding ‘development’.
By building an understanding of the relationship between conservation and development, we show that the latter, especially the way it is currently promoted by new conservationists, is not the answer to conservation’s poor social record either. In fact, we show that conservation and capitalist development have increasingly become one and the same in the eyes of many conservationists via the idea of ‘natural capital’. To truly drive the point about capitalism’s unsustainability home, therefore, we end the chapter by summarizing our earlier arguments on this latest stage, what we call ‘Accumulation by Conservation’.
THE UNSUSTAINABILITY OF CAPITALISM
The argument that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable is not straightforward and has been discussed at length in various quarters over the last decades. Unsurprisingly, a great chunk of this has centred on understanding ‘the significance of Marx’s analysis to the contemporary ecological movement’.3 These are not the only discussions on capitalism’s ecological consequences by far, but two of their key contributions are worth highlighting for our purposes. The first refers to what the late sociologist James O’Connor called capitalism’s ‘second contradiction’.4 O’Connor argued that, in addition to the first contradiction of capitalism where capital over-accumulates beyond demand, capitalism harbours a second contradiction revolving around a tension between the need for continual growth to stave off overproduction crisis and the inherently finite nature of the material resources upon which this growth depends. As resources become increasingly taxed by the quest for continual growth they become scarcer, causing costs to rise and profits to fall. In this way, O’Connor argued, efforts to resolve capitalism’s first contradiction end up exacerbating its second, and vice versa, ad infinitum. In the process, natural resources are depleted and both waste and pollution accumulate while economic crisis forever looms on the horizon. The combination of first and second contradictions, according to O’Connor, render capitalism essentially unsustainable in both economic and environmental dimensions.
While this was seen as a breakthrough, O’Connor’s second contradiction was also criticized, as ‘it tended to subsume environmental contradictions within economic crisis, while failing to see ecological crises as serious problems in their own right’. In short, economic crisis could lead to ecological damage, but not vice versa. It is this point in particular that subsequent analyses sought to remedy, especially by revisiting the ideas of Marx, along with other nineteenth-century thinkers, around the metabolic rift. As noted by sociologist John Bellamy Foster and economist Paul Burkett: ‘the intensifying ecological problem of capitalist society could be traced therefore mainly to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and nature (that is, the alienation of nature) that formed the very basis of capitalism’s existence as a system, made worse by accumulation, i.e. capitalism’s own expansion.’5 In other words, economy and ecology are always dialectically integrated, parts of a metabolic unity, that capitalism ruptures by turning human and nonhuman nature into commodities to stimulate growth ad infinitum. This is the ultimate reason why capitalism is unsustainable and why revolution is imperative.
Yet this conclusion, while important, does not answer anything or provide a way forward. It also does not mean that capitalism will ‘automatically’ be toppled as ecological crises reach boiling point. According to David Harvey, Naomi Klein and others, evidence suggests that capitalism might be able to not only deal with but, more dangerously, profit from ecological disaster.6 The imperative for revolution therefore also comes from another reason for capitalism’s unsustainability, namely its tendency to lead to extreme alienation from nature, understood as the ‘estrangement of the necessary organic relation between human beings and nature’.7 In a sense, this argument provides another, deeper understanding of the problem of the nature–culture dichotomy: Not only are human and nonhuman natures often seen as separate, they have also become deeply estranged from each other.8 Interestingly, from a theoretical point of view, this has, perhaps indirectly, led to various ‘turns’ in contemporary theory under labels such as ‘more-than-human’ and ‘animal’ geographies and ‘new materialism’. While diverse, these perspectives all stress a need to bring ecosystems, nature and animals back into the analysis and focus on what unites human and nonhuman natures rather than what differentiates them. Yet, in doing so, they have swung the pendulum much too far: They seemingly aim to erase many if not most meaningful and essential distinctions between humans and the rest of nature that remain essential for ecological politics.9
This, then, is where we need to become more precise about the dichotomy. The fact that human natures and nonhuman natures are always inherently co-constituted does not mean, in our view, succumbing to monism and seeing everything in the world as simply ‘hybrids’ or ‘assemblages’. Following other scholars, we argue that moving beyond the dichotomy – and hence acknowledging the fundamental and organic co-constitution of human and nonhuman natures – requires at the same time careful analytical and empirical acknowledgement of the ‘relative autonomy of parts’ across and between the different categories, especially in relation to the role of humans.10 As Kate Soper asserts, a meaningful ecological politics can only occur based on a critical realist ‘acknowledgement of human exceptionality’.11 Only this stance can acknowledge human alienation from nature as a possibility, and thus open up potential for different and better relationships between humans and the rest of nature. The next chapter will explicate these issues more fully.
A REVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM?
In all of this, the question concerning the necessity for revolution remains. After all, the basic unsustainability of (contemporary) capitalism has also been endorsed by many capitalist actors, who see a better capitalism as the logical answer. Increasingly influential initiatives such as Breakthrough Capitalism and Plan B make this explicit; they plainly state that the way capitalism currently operates is ‘failing economically, socially and environmentally’ and that, following Peter Bakker, the president of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, ‘we need a revolution of capitalism’.12 Crucially, however, these actors believe that capitalism can be made sustainable. Through market-based instruments (MBIs) and other forms of economic valuation, but also broader ‘varieties of green capitalism’ such as the ‘green economy’, global capitalist actors are currently trying to imagine and – to a degree – build a new, more environmentally sensitive accumulation model in response to the global ecological crisis.
