Unsettled conservation: Thinking, researching and acting for nature in an era of illiberal breakdown, capitalist brutalism and AI-driven post-truth

As global political dynamics are heating up amidst rising authoritarianism, violent, even genocidal conflicts and a crumbling international system, how to think about, do research on and take action for environmental issues that also continue to worsen rapidly? In this presentation, I reflect on this question by combining earlier research on the link between conservation and digital media and more recent work on the relations between artificial intelligence, post-truth and capitalist power. Building on Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘brutalism’, I show how current forms of AI-driven capitalism are central to the rise of post-truth, authoritarianism and new forms of resource and power-grabs, and how these are marginalizing the already limited gains that neoliberal environmentalism made over the past decades. This moment of ‘unsettled conservation’, I will argue, also provides an opportunity to renew the critique of neoliberal environmentalism and, on this basis, propose alternatives going forward. I conclude by reflecting on how ‘planetary ethnography’ can renew this critique and whether ‘convivial conservation’ can be such a systemic alternative going forward.

Bio:

Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University. His research and writing revolve around the political economy of environment and development with specific interests in biodiversity, conservation, new media and digitalization, violence and extraction. Bram has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and is the author of Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2013). His most recent book, The Truth About Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism was published by the University of California Press in 2021.

Speaker website link:

https://www.wur.nl/en/persons/bram-buscher.htm