Speaker: Dr. Libby Lunstrum, Professor of Environmental and Global Studies at Boise State University
Host(s): Dr. Naomi Schwartz
October 25th 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM, Room 229 in the Geography Building.
“Biodiversity conservation is experiencing a dual crisis: the crisis of biodiversity decline coupled with the crisis of dispossession caused by efforts to protect and conserve nature. Each of these trends has emerged as a defining feature of conservation biology and political ecology respectively, two disciplines that often stand in tension with one another. In this presentation, I pull this crisis apart, showing how each field understands and mobilizes the concept of crisis and how the tension between the two informs contentious disagreements around contemporary biodiversity governance. This includes the Convention for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) post-2020 global biodiversity agenda. I show how confronting this dual crisis of conservation requires integrating insights of both perspectives along with recognizing causal relations between displacement and ecological decline. Building from here, I suggest we can begin to chart out more ecologically sustainable and socially just paths for moving forward in terms of both scholarly debate and conservation practice.”