In doing so, many draw on the influential ‘manifesto for sustainable capitalism’ by Al Gore and David Blood, which argues that we must move away from ‘short-termism’ and build ‘a more long-term and responsible form of capitalism’.13 This includes negation of the alienation from nature through the commodification of conservation. In other words, this is a form of accumulation that takes conservation not as a Polanyian double-movement in response to environmental destruction, but aims to render it equal to – and so balance out - extraction and destruction while ensuring that humans can continue to be connected to and derive meaning from the rest of nature. Indeed, through ecotourism, nature documentaries, adventure sports and so forth, connection to nature to deal with modern-day alienation has become extremely profitable. The model of conservation that follows from this we have previously labelled ‘accumulation by conservation’.
This, then, is the one element that many critical scholars of the relation between capitalism and the environment often forget or minimize: the essential role that conservation has long played in the development of global capitalism. According to David Harvey, alienation comes from ‘the kind of ecological system that capital constructs’, namely as ‘functionalist, engineered and technocratic’.14 Andreas Malm holds that ‘the curse of capital is that it can emancipate itself from nature in all its sparkling autonomy only by colonising it, lining it up in rows and marching it off to the chimneys of accumulation’.15 But while this is often true, nature’s autonomy is explicitly promoted in much conservation policy and posited as a direct response and as a way to mediate and even ‘offset’ the other forms of alienated natures that ‘capital constructs’. Later in this chapter, we will show that this form of capitalist displacement of the alienation problem does not actually solve capitalism’s fundamental unsustainability. But, for now, it is important to acknowledge that conservation has long seen its role as putting boundaries around certain natures in order to ‘save’ them from the chimneys of capital (or from ‘humans’ more generally) and to allow them to remain as ‘autonomous’ as possible. Neoprotectionists, especially, worry about this though we need to clarify precisely what they mean when they refer to autonomy or ‘self-willed’. This is, we argue, the change that capitalism makes.
CAPITALIST CHANGE AND CONSERVATION
In our reading of both recent and older neoprotectionist literatures, a core element that comes back time and again is the question of change. The global capitalist economy is a major change-machine and has dramatically transformed social and ecological environments worldwide.16 Many neoprotectionists – and, indeed, many mainstream conservationists – dislike and/or resist these types of human-induced change, especially when these render natural environments ‘engineered, functionalist and technocratic’. Soulé, for example, expresses a common concern when he writes that ‘the global speedup affects everything, from the pace of elections to how fast we walk, to happiness metrics, stock trades, and the rate of species extinction – which is expected to grow by a factor of 10,000 compared to its preagricultural baseline rate’.17
Consequently, neoprotectionists have long advocated for establishing boundaries and limits to human-induced change, including the growth and spread of humans themselves. This basic element of the neoprotectionist perspective, it seems, has now evolved (again with some important exceptions) to increasingly include more radical critiques of growth, consumerism and development more generally. This stance is most clearly evident in growing rewilding campaigns advocating a return to a ‘prehuman baseline’ from which all (directly) human-induced change is eliminated, but it is apparent in less extreme (neo)protectionist positions as well.
As noted above, the history of conservation is often depicted as a Polanyian ‘double-movement’ to counter the most devastating effects of global capitalism (both socially and ecologically, although neoprotectionists focus almost exclusively on the latter). This double-movement perspective is deeply engrained within the fabric of conservation and its science. Much of conservation biology, after all, is about trying to understand the effects of human-induced change on biodiversity and what species and ecosystems need in order to survive despite these changes.18 Hence, in addition to the particulars of ecological function and behaviour, a key question for contemporary conservation biology is: how do human-induced land-use or ecosystemic changes and other broader economic, social and related dynamics affect nonhuman nature and how can this be mitigated so that the latter remains as autonomous as possible and ecosystems, species and their functions remain viable for the long term?
In answering this question, the issue of ‘baselines’ or thresholds is, again, central; it is not for nothing that Marris starts her book by criticizing conservation’s obsession with baselines. The idea of baselines is essentially to establish a certain desired ‘natural’ state of plant and animal species and an ecosystemic balance which can be retained or, if necessary, recreated through activities such as rewilding.19 As Tim Caro and colleagues describe, ‘planning and setting goals for conservation action usually require relatively intact areas that serve as baselines for comparisons and to set targets’.20 As previously noted, this baseline is commonly – implicitly or explicitly – a ‘prehuman’ one. In this way, Marris asserts,
For many conservationists, restoration to a prehuman or pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it. Baselines thus typically don’t just act as a scientific before to compare with an after. They become the good, the goal, the one correct state.
But, Marris continues, the ‘most vexing issue with prehuman baselines is that they are increasingly impossible to achieve – either through restoration or management of wild areas. Every ecosystem, from the deepest heart of the largest national park to the weeds growing behind the local big-box store, has been touched by humans.’21
In attacking the nature–culture dichotomy from the perspective of the Anthropocene, new conservationists thus also question and aim to rethink a foundational element of conservation policy and science: how to understand and deal with human-induced ecological change.22 In fact, they go one step further still. Some argue that we need to embrace and move along with the ‘great change machine’ itself. As Kareiva et al. paradigmatically pointed out, ‘instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures’.23 This is nothing short of a complete transformation of the historical framing of conservation within broader processes of capitalist change; instead of a countermovement to ameliorate its worst ecological impacts, conservation is now urged to become part and parcel of this specific form of change and its ‘operations and cultures’. In other words, while capitalism and conservation have always been intimately related, the nature of this relation, according to new conservationists, needs to be drastically transformed.
