Intermezzo: The Sea of Alternatives

This short intermezzo aims to provide some context for our convivial conservation proposal. We believe this is important to show that convivial conservation does not come out of the blue or could ever function in isolation from other struggles. Our proposal should be seen as one of many confluent streams contributing to a much larger river of what Arturo Escobar calls ‘transition discourses’ and what McKenzie Wark refers to as acts of ‘alternative realism’.¹ Both of these deliberately construct different worlds beyond the boundaries of neoliberal capitalism. Both authors (along with many others) also emphasize that there are already a great number of these around the world, in on-the-ground practice as well as in more general conceptualizations. It is beyond the scope of this book to describe all or even a number of them. Yet it is crucial to emphasize that they are out there, and that they already contain most of the elements we need to build the kind of world that we want.

We are inspired by the many transformative movements, initiatives, actions and engagements that have streamed into being over the last decades, including (but not limited to) those around ‘buen vivir’, ‘radical ecological democracy’, ‘the right to the city’, reinvigoration of the commons, ‘diverse economies’, ecosocialism, economic ‘degrowth’, ‘steady state economics’, the ‘wellbeing economy’, doughnut economics, ‘bioregional’ economies and youth movements demanding an earth uprising.² We see these – and many others – as confluent streams that play an important role in the current historical moment. Hence, they will infuse our discussions at every step of the way; often implicitly so, sometimes more explicitly; occasionally because we agree with them and cannot say it any better, but also because we may disagree with aspects of their arguments and build on them to make our point.

Importantly, these confluent streams are just a small sample of the myriad alternative ideas, discussions or ‘hope movements’ in circulation.³ Indeed: there is such an ‘embarrassment of riches’ in terms of the sheer number of possible alternatives that to assume that neoliberal capitalism is the ‘only game in town’ is patently absurd.⁴ At the same time, these alternatives are themselves heavily interrogated, debated and contested (as they should be) and they exist in a context wherein neoliberal capitalism is materially dominant. Hence, we do not present our alternative in the naïve presumption that it is easy to realize – quite to the contrary.⁵ We are realistic about the strength and force of contemporary capitalism, even though it is intellectually, inspirationally and spiritually moribund.⁶

But this does not mean that we revert to capitalist realism, which, to go back to Wark again, is about seeing the world through capitalist eyes. This would be disastrous, as capitalist realism would rather let the planet go to waste than to think of attempting the difficult yet vital task of changing entrenched power structures, something that some new conservationists seem content to facilitate in their embrace of capitalist mechanisms. Many neoprotectionists, as we have seen, are no longer buying into this. We have long felt the same and are inspired by this. Hence our goal is to present a liberating, positive vision, in conjunction, connection and spirit with the many proposed alternatives out there. A key element in all of these, we argue, concerns the need to seriously engage with degrowth.

DEGROWTH AND POSTCAPITALIST CONSERVATION

As we see convivial conservation as one stream in a broader post-capitalist river, it is important that we encourage this stream to flow with others so it can stand a chance of gaining ground. Most fundamentally, we argue, convivial conservation must be grounded in an overarching society-wide programme of ‘degrowth’.⁷ A key issue that has arisen in recent years is the contention that our measurements of GDP and growth warrant rethinking in order to do justice to social and environmental issues.⁸ Indeed, in order to achieve a more sustainable planetary trajectory, analysts have recently argued that a strategy of managed degrowth of the economy is necessary, pointing at the fact that the only time when global environmental impacts seemed to be decreasing was during the 2007–2008 global economic crisis and related dip in global growth levels.

