Imperialist conservation and 'biodiversity leakage'
Can ecosystem restoration projects in rich, imperialist countries actually lead to a net reduction in global biodiversity? Is the 'environmentalism of the rich' actually damaging global biodiversity?
Restoring ecosystems at a time when biodiversity is in freefall is a good thing, but is it a good thing on every such occasion? One of the benefits of studying political economy is that it can be used to reveal the social relations that may be remain hidden if we only look at the level of ecology alone.
I’ve recently come across a study that looks at global forest biodiversity loss resulting from outsourcing agricultural production to other parts of the world. Here is a graph showing the damage:
It’s more evidence that the richest countries on the planet are driving species extinction across the globe. The study states:
Since 1961, crops grown predominantly for export have expanded at more than twice the rate of crops grown for domestic consumption, and other products, such as meat and timber, have a sizable proportion of their production destined for international export, too.
Another recent study shows that the drive for ever-higher agricultural efficiency has led to declines in system robustness and biodiversity. Both of these papers mentioned, in different ways combine, to expose the flaw in the idea of land sparing, that is the idea that we push for as high productivity as possible, on the smallest area of land, in order to ‘free’ land for nature. This is the ideology that drives much of contemporary conservation, including the idea of rewilding, and one of its biggest proponents includes George Monbiot. In reality, ‘agriwilding’ of places like the much lauded Knepp Estate, which lies on productive agricultural land1, just drives greater species extinction elsewhere. All so that middle class people can feel better about themselves as they tuck into beef that costs around £25/kilo. A perfect example of what Peter Dauvergne has called the ‘environmentalism of the rich.’ Is that what we want?
Countries in the imperial core have long outsourced the everyday resources that feeds their economies to the global south, which helps to make northern economies richer and southern countries have to deal with the consequences of biodiversity loss. The south is locked into this dynamic of exporting cheap primary goods through things like the way so-called free trade deals work and requirements of paying back debts to the IMF and the global north.
This is part of what the dependency theorists of Latin America were talking about in the 60s, or Kwame Nkrumah when theorising the concept of neocolonialism. Countries that tried to delink from this imperialist world system faced CIA coups, US (or US backed) military invasions, economic sanctions, and enforced debt crises. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been in a state of war for decades, had its leader, Patrice Lumumba assassinated, when they planned a programme of breaking with the old colonial powers. Now Congo provides cheap raw materials, mined by children, for the high-tech economies of the north. Thus it’s no accident of history that the world economy is structured how it is. And whilst Congo might be one the worst examples, it is not an anomaly.
Back to conservation. Much of it in countries like the UK is focused around how to restore domestic biodiversity. After all the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries on the planet. Just 15% of the UK is under tree cover, we have lost 99% of our wildflower meadows since WWII, and various habitats like peatlands are in a depleted state. So there are good reasons to focus on ecosystem restoration projects in places like the UK and that will require shifts in land use and management.
However, too often mainstream environmentalism focuses on the damage that humans2 cause, and specifically certain groups of humans, rather than on the underlying social relations that have given rise to these practices in the first place. Sheep and shepherds are often blamed for overgrazing and yet they were responding to the pressures placed upon them by political economic system that has developed over the last few centuries. The British Empire, and fractions of the ruling class, became very rich as a result of the wool industry, combined with the markets provided thanks to the enslavement of Africans and other Indigenous people (the wool provided clothing). Sheep farming grew as a result of this change in economic necessity. Similarly, after the so-called green revolution, developments in genetics (breeds of sheep, grass varieties) and management tools (fertilisers, tractors) has meant that the sheep population has doubled in places like Wales. For farmers it has been a case of keep up with the times or leave farming. To blame sheep and shepherds for changes in the global political economy, driven by the world’s ruling classes, is to entirely miss the point.
Thankfully there are plenty of conservationists and ecologists out there who understand this point and seek to work with farmers in adapting their systems to improve biodiversity, rather than attacking them.
All of that is to say that I agree that we need ecosystem restoration.
Let’s look at another example ecosystem restoration being driven by imperialist social relations in an even less abstracted sense.
Aviva has plans to become the world’s first insurance company to reach net zero. As always the devil is in the details in these things. I don’t want to dwell on the ins and outs of net zero targets in this piece, what I want to focus on is Aviva’s investment in rewilding and conservation in the UK. For example, they have made £38 million of investment into restoring British rainforests. For what it’s worth I think it’s good to restore some of the temperate rainforests on these islands. But let’s also be clear, the money invested from Aviva is derived from capital accumulation from a violent, imperialist world system.