Hence, what new conservation is effectively advocating – and what further differentiates it from mainstream capitalist conservation – is not just a paradigm shift, but also a cultural and institutional shift in relation to the very spirit of conservation practice and science. All of this, as we saw, is clearly much too drastic a change for those who see themselves as ‘real’ or hardcore conservationists. In fact, it is precisely this proposed shift that according to Soulé is so drastic that it ‘does not deserve to be labelled conservation’ at all.24 Conservation, according to most neoprotectionists, is not about moving along with forms of capitalist change; it is, ultimately, about placing boundaries around this change; about drawing ‘lines in the sand’ – both geographically through protected areas and in the social, economic, political and reproductive realms via regulation and other policy measures.
We have already given some examples, but several key statements from neoprotectionists drive the point home: Paul Kingsnorth describes conservation as ‘trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development’; Tom Butler as ‘promoting a reasoned discussion of retrenchment’ in the face of a ‘modern, techno-industrial society where the civil religion of progress means ever-more commodification of nature to serve economic growth’; and, in response to new conservationists’ assertion that nature is constantly changing, Curt Meine pithily asserts,
that not all change is created equal; that the causes, rates, spatial scales, types, and impacts of ecological disturbance and environmental change vary; that natural and anthropogenic change are interwoven in complex ways; and that our challenge is to calibrate more finely our understanding of historic change, and to explore more carefully our ethical response to the human role amid such change.25
While both radical camps seek to ameliorate the negative effects of capitalist change, in short, they fundamentally differ concerning how to deal with this change. So, what if we approach the Anthropocene conservation problem from the other end, from the perspective of neoprotectionists? How do their proposed solutions hold up to the ‘great change machine’ they so desperately want to curtail?
RESISTING (CAPITALIST) CHANGE?
In chapter three, we already outlined the untenable contradictions in the new conservation strategy in terms of moving along with capitalist forms of change. But the neoprotectionist response to the new conservation agenda and the subsequent intensification of their earlier ideas and proposals also contain several untenable contradictions. What the current neoprotectionist response in effect seems to boil down to is a retreat into – or a harkening back to – more classical or traditional understandings of conservation, conservation science and how these have regarded, conceptualized and institutionalized nature, wilderness and development. Several neoprotectionists, as we have shown, literally feel they are ‘under attack’ for this position. In response, they strike back by retrenching into their favoured fortress position. This counterattack has several important dimensions.
A rather quixotic dimension is that many neoprotectionists seem to want to go back in time, in two ways. First, by quite literally taking nature to a time before it was changed by humans and their economic and various modes of operation and production. Here, the obsession with baselines is again crucial: the idea that nature, in earlier times, before capitalist development, when humans were less dominant or even absent altogether, was somehow purer, more pristine, even ‘Edenic’ and ‘untouched’. These oft-used terms indicate that any form of human-induced change renders nature to some degree ‘impure’, modified, spoiled. If we were to take this logic too seriously, it would mean that conservation becomes logically impossible in the Anthropocene, where there is a broad consensus – even among neoprotectionists – that no nature on planet earth is actually ‘untouched’. The only thing then to do, paradoxically, is to use an often-heavy human hand to create and/or maintain wilderness spaces that reduce ‘unwanted’ human influence to a minimum.
Second, and more figuratively, neoprotectionists seek to go back to an institutional time when they could focus mostly on nature, and not so much on people. The sea change that has taken place with the rise of the community-based conservation and people-and-parks paradigms in the 1990s and early 2000s – opposed by many of these same neoprotectionists at the time26 – was not only the start of broader efforts to neoliberalize nature and conservation, but also a major change in how conservation had to operate institutionally. Instead of a predominant focus on nature and the protected areas where ‘pristine’ nature was found, conservationists and conservation organizations now had to take diverse social surroundings, especially around protected areas, seriously. This had major organizational, institutional and discursive implications. As a large literature has shown, organizations set up ‘people-and-parks’ or ‘community’ departments and started emphasizing the many benefits that communities can or should derive from conservation.27 As a South African protected area manager told one of us in 2007, ‘in the last years, South African National Parks [the national parks authority] has had to change as an organization to take into account the surroundings of protected areas and not regard them as pure islands. There was a realization that we do not live in isolation’.28
This process was, and still is, difficult or uncomfortable for many conservationists. As John Terborgh and Carel van Schaik, two well-known neoprotectionists, asserted:
No apology should be required for adhering to the accepted definition of a (national) park as a haven for nature where people, except for visitors, staff, and concessionaires, are excluded. To advocate anything else for developing countries, simply because they are poor (one hopes, a temporary condition) is to advocate a double standard, something we find deplorable.29
These authors and others essentially seek to detach conservation from specific political, economic and social contexts and to advocate a universal blueprint of a classical protected area to ground conservation efforts throughout the world. This, however, does not mean that neoprotectionists are against addressing poverty per se, as they are sometimes accused of. Rather, many of them believe that development interventions should take place independently from conservation, since attempting to merge the two aims is seen to undermine both.30 For them, the traditional institutional strategy for saving nature behind fences and the ‘hard certainties it offers’ is seen as the most realistic and effective way to operate in a growing state of ‘siege’.31 Neoprotectionists’ emphasis is therefore on ‘saving nature’ rather than addressing social issues. It is this emphasis that is meant to ensure that the ecological base upon which humanity depends stays intact. The problematic contradiction is therefore not necessarily that neoprotectionists are ‘against people’.32 It is, rather, that they think they can resolve the ecological contradictions of capitalism by fortifying and amplifying the nature–culture dichotomy, that is, by putting (more) boundaries between people and nature.
