Conservation by the People
The Future of Biodiversity in a Divided World
Today marks the publication of my latest book: Conservation by the People. Here’s how it starts:
You can read a bit more of the first chapter at Google Books’ preview.
If you’ve followed my past writing, both here and at outlets like The New Atlantis and The Ecomodernist, you’ll recognize some of the arguments. But there’s a lot that I haven’t shared here, especially a number of fascinating stories of conflict and disagreement from the world of biodiversity conservation, which illustrate how environmentalism has gone wrong and how it could get back on track.
The book is the culmination of a long journey. I started out as someone with well-meaning but ultimately naive ideas about biodiversity and rewilding, who just so happened to have convinced the Fulbright Commission to fund a stay at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). And I ended up realizing that conservation conflicts illustrate a number of wrong turns that we have made as a society. They illustrate a pattern of thinking and action that will damn us to repeat the errors of past generations of environmentalists and science activists, the mistakes of both climate change and of COVID—if we let it.
But Conservation by the People is also a hopeful book. I suspect my Taming Complexity collaborator Shunryu Garvey will see its central message as almost Buddhist: That we let go of the belief that we can analyze and quantify our way to knowing where it is exactly that the human species ought to land on planet Earth, and instead that we strive to learn to simply better navigate the path together.
I don’t merely call for us to try to practice a kind of Biodiversity Democracy. I have come to see common ideas about how to do democratic politics, and the role that science should play in it all, as having long ago run aground. If we are to find our way out of the stormy seas and onto the shoreline, it will be focusing more on listening than on talking, and more on doing than on knowing. I hope you join me on that journey.
@ Amazon
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Congrats!