Green Grabbing
“Across the world, ecosystems are for sale.”
“Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. The commodification of nature, and its appropriation by a wide group of players, for a range of uses — current, future and speculative — in the name of ‘sustainability’, ‘conservation’ or ‘green’ values is accelerating.”
—James Fairhead, Melissa Leach & Ian Scoones (2012) Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature? The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Over the past 20 years or so, growing concerns that mainstream approaches to conservation are failing have converged and clashed in ‘the great conservation debate.’ This debate has been propelled in part by critical assessments of what’s gone wrong with conservation, as well as by a number of terrifying scientific press releases and reports of ‘species extinction accelerating’ and ‘Nature in decline.’ Some suggest the debate can be boiled down to two clashing positions on how best to save nature in a time of ecological crisis: ‘sparing vs. sharing’. Others argue that this is way too simplistic, as conservationists are a diverse bunch of people grappling with very different circumstances around the world, and therefore hold a much more complex range of positions. In their recent book on this debate, political ecologists Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher write that “[i]n analysing the great conservation…