There is some logic in this position. After all, these tactics seem to have saved important tracts of nature from previous waves of capitalist development.33 At the same time, neoprotectionists – like all of us – cannot actually go back in time (even though they do at times seem to try, particularly through attempts at rewilding). The desire to turn back the clock thus leads to some strange contradictions. One especially interesting example in the context of this book concerns the relation between notions of self-willed nature and neoprotectionists’ worries about capitalist consumerism and development. As Lorimer and Driessen note of the neoprotectionists’ rewilding programme: ‘fungible, laissez-faire neoliberal natures and fluid, self-willed ecologies are ontologically not that different’. Ecologist Curtis Freese, from a neoprotectionist perspective, similarly describes potential synergies between ‘the growing ecological movement for rewilding and emerging methods of payment for ecosystem services of rangelands’.34 The question of how to tackle capitalist imperatives of growth and consumerism therefore remains rather vague, and certainly not answered by a focus on protected areas or rewilding.35
Another important dimension in this discussion, noted by Braverman, is that, while neoprotectionists hold on to dualism in theory, they are often forced to be ‘holistic in their practice’.36 Hence, even while neoprotectionists passionately argue for separating humans and nature in very dichotomous ways, they themselves also realize that, in practice, they do need to deal with people, politics and real-world contradictions. Irus Braverman supports her statement by citing a conservation biologist who argues that conservation practice is often a ‘sophisticated bricolage approach to the world’. While this may be true, whether it counts as a ‘holistic’ approach is questionable. Holism in practice may be what transpires despite dualist theory. But the latter does not provide a good guide for proactive holistic practice, nor does it provide a convincing answer to the broader problems of capitalist change about which neoprotectionists feel increasingly uneasy. Arguably, the most illustrative example of this is the recent ‘half earth’ or ‘nature needs half’ proposal advanced by Wilson and many others.
HALF EARTH TO THE RESCUE?
According to neoprotectionists, science indicates that the only way to tackle the ecological crisis, and so avoid the collapse of human civilization, is to turn half the planet into a protected area. But it is not just science that led them to this radical proposal. It is also a newfound assertiveness to be bold about what is needed in the face of overwhelming odds and the urgency of the ‘sixth extinction’ crisis. And this newfound assertiveness means defending what they ‘know’ to be right and proven effective: protected areas. Hence it should be no surprise that, in the face of an extreme problem, they propose an equally extreme solution. As the slogan ‘nature needs half’ indicates, the focus is again fully back on nature and what ‘it’ needs. Essentially: more space to be autonomous, away from humans or human-induced change.37
There are many problematic aspects to this proposal. Together with a group of scholars, we highlighted some of these.38 For one, much research has shown that protected areas often do not work very well in many biodiverse areas and in many countries with weak governance regimes.39 So how will the half-earth plan be implemented in practice? How will these protected areas remain socially, politically and culturally legitimate? How will forms of corruption, and the fact that many protected areas are either paper parks in practice or simply have porous borders that do little to stop resource extraction, impact the plan? And how will neoprotectionists halt the increasing intrusion of extractive industry into protected areas?40 These are just a few illustrative issues where this dualistic solution cannot provide a good guide to actual conservation practice in its local and broader social, political economic, cultural and other contexts. This is in large part, we contend, because the effort to deal with these issues does not address their foundation in the capitalist processes of expansion and accumulation outlined earlier.
Hence, despite their impassioned critique of the effects of both capitalist development and capitalist conservation and the need to defend against these, neoprotectionists offer few concrete suggestions for how this can be done, beyond vague calls for stronger states to intervene to protect threatened resources in revived fortress fashion. Or, in Wilson’s case, a confused, ungrounded faith in the free market’s invisible hand. In making such calls, they do not address the initial critiques of fortress conservation either. These showed that, in reality, the approach did not work very well in many circumstances, particularly in societies with weak impoverished states under the influence of powerful multinational conglomerates eyeing their valuable natural resources. Hence, community-based conservation and other mechanisms intended to link conservation and development sought precisely to introduce other means whereby states and citizens could be induced to support conservation in place of a faltering fortress model. It is unclear how an even stronger insistence on imposing a model that was often ineffective in the first place is intended to stand as a realistic, workable model for the future.41
Another set of problematic issues regarding ‘half-earth’ relate to the issue of ‘development’ and its negative impacts on conservation. The major contradiction here is that while the ‘half-earth’ solution is proposed to address these effects, it almost completely ignores what humans are supposed to do in ‘their’ side of earth. How will neoprotectionists ensure that the activities of the human-half of earth, arguably still fully integrated into (intensifying?) capitalist development, will not affect the ‘nature-half’? One only has to think here about climate change or many other effects of contemporary industrial production, transport and consumption that easily cross borders to show how gratuitous and contradiction-riddled this plan really is. Simplistically shutting half the earth away behind park boundaries, in short, cannot solve or contain the negative effects of a capitalist development model that does not respect (and in fact thrives on transcending) boundaries in the first place.42 While half of nature on earth is supposed to be left unchanged by humans, the ways in which human-oriented activities and processes affect nature on a global scale are almost completely ignored.