Developed through social activism since the turn of the century and elaborated on through a series of international conferences over the past several years, degrowth implies a period of ‘planned economic contraction’⁹ leading eventually to the type of steady-state economy at a sustainable level of aggregate, which has long been advocated by Herman Daly and others.¹⁰ Kallis and colleagues present a list of policy proposals commonly championed in degrowth discussions.¹¹ These include ‘resource and CO2 caps; extraction limits; new social security guarantees and work-sharing (reduced work hours); basic income and income caps; consumption and resource taxes with affordability safeguards; support of innovative models of “local living”; commercial and commerce free zones; new forms of money; high reserve requirements for banks; ethical banking; green investments; cooperative property and cooperative firms’.¹² Meanwhile, degrowth activism occurs at the grassroots level, entailing organization and mobilization by community groups promoting diverse initiatives including ‘cycling, car-sharing, reuse, vegetarianism or veganism, co-housing, agro-ecology, eco-villages, solidarity economy, consumer cooperatives, alternative (so-called ethical) banks or credit cooperatives as well as decentralized renewable energy cooperatives’.¹³

Links between such initiatives have facilitated their scaling up into national and transnational networks. D’Alisa and colleagues summarize, ‘Explicit degrowth networks have also emerged nationally and regionally since 2000 in France, Italy, and Spain, with also an informal international academic network consolidating around degrowth conferences. The movement is now spreading to Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Czech Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Canada; more than 50 groups from around the world organized simultaneous “picnics” for degrowth in 2010 and 2011.’¹⁴

Yet, as Kallis and coauthors point out, degrowth advocacy often ‘fails to explain how a capitalist economy would work without a positive profit rate, a positive interest rate or discounting.’ After all, ‘capitalist economies can … either grow or collapse: they can never degrow voluntarily.’¹⁵ Hence, Foster contends that widespread degrowth must properly entail ‘deaccumulation’.¹⁶ Particularly within a neoliberal regime, growth is imperative as the basis of social policy.¹⁷ More mainstream commentators tend to evade this issue. In his call for ‘prosperity without growth’, for instance, the economist Tim Jackson contends that whether we call his envisioned society capitalist or otherwise is irrelevant.¹⁸ Yet the policy revisions he advocates imply a fairly radical movement away from the neoliberal capitalist system as we know it. On the other hand, some degrowth proponents are more forthright in their acknowledgment of capitalism’s essential incompatibility with even a steady-state economy. For example, Kallis asserts that implementing degrowth would require ‘such a radical change in the basic institutions of property, work, credit and allocation, that the system that will result will no longer be identifiable as capitalism’.¹⁹

From this perspective, serious degrowth is an essentially postcapitalist platform, and we approach it as such in this book. The consequences are important: if conservation is tied to capitalism and capitalism necessitates growth, then degrowth, in its more radical incarnation, means moving beyond capitalism and hence should have profound consequences for conservation. Vital questions arise: if exploitative pressures on ecosystems and natural resources diminish due to managed degrowth, does this ‘automatically’ mean that there is more space for biodiversity and ecosystems to develop and thrive? Would people have more time to pay attention to nature in their daily lives and hence become less alienated from the rest of nature? How would conservation organizations, policies and practices – now increasingly geared and attuned to fitting conservation in capitalist growth strategies – need to adapt and transform in order to support a degrowth political economy?

These are critical questions that are rarely discussed openly in policy, academic or other discussions. Indeed, capitalist mainstream conservation is at present fundamentally concerned with harnessing increased economic growth as the basis for the substantial revenue generation it views as necessary for the maintenance of a global protected area estate and related activities.

SHARING THE WEALTH

Achieving degrowth, by contrast, would necessitate strong mechanisms for redistribution if it is also to redress currently extreme levels of inequality. Herman Daly states unequivocally, ‘without aggregate growth, poverty reduction requires redistribution’.²⁰ In chapter four, we went even further to argue that capitalist growth is the cause rather than the cure for poverty, which provides an additional reason to move decisively beyond (capitalist, GDP-oriented) growth. Rather than seeking to generate additional finance through spurring further economic growth, therefore, we will argue that convivial conservation must seek to redirect resources from other arenas to support both biodiversity protection and the livelihoods of local people who depend on them. This does not mean courting multinational extractives to try to direct a portion of their proceeds into conservation as offsets for ecological damage, as capitalist conservation seeks to do, but rather to reign in these extractives altogether so that their activities do not need to be offset at all. In place of the potential revenue lost in this approach (as well as through other activities like ecotourism that must also be curtailed), resources must be generated by mobilizing forms of redistribution that harness available wealth, in various forms including money but also the sharing of labour and other collective activities.²¹

