LAUSR

As the world grapples with the threats of the current ecological and climate crises, it has become increasingly clear that mainstream conservation and development approaches have failed to offer sustainable solutions, let alone address the root causes of environmental degradation and widening social inequity. In their “post-capitalist manifesto for conservation,” The Conservation Revolution, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher—both professors in the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands—bring a political ecology perspective to the existential debate over how best to achieve sustainable environmental and human development in and beyond the Anthropocene. Through a pointed critique of mainstream conservation and its contemporary alternatives, Büscher and Fletcher propose a radical way forward: convivial conservation, which rejects conservation’s problematic entrenchment in nature-culture dichotomies and global capitalism and works instead toward integrated and just human environments. After a brief introduction to the concepts and terms framing the authors’ argument and proposal, Chapter 1 starts off with an overview of the “great conservation debate,” or put more simply, the longstanding debate over “parks versus people.” From early fortress conservation to community-based conservation to more recent market-based mechanisms (e.g., carbon markets, payments for ecosystem services), the authors chart the dominant models of global conservation roughly alongside the stages of capitalist development, emphasizing the intensification of mainstream conservation’s relationship with capitalism over time. In response to the apparent failures of mainstream conservation in stemming Anthropocene biodiversity loss, the “new conservation” and “neoprotectionist” movements have emerged as prominent alternatives in the renewed debate over conservation best practice, representing a return to strict protected areas expansion and enforcement on the latter side and an embrace of financialized conservation on the former. However, the authors contend that while these positions make important advancements in the debate, they do not resolve the underlying contradictions of capitalist conservation steeped in an ontological divide between humans and nature.