This leads to a related point. The half-earth proposal, and indeed the broader neoprotectionist perspective, fails to explain how poverty can be addressed alongside conservation. After all, dramatic poverty continues to persist alongside many conservation areas, and – important social justice implications notwithstanding – this continues to diminish conservation’s effectiveness due to the increased pressure it places on protected resources by people with often few other options.43 More generally, it is apparent that socio-economic inequality is, on the whole, inversely proportionate to effective conservation, and facilitates (increasingly violent) conflicts around protected areas.44 Turning half-earth into a reality under present socio-political arrangements would likely make all this worse, as it would require massive dispossession and relocation of poor and marginalized communities, making the enlarged protected area estate overall more socially unsustainable.
The importance of addressing poverty for conservation is something that new conservationists have usefully brought back to the centre of attention. Yet, the way they have mainly done so is by using the language and promise of ‘development’. As Kareiva and colleagues paradigmatically noted, ‘Conservation should seek to support and inform the right kind of development – development by design, done with the importance of nature to thriving economies foremost in mind. And it will utilize the right kinds of technology to enhance the health and well-being of both human and nonhuman natures.’45 This may sound good at a superficial level. But it is illusory when the ‘development’ they are talking about is specifically capitalist development, which tends to exacerbate the very inequality – and hence often also the poverty – that new conservationists seek to redress.46 This is yet another element of the unsustainability of capitalism that must be rendered explicit.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT
The starting point for most contemporary mainstream discourses about capitalism and policies on development is that the latter is needed to address poverty. Famous development pundits like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, have repeatedly stated that focused development assistance can solve extreme poverty in a generation. His understanding of development, however, is rather blunt and linear:
As a global society, we should ensure that the international rules of the game in economic management do not advertently or inadvertently set snares along the lower rungs of the ladder in the form of inadequate development assistance, protectionist trade barriers, destabilizing global financial practices, poorly designed rules for intellectual property, and the like, that prevent the low-income world from climbing up the rungs of development.47
This discourse remains pervasive among international development planners. Capitalist development in this discourse is analogous to ‘improvement’, with its connotations of progress, betterment and positive change.48 Importantly, however, capitalist development and ‘improvement’ share a long and closely intertwined history. Meiksins Wood argues that the concept of improvement ‘tells us a great deal about … the development of capitalism’, particularly in the context of seventeenth-century English agriculture:
The word ‘improve’ itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just ‘make better’ in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit … By the seventeenth century, the word ‘improver’ was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste.
Pushing this argument further, Meiksins Wood emphasizes that ‘“improvement” meant, even more fundamentally, new forms and conceptions of property’. With this, she refers to ‘capitalist conceptions of property – not only as “private” but as exclusive’. This exclusion necessarily entails enclosure, which in turn means ‘not simply a physical fencing of land but the extinction of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood’.49 Enclosure with its links to the history of protected areas and conservation more generally, then becomes a form of dispossession, as previously described. This process, as Perelman, Harvey and others emphasize, is a continuous and ongoing rather than an exclusively historical process (hence, Harvey’s reworking of ‘primitive accumulation’ as ‘accumulation by dispossession’).50 All this together risks becoming cyclical if we follow Li’s argument that one of the several ‘deeply embedded contradictions’ in improvement and development discourses is ‘the contradiction between the promotion of capitalist processes and concern to improve the condition of the dispossessed’.51 Development as capitalist improvement, ironically, is both the cause of and is often presented as the answer to dispossession, poverty and inequality.
The conventional depiction of development as the antidote rather than cause of poverty and inequality presents an interesting and important parallel to the history of conservation, namely its common depiction as a Polanyian countermovement to capitalist ‘progress’. Similarly, following Li, Meiksins Wood and others, development-as-improvement is historically and still often seen as a countermovement to the inevitable dispossession that follows capitalist development. Yet a substantial body of research in political ecology, post-development and other literatures demonstrates that instead of solving poverty, capitalist development has in fact long produced, and continues to produce, poverty, exclusion, marginalization and inequality.52
For us, this conclusion is grounded in theories of ‘uneven geographical development’. While there are various theories to explain this, including problematic ‘environmentalist’ theories that attribute developmental (mis)fortunes to differential environmental conditions,53 we here build again on David Harvey’s perspective. Harvey proposes four conditionalities as foundations for his theory of uneven geographical development: the material embedding of capital accumulation processes in the web of socio-ecological life; accumulation by dispossession; the institutional legitimation (‘law-like character’) of capital accumulation in space and time; and political and social struggles at various geographic scales.54 One could say that these conditions generate a specific ‘formative context’ that ritualizes and naturalizes what Harvey calls capitalism’s ‘abstractions and fictions’.55 It would take too much to fully explain these conditions in detail, and in any case this is not our objective here. The key elements we take from Harvey’s theory are that capitalist accumulation is non-dichotomous but dialectical (embedded in the ‘web of life’); that it creates systemic inequalities (by dispossessing some to allow others and the system to accumulate); and that all this is institutionalized and subject to struggle in myriad ways.
Harvey’s theory of uneven geographical development, in short, demonstrates that people around the world are not poor because of their innate incapability to produce meaningful lives. They are poor because they are the losers in a broader political economic struggle based on accumulation by dispossession.56 Capitalist development, therefore, entails an inherent and perennial set of contradictions, which is why it is crucial to move beyond it.57 In failing to directly confront these contradictions, neither neoprotectionism nor new conservation actually resolve the critical issues of poverty and inequality in relation to conservation. And this is because neither adequately address the issue of capitalist development nor do they confront the urgent need to move beyond this if we are to achieve either conservation or poverty alleviation – let alone both in concert.58
Yet – and we want to be unequivocal here – this is not because contradictions are necessarily negative. As Harvey points out, ‘the contradictions of capital have often spawned innovations, many of which have improved the qualities of daily life’. At the same time, however, he forcefully argues that capitalist development harbours various types of contradictions that make the system as a whole crisisprone and inherently socially, economically, culturally and environmentally unstable and unsustainable. Several of these, according to Harvey, are ‘disparities of income and wealth’, ‘capital’s relation to nature’ and ‘universal alienation’.59 In the remainder of this chapter, we will explore how these first two contradictions of capitalist development historically relate to, enable and ultimately undermine conservation. In further chapters, we will come back to the question of alienation.