Conservationists on all sides of the great debate commonly claim that we face ‘hard choices’, essential tradeoffs in our efforts to support both economic and ecological thriving.²² But in fact this may be an inaccurate characterization of our situation once the dynamics of capitalism are brought into the picture.²³ André Gorz, for instance, argued some time ago that:

Nothing – other than the logic of capitalism – prevents us from manufacturing and making available to everyone adequate accommodation, clothing, household equipment, and forms of transportation which are energy-conserving, simple to repair, and longlasting, while simultaneously increasing the amount of free time and the amount of truly useful products available to the population.²⁴

It is precisely this type of programme that degrowth pursues, and our proposal of convivial conservation fits right into this vision.

RECLAIMING THE COMMONS

At the same time as ‘degrowing’ the global economy and de-accumulating the political economy, we must redevelop communal forms of resource governance based on egalitarian, democratic decision-making and resource allocation – what Ashish Kothari calls radical ecological democracy.²⁵ In doing this, convivial conservation must build on and at the same time transcend existing models of common pool resource (CPR) management. Another element of this discussion relates to the surviving commons. This is not only the commons that survive despite forces of privatization highlighted by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and her school of thought, but also the focus of more recent research showing that autonomous spaces can work positively for common resource management as well.²⁶ As Prakash Kashwan explains, ‘recognizing the agency of rural residents in the process of adjudication of land use conflicts and providing them with autonomous spaces for management of local resources is likely to significantly boost the local demand for environmental stewardship.’²⁷

As copious research shows, common property regimes are commonly limited by the fact that they do not act in a vacuum but are in reality encroached upon by numerous external forces, not least of which are powerful industrial enterprises with claims upon the same resources that common pool resources manage.²⁸ Hence, finding ways to limit this influence while building more conducive global and higher-scale regimes is essential to effective commons management. Also essential is finding new sources of revenue to support this management that do not entail further commodification of the resources to be conserved or offsetting of increased extraction elsewhere, which merely displaces ecological damage rather than reducing it in aggregate. In turn, this requires moving from the ‘Anthropocene’ to a politics where ‘taking responsibility for nature and taking responsibility for democracy come together’ whereby ‘the democratic responsibility is the responsibility of making a world’.²⁹

RECLAIMING REVOLUTION

The logical conclusion becomes inevitable: reclaiming revolution. The very fact of thinking and imagining beyond capitalism is already a revolutionary step, as argued by Neil Smith:

One of the greatest violences of the neoliberal era was the closure of the political imagination. Even on the left, perhaps especially so, the sense became pervasive that there was no alternative to capitalism. Revolutionary possibility was generally confused with utopianism, the history of revolutions notwithstanding, and revolution was collapsed into a caricature of inevitable failure.³⁰

The Anthropocene conservation debate has shown that positing radical ideas for conservation can be done, that big thinking is important and that it works. It works to open up space and political possibilities. Whether these lead to actual revolution, and in what form, cannot be predicted. But we can no longer let fear of failure hinder us from trying. The failures of contemporary capitalism are simply too devastating to not try. And besides: trying, imagining and opening up space for doing and thinking differently is fun and energizing! If this sounds amateurish rather than ‘professional’ or ‘serious’, then this may be precisely the point.³¹ The revolution certainly needs serious ‘social and political organisation for a more humane future’. But not at the cost of losing ‘the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love’.³²

ERGO

Let us wrap up this intermezzo in straightforward terms. Convivial conservation must be pursued within a broader revolutionary context of degrowth and sharing the wealth that promotes mixed landscapes in which humans and nonhumans coexist rather than being separated by promoting radical redistribution of resource ownership and control through reining in the power of global corporations (and their capitalist ways of producing ‘value in motion’) rather than appealing to them for leadership and funding. All this, in turn, must be grounded not in monetary valuation or even more general benefit–cost calculation but in an ethic of reciprocity, care and gifting supported by pursuing financing not from the private sector but from collective pooling of resources in whatever form, from state taxation through crowdsourcing. It is in this context that we believe our proposal for convivial conservation must be pursued and to which it should always be connected.