Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

The United Nations declared the 2010s to be the Decade on Biodiversity, but to what avail? A generation after the Convention of Biological Diversity launched the term biodiversity into the realm of global environmental policy, species' numbers keep declining, as do state-funded conservation measures. Meanwhile, public attention to ecological crises focuses understandably on immediate dangers of undrinkable water and unbreathable air. With climate change deniers in positions of power, simply decrying the daunting climactic changes underway takes work, alliances, and political strategy. In this dire ecological and political time, supporters of both biodiversity and its conservation are hard-pressed to state their case.

Three scholars have stepped up to do so, but each contends that the very terms of the conversation need changing. These books complement each other, and would comprise an informative, thought-provoking seminar on historical, present, and future iterations and expansions of biodiversity conservation. Other books and perspectives, however, would be needed.

Rafi Youatt's Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics begins by challenging the reader to conceptualize biodiversity as a productive idea, a cluster of meanings changing over time and space. His discourse analysis attends to the materiality of the topic as both object and subject: coauthor of itself. By "breaking up" dominant notions of agency into biotic, techno-informational, and abiotic components, Youatt seeks the lost political potential of biodiversity, whose story is partially one of "self-inflicted co-optation in an effort to bring about serious reform" (p. 4). Though not actually saving much biodiversity, the various biodiversity conservations nevertheless do things, such as follow and enact larger political trends. The book illustrates this trajectory with case studies.

In the 1980s, biodiversity value was tied to liberalist human rights and the "intrinsicness" of positive law. The "awful symmetry" of biodiversity hotspots cluster in the tropical Global South and exacerbate power asymmetries of conservation interventions. In a brief ethnographic analysis of scientists, Youatt argues that biodiversity was dematerialized in the preservation of a species type.

In the 1990s, biodiversity was remade to align with agendas of sustainable development and liberal multiculturalism. UNESCO World Heritage Sites embody this entrenched Western tendency to dichotomize the natural from the cultural, until hybridized/hyphenated in the multicultural 1990s. Even the current "living cultural landscapes" version of heritage has become code for "living museum" indigenous associative landscapes; the mixed status of heritage site serves as a proxy for "postmodern rewriting of nature-culture by guilty post-colonials" (p. 85). Likewise, the term "biocultural diversity," once institutionally embedded, can reify "the indigenous-nature complex" (p. 94) and so elide the fact that all human landscapes are also eco/biological.

In the 2000s, biodiversity was valued as provider of goods and neoliberalized ecological services, "downsized" (p. 102) to fit in easy market-based solutions. By the 2010s, it serves security goals of emergency resilience, particularly in cities. Global urban biodiversity policy still erases colonial past and projects Western environmentalities, while post-Hurricane Sandy New York City expands green governance and postpolitical nationalist and metropolitan securitization.

Youatt effectively demonstrates the fatal flaw of the multiple meanings that characterize biodiversity. This framing allows for success in policy discourse and conservation politics, but it prevents biodiversity conservation advocacy from sustaining the thorough critiques needed for actual ecological flourishing. Eschewing fixation on individual species preservation opens space to foster trophic cascades, species communities, and attention to the distributed nature of nonhuman and human agency and thus subjectivities and encounters.

Youatt holds out hope for the reanimating potential of three-pronged rewilding: on a personal, Thoreauvian level (as in new urban micro-ecologies of rooftop gardens and dung beetle composting), a grand ecological level (as in predator reintroduction and continental wildlife corridors), and on a political level. Yet this theoretically...