CONSERVATION AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT
The historical relations between conservation and capitalist development are complex. One argument that we have been making in this book is that the close and inherent relations between these processes have changed quite dramatically across time and space. If we would essentialize and simplify what in reality is a much more complex and nonlinear story it could roughly follow the trajectory of the ‘great conservation debate’ we outlined in chapter two. This means that conservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries acted principally – but certainly not exclusively – as a bulwark against the negative environmental and social consequences of capitalist development. In this way, conservation served in part to safeguard capitalism in helping the upper classes that dominated both industrial and conservation realms to cope with the rapid changes and concomitant social, environmental and political upheaval caused by capitalist development.60 At the same time, conservation became a colonial movement, part of broader colonial state-building exercises in the service of empires.61
From the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that conservation had to account for the social costs that accompanied this countermovement position. Hence, increasingly, conservation became framed as a force of development in its own right. At first, this mostly happened through tourism or as an outreach activity from behind the walls of the fortress. But this swiftly broadened to render conservation part and parcel of broader developmental processes and imaginaries. The emphasis changed to promoting conservation as a form of capitalist development itself.62 As Paige West and many others have argued, since the 1980s, it was increasingly assumed that ‘environmental conservation could be economic development for rural peoples; that development needs, wants and desires, on the part of rural peoples, could be met by the protection of “biodiversity” on their lands’.63 Many neoprotectionists lamented this move, with John Oates complaining that ‘conservation fell in love with economic development’.64 Yet this was only the beginning. As West summarizes the argument made by Wolfgang Sachs, ‘nature became valuable because it was the raw material for growth, and growth came to be articulated as “development”’. Development – or again more precisely capitalist development – thus had to start conserving this raw material from (extractive) development itself!65
Then, even more recently, conservation became increasingly seen not merely as a development opportunity (or necessity), but as the basis for a new (sustainable) model of capitalist development entirely – one that we call ‘accumulation by conservation’. This is, for instance, how we should read the statement by CEOs Rob Walton of Walmart (the retail corporation) and Wes Bush of Northrop Grumman (a security and military defence technology company) in support of Conservation International. Both contend that ‘there is a direct connection between international conservation and America’s economic and national security interests’.66 This point recalls our assertion in chapter two that capitalist conservation has truly become mainstream. The acknowledgement that corporate elites are taking conservation seriously is but one illustration of this.67
The problem with this ‘story line’, however, is that the linearity it exudes renders it problematic. At best we can say that there might have been dominant tendencies in the historical relation between conservation and capitalist development, four of which, we argue, could be distinguished for analytical purposes: (1) conservation as a bulwark against development; (2) conservation to safeguard development; (3) conservation as development; and (4) conservation is development. These various iterations have emerged and withered in different times and spaces but also often functioned side-by-side or simply overlapped in the same time-space.
Regardless of the precise nature of the relation between conservation and capitalist development at any particular point of time, it is important to emphasize that the two processes have historically always been closely related. Moreover, seldom, if ever, has conservation functioned to question capitalist development tout court. Hence, even in those instances when conservation seemed to function as a bulwark against capitalist development did it rarely if ever lead conservationists to question the overarching model of capitalist progress, ‘civilization’ and development as a whole.68 More commonly, ‘an amalgam of utilitarianism, preservationism, conservationism, and capitalist interests’ came together in what Dorceta Taylor calls ‘business environmentalism’, which she argues has historically infused the development of the conservation movement, in the US and elsewhere.69
All this makes the fundamental critique of capitalist dictums such as growth, consumerism and accumulation by neoprotectionists important and urgent. Yet their ‘half earth’ proposal, as we argued, does not provide any pointers for how to evaluate the currently dominant stage of the relation between conservation and capitalist development, which we refer to as ‘accumulation by conservation’. In the next section, we therefore summarize the assessment of accumulation by conservation we published earlier as it demonstrates what will result when conservation tries to align itself more fully with contemporary forms of capitalist change.
ACCUMULATION BY CONSERVATION
Central to accumulation by conservation is the conviction that conservation must become a form of capitalist production, aiming to make the wider environment, and its ‘ecosystematic embedding’, conducive to the ‘frantic economic urgency’ of contemporary capitalism.70 This works in several ways. First, conservation provides spaces for rest and recovery from this urgency. For instance it can mediate what Karl Polanyi refers to as the market’s tendency to ‘destroy society’ and accommodate the countermovement we have mentioned several times.71 Second, it facilitates the infusion of a deeper capitalistic logic within nature; the capitalization of nature ‘all the way down’, including to molecular and genetic levels.72 Third, conservation addresses the metabolic rift, and hence the nature–culture dichotomy, by ostensibly offering an experience of ‘nature–culture unity’ to counter the sense of alienation produced by capitalist social and labour relations.73 And fourth, accumulation by conservation claims to be able to resolve the fundamental contradictions of capitalist production by transforming capitalism into an ostensibly ‘sustainable’ form in which economic growth can be maintained without taxing environmental limits.