For example, Aviva are the company that insures UAV Engines in Staffordshire. A company owned by the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. As Palestine Action, who recently shut down Aviva’s offices, explain:
By insuring UAV Engines, Aviva is facilitating the design and production of drone engines used to power Israel’s killer drone fleet, including the Hermes 450 drones and IAI’s Harop and Harpy attack drones. Such drones are used to surveil, massacre and terrorise Palestinians, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. […] Aviva is providing the mandatory insurance Elbit needs in order to build Israeli weapons on our doorstep. Without insurance, the Israeli arms maker would not be able to operate in Britain
Are British wildlife trusts happy taking money from a company that is happy to both enable and profit from genocide? And if they are — and silence is complicity — then they need to accept the charge of being imperialist conservationists. In reality there is no ecosystem restoration occuring on a global scale when the source of funding for conservation is rooted in not just genocide but ecocide. Quite simply, it’s a case of greening our own back garden whilst being indifferent to other parts of the world being obliterated on our behalf. As of a year ago nearly 50% of tree crops had been destroyed in Gaza.
The “pragmatic” argument given in defense of this is that finance is hard to come by — and yes it is, and it needs solving. But if the pragmatic argument provides justification for benefitting from genocide then perhaps it’s time to leave so-called pragmatism behind. Turning a blind eye to this is turning a blind eye to genocide and ecocide.
A few years ago the CEO of Aviva, Amanda Blanc, rightly called out the sexism and misogyny that existed in the Welsh Rugby Union, but she hasn’t made a statement on Elbit systems murdering and maiming women in Gaza. Aviva has made no comment since the action taken against them by Palestine Action.
An article I read recently calls attention to how ecosystem restoration projects in the global north can actually drive biodiversity loss in the global south. The discussion piece, in the journal Science, argued that, restoring ecosystems on productive farmland in places like the UK can lead to a net-loss in biodiversity globally. Whenever domestic food (and timber and other land-based products) production declines those products will be sourced from elsewhere. Given that the UK has one of the world’s lowest levels of biodiversity, almost by default that will mean being sourced from a country with higher levels of biodiversity.
Based on what the authors call ‘biodiversity leakage’ I think we must focus on both ecosystem restoration along with an increase in domestic food production produced to improved ecological standards, as measured on a global scale. It might look less glitzy than rewilding thousands of acres, but it will have net positive effect at a global scale, rather than a net negative. First cause no harm and all that. The corollary of the rewilding argument given is that we need a shift in consumer diets. Well how’s that going? It’s declined by around 14% in a decade, and my guess is that this approach will yield a diminishing set of returns. Leaving decisions about production and consumption to the market will always lead to contradictory results. Why are we letting markets decide how land should be used and managed?
The alternative is to plan food production and consumption to a higher degree. This is achievable with the right government in place and we can be creative about how to achieve such a thing. If we start from this basic premise we can work out the best approach as we go. An approach that can take the sting and confrontation out of current sheep versus trees arguments that are getting us nowhere. But typically proponents of ecosystem restoration ignore these wider social relations, on a global scale, and again a bastardised ‘pragmatism’ stands in as justification.
Importantly, to break with imperialism is to think, plan and act beyond the national level, breaking with the myopism of the nation-state. Biodiversity is always global, so acting locally is not going to cut it and can have disastrous global consequences.
Talking about reformism, Stuart Hall, in his classic essay, Marxism without guarantees, quotes James Baldwin, saying:
‘You think you just won something, but just wait for the unintended consequences of the good things in the world’ (because) ‘unless you understand that advance and retreat are deeply implicated with one another, and that one has to have eyes in the side of one’s head for the bit one didn’t calculate, you aren’t, as Hegel would say, thinking dialectically’.
This is one of the reasons why Marxist analysis provides such a powerful set of tools. It can help us uncover the material social relations that become mystified through discourse. Methodological nationalism is often one of the key theoretical flaws upon which bad decisions are made. The alternative is to let go of the nationalist myth and focus on always acting with global social relations in mind and how they are structured by imperialism. Ultimately, global biodiversity will not recover unless we work to undermine the global system of imperialist capital. There can be no greening capitalism.
In reality, there is nothing pragmatic about imperialist conservation because it very often leads to a worsening of global biodiversity. Necessarily, we have to struggle against the limitations of the capitalist nation state, and to do that we must think, act and cooperate beyond borders.
I’m also not saying that the land upon which the Knepp Estate exists should be farmed to the max, according to the orthodoxy of sustainable intensification. The land sharing agroecological approach would seek to achieve a sustainable level of food productivity in a way that works to improve the local ecosystem.
And even this doesn’t look to differentiate between those with class and imperial power and those without, as critiqued by Jason Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Life.
I think the issues you laid out here are exactly why we need less of this preservation/human-free approach to conservation. My particular interest is in where conservation and agriculture intersect. SO much is possible in that space. I’m in North America, and here we have dozens, if not hundreds, of easy-to-grow, highly nutritious, and very palatable native plants that most people don’t even know are food. I am certain that highly productive systems that are majority or even entirely native plants can be designed in most, probably all bioregions.
The limiting factor is, as you mentioned in the piece, the fact that this will require diet changes and massive reworking of agricultural systems and labor. The cultural and economic barriers to this shift are massive, but I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think creating more and more demonstration projects to test designs and show folks what is possible can do a lot to show people what’s possible.
Sooo good thank you so much for this. It reminds me a lot of Max Ajl’s work.