The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves.
More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as “natural capital” and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection.
The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.
So what if humanity instead were to begin to see itself as an integral, engaged part of nature – a force that could engage respectfully with more-than-human life and even restore and regenerate it?
That’s the vision that Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in The Netherlands, has for reinventing conservation. As Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, he wants to move beyond the extractive logic of capitalism itself to develop a more commons-based approach that changes the very premises of how land is protected.
Büscher’s vehicle for this mission is an ambitious, newly launched international project, the Convivial Conservation Centre.
A growing legion of renegade conservationists, ecologists, farmers, activists, and academics have joined him in rejecting the idea of “fortress protection” for land, through wilderness preserves, as well as the idea of converting landscapes into money-making “natural capital.” Convivial conservation wants new practices and policies that can reintegrate people with nature in constructive ways, nourishing wholeness, while addressing the eco-pathologies of capitalism itself.
To learn more about this growing movement, I spoke with Büscher on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #53). https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes/bram-buscher-bridging-the-human-nature-divide-through-convivial-conservation
Büscher’s developed much of his vision in collaboration with coauthor Robert Fletcher in the course of writing their 2020 book, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (Verso). The book argues that the very premises of the modern conservation movement need to be re-examined and transcended. Conservation should be about moving “from protection to connection,” they argue. The word “convivial” signals this goal: conservation should be all about “living with” the Earth, not treating it as an object, commodity or capital.
The problem with wilderness zones is that they don’t address the core problem, capitalist “development,” Büscher and Fletcher argue. Nor do they restore land to some aboriginal, pristine state – an idea that is itself a modernist fantasy. Throughout history, especially Indigenous cultures, humans have lived in symbiotic relationships with the land. The problem is not humanity as such or a scarcity of wilderness zones. It’s capitalist-driven extraction and pollution. Can the conservation movement begin to address that in serious ways?
The first step is to develop a more critical stance toward contemporary conservation efforts. Büscher and Fletcher note that “neoprotectionists” seek limits on population growth, restrictions on development, and even limits on consumption and economic growth. But neoprotectionists in their worldview presume that humans stand apart from “nature,” a mindset is idealized in nature photography that eliminates all humans from the frame. This mindset is also seen in the “Nature Needs Half” campaign, touted by the biologist E.O. Wilson, which proposes banishing humans from half of the world’s land, without addressing the capitalist free-for-all destroying the other half of the Earth.
Then there is another faction, the self-styled “new conservationists,” who want to blend capitalist development and conservation. Their strategy has been called “selling nature to save it.” It elevates markets to a central role, and proposes more eco-tourism and hunting preserves and bio-prospecting for drug and product patents. “New conservationists” also like market-based policy schemes that require businesses to pay for “ecosystem services,” for example.
But “using the logic of the problem as the logic for the solution never works,” Büscher warns. “Simply turning nature into a commodity or natural capital simply never makes as much money as polluting nature or extracting nature by taking species.” Taking plant and animal life and resources from nature is usually free, or much cheaper than keeping species alive and finding sustainable sources of income for them.” In any case, the size of market-based conservation is infinitesimally small, notes Büscher. It amounts to “slivers of slivers of slivers of the actual, unsustainable [capitalist] economy.”
The challenge for conservationists, says Büscher, is to move beyond both the nature/humanity dichotomy and faith in capitalist markets. Taking a cue from social critic Ivan Illich and others, Büscher and Fletcher propose “convivial conservation.” They see this approach as non-capitalist, commons-inspired, and “non-dualist” (nature and humanity are seen as deeply entangled).
The goal of convivial conservation is not to exploit nature for market purposes or lock it up as a preserve, but to build “long-lasting, engaging, open-ended relationships with nonhumans and ecologies.” For this to occur, Büscher has proposed a “conservation basic income” to enable ordinary people to live decent lives while talking care of local landscapes. He also calls for greater “democratic management of nature,” adding that we need to focus on “nature-as-commons and nature-in-context rather than nature-as-capital.”
Unfortunately, there are many retrograde conservation trends these days, most notably crypto and other high-tech systems that purport to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and more ecologically sustainable practices.
“With drones and distance technologies, amd modern forms of surveillance and artificial intelligence, we are deepening our alienation from nature to an incredible degree,” said Büscher. “All of a sudden, animals become numbers and pixels and models on computer screens, which somehow or another we think we can manage. But in fact, [these technologies are] a big step away from being able to live with the rest of nature. Meaningful relationships with the rest of the nature are impossible with these technologies, and everyone knows it, especially those who work with these technologies.”
Büscher covers many other topics in my podcast interview with him, especially about the importance of commons and dynamic human reciprocity with nature.
In an effort to “redirect conservation politics, policy, and practice in support of systemic change,” the Convivial Conservation Centre recently issued a Convivial Conservation Manifesto that outlines ten central principles of its work. These include such tenets as “Promote integrated spaces where humans and other species co-exist respectfully and equitably,” and “Understand conservation as the stewardship of a global commons, collectively owned and managed by and for all life on the planet.”
You can listen to my interview with Bram Büscher here.