Yet all of this leads to even more contradictions. One especially curious contradiction is that, via accumulation by conservation, mainstream conservation is at present fundamentally concerned with harnessing increased economic growth itself as the basis for the substantial revenue generation it views as necessary for the maintenance of a global protected area estate and related activities. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates, for instance, that global conservation will require an additional 200–300 billion USD in financing over the next decade to achieve its goals.74 One of the main avenues for the pursuit of this funding advocated by both mainstream and new conservationists is, as we have noted, the harnessing of global financial markets to establish conservation as a new ‘asset class’.75 Achieving this would require continued growth in these financial markets and hence in the material economy underlying them.76 Yet the vast majority of such growth depends on extractive and other environmentally destructive industries that increase pressure on those same protected resources that they are now expected to finance within this vision.77 This approach is thus deeply and dangerously contradictory.
As with any form of accumulation, such contradictions can be overcome for a time through various forms of spatial or temporal displacement, but eventually this capacity for expansion will be exhausted and the contradictions rendered unavoidable.78 Hence, while, in the recent past, mainstream environmentalists pursued continued expansion of the global conservation ‘estate’ grounded in an unerring faith that concerns for conservation and development could be reconciled through market mechanisms, these trends have reversed themselves with the renewal of neoprotectionism, which calls for the consolidation and prioritization of the fortress conservation estate.79 Although conservationists do not often explicitly acknowledge this themselves, what these neoprotectionist calls also point to is the more fundamental inability of accumulation by conservation to successfully capitalize on conserved nature despite decades of determined effort.80
This failure can be seen as the main drive behind some of the radical proposals now on the table, provoking a profound rethinking of the mainstream strategies pursued over the last century and a retraction in conservation’s erstwhile globalization. After all, various world system theorists would contend that the move to financialization characterizing the current wave of ‘fictitious’ conservation increasingly promoted by mainstream conservationists, is usually something of a last-ditch effort to recover profit when concrete commodity markets have exhausted their potential within a given global cycle of accumulation.81 As Giovanni Arrighi explains, the push towards financialization indicates that ‘growth along the established path has attained or is attaining its limits, and the capitalist world-economy “shifts” through radical restructurings and reorganizations onto another path’.82
In these terms, the rise of financialized conservation can be seen as something of a desperate hope to finally successfully harness the long-promised capacity of conserved nature to pay for itself and deliver a profit that it heretofore failed to exhibit on a significant scale. Until now, global conservation has functioned mostly as a global subsidy system, redistributing resources to support conservation under the recurring assurance that this is merely a short-term support for the effort to generate self-sustaining markets for trade in environmental services, to eventually be withdrawn once such markets finally materialize. When these global markets fail to develop – as they have until now – the system turns to financialization instead to try to capture the promised potential that conservation has thus far proven unable to deliver.
This dynamic, importantly, is much broader than conservation. Focusing more on environmental dynamics around food production, extraction and general development patterns, Jason Moore comes to a similar conclusion. He states that ‘neoliberalism has reached the limits of developmental possibilities, the financial crises and inflationary crescendo of 2008 marking the “signal” crisis of the neoliberal ordering of relations between humans and the rest of nature’.83 Yet this intensification of crisis does not necessarily mean that capitalism will therefore collapse in the foreseeable future under the weight of its inherent contradictions, as Jason Moore, like James O’Connor, at times implies. Rather, as Arrighi, Foster and others point out, the capitalist system may simply reorganize on a new foundation for renewed accumulation, again pushing systemic crisis further into the future. In this way, capitalist development can continue alongside and even profit from ecological devastation in the short term even if it fails in its quest to offset this destruction through effective conservation.
Nor does this crisis imply that many things are not changing in the meantime and that serious attempts to develop accumulation by conservation – despite their own inherent contradictions – are not happening. And, as these attempts continue – even if they do not actually succeed in commodifying the resources they target or render capitalism sustainable – they change how we think about nature, wilderness and ecology more generally, namely as a nature in capital’s own image; a nature that does what capital wants, and that ‘needs’ what capital needs. The nature that capital conserves, in short, is natural capital. It is therefore not coincidental that this has become the discursive label around which mainstream capitalist and both mainstream and new conservation interests have been integrating through initiatives like the Natural Capital Coalition. Natural capital, according to its proponents, is the ultimate form of ‘conservation-is-development’, the quintessential form of accumulation by conservation. Natural capital is capital conserving itself – the ultimate contradiction that makes revolution the only option left.
FULL CIRCLE?
One important question regarding the unsustainability of capitalism remains: in the face of the widespread failure of accumulation by conservation to achieve effective conservation, what other strategies are transpiring in practice to counter urgent threats to species and ecosystems? The answer seems to provide the final nail in the coffin of capitalist conservation, namely that we are currently witnessing a dramatic escalation of violence in relation to environmental protection in many parts of the world. This takes several forms. In parts of Africa, recent years have witnessed a dramatic surge in ‘green militarization’ or ‘green violence’ whereby increased poaching of endangered megafauna such as elephants and rhinos has been met with a resurgence of state-sponsored – often lethal – violence to police protected areas.84 In Latin America, we have seen an exponential increase in violence directed against those opposing development projects, particularly extractive enterprises, on environmental grounds.85
While seemingly opposed to the financialization prescribed by accumulation by conservation, these ‘green wars’ may, in fact, be more intimately connected to the former than presumed. 86 Alexander Dunlap and James Fairhead, for instance, contend that the ‘militarisation and marketisation of nature’ are actually two sides of the same coin, in that ‘new global “green” markets … remain dependent on resource intensive structures and a military-industrial complex to police them.’87 Foreshadowing this argument, the political philosopher John Gray observed some time ago:
The connection between free markets and ‘law and order’ policies has never been inadvertent. As intermediary social institutions and the informal social controls of community life are weakened by market-driven economic change the disciplinary functions of the state are strengthened. The endpoint of this development comes when the sanctions of the criminal law become the principle remaining support of social order.88
Or, as the anthropologist and activist David Graeber warns more bluntly, ‘Whenever someone starts talking about the “free market,” it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun.’89 Sociologist Razmig Keucheyan goes further to argue more generally that ‘financialization and militarization are the system’s two reactions to’ periodic crisis. He explains:
Throughout capitalism’s existence, faced with crisis situations and the aggravated inequalities that they engender, it has resorted to the two solutions of financialization and war. In generating ‘fictitious’ capital, finance allows for the deferral and thus the temporary attenuation of the contradictions inherent to capitalist production (as its subprime lending mechanism recently once again demonstrated). War is the fruit of the inevitable conflicts that these contradictions periodically generate. The shrinking of profit opportunities and the need to guarantee control over the extraction and circulation of resources – but also the growing opposition to the system – tend to make political conflictuality increasingly acute.90
From this perspective, then, the failure of fictitious conservation via financialization may be seen to be largely responsible for the rise of green militarization and its attendant violence. Consequently, the main strategies prescribed by our two radical positions in the Anthropocene conservation debate – natural capital valuation for new conservation, expanded protected area enforcement for neoprotectionism – might be seen not as diametrically opposed but rather as two sides of the capitalist conservation coin.
CONCLUSION
Several times in this chapter, we have argued that conservation and capitalism have become increasingly conjoined over time. It is important to be clear about what we mean with this. In no way are we implying that capitalist conservation is a done deal, or the teleological end-point of a long historical process. What we are arguing is that mainstream and ‘new’ conservation discourses (and to a much lesser degree, their practices) have enabled a new understanding of the links between capitalism and conservation whereby they have become, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. The idea is, simply put, ‘to establish conservation as an asset class’ within global financial markets, whereby the difference with other credit classes is no longer of interest or even visible for capitalist investors.91 To put it in the language of the Natural Capital Protocol:
The Natural Capital Protocol is a framework designed to help generate trusted, credible, and actionable information for business managers to inform decisions. The Protocol aims to support better decisions by including how we interact with nature, or more specifically natural capital … Until now, natural capital has for the most part been excluded from decisions and when it is included it has been largely inconsistent, open to interpretation or limited to moral arguments. The Protocol responds by offering a standardized framework to identify, measure and value impacts and dependencies on natural capital.92
Through statements like these, what these actors basically seek to do is to foreclose the debate concerning the appropriate relationship (or lack thereof) between conservation and capitalism. As Mark Gough, Executive Director of the Natural Capital Coalition that published the Protocol cited above, asserts of his organization’s effort to promote natural capital valuation, ‘The wave is coming. Either drown, or pick up your surf board.’93 For Gough and colleagues, capitalism and conservation really have become identical: conservation is finally taking up its rightful place in dominant and ‘standardized’ capitalist frameworks and ways of seeing, understanding, measuring and valuing the world.
We have argued in this chapter that this type of discourse is fundamentally wrong since capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable. At the same time, we have sought to highlight that broader debates making this argument often neglect or minimize conservation and its historical and changing role in relation to capitalist development. This role has not been straightforward: the long road to natural capital has come with many changes in conservation, capitalism, development and the relationships among them, all of which are complex, manifold and contested. This latter aspect is something that we have highlighted through neoprotectionists’ concerns about consumption, growth and development. Yet capitalist conservation is contested in many other ways as well. Researchers, for example, worry that efforts to economically value natural resources as the basis for their conservation risk reducing their intrinsic, aesthetic and cultural values. In short: that they trigger further alienation. As environmental anthropologist Sian Sullivan contends,
We are critically impoverished as human beings if the best we can come up with is money as the mediator of our relationships with the non-human world. Allocating financial value to the environment does not mean that we will embody practices of appreciation, attention, or even of love in our interrelationships with a sentient, moral and agential non-human world.94
Author and environmental activist George Monbiot, similarly, worries that the ‘attempt to reconcile the protection of the living planet with commerce simply turns the biosphere into another corporate asset’.95 This is a concern that most neoprotectionists share. A central element of the neoprotectionist position is in fact its questioning of how nature is valued within the capitalist vision that new conservationists promote. And, while many capitalist and conservation actors believe that this debate has now been closed with the advent of natural capital – an idea that, according to the Natural Capital Coalition, presents ‘great opportunities to finally work together across the system, with the goal of conserving and enhancing our natural world’96 – it means the debate is far from over.
Quite the opposite: the change that capitalism makes increasingly demonstrates that it is the political economic system that needs to change; that more people need to become (even more) serious about moving beyond capitalism, the nature it conserves and the types of development it embodies altogether.97 The two radical challenges to mainstream conservation highlighted in this book allow us to see this more clearly, yet in and of themselves they cannot provide the way forward. For a more realistic and optimistic forward path, we need to reconfigure and redirect the radical potential of these proposals away from their inherent and crippling contradictions. That is the purpose of the next chapters.