What a week. The global biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia (COP16) had just concluded. And then Trump got re-elected as President of the United States. Clearly the latter puts an enormous damper on the former. That is, if one believes that the Cali conference actually made significant progress in terms of tackling the biodiversity crisis. Surely, the conference produced some positive outcomes: Indigenous peoples have been granted permanent representation at the United Nations and companies need to pay more for ‘nature’s genetics’ to produce drugs. But overall, most agree that COP16 did not lay the groundwork for the dramatic action so urgently needed to address the biodiversity crisis. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. International environmental meetings consistently fail to halt the crises they are meant to address. And in the meantime, the biodiversity crisis keeps going from bad to worse. The massive, climate change-induced fires raging in the largest wetland on Earth, the Brazilian Pantanal, and their staggering impacts on biodiversity, are just one of the latest illustrations. Fires raged in the world’s largest wetland, Brazil’s Pantanal, this year. Image courtesy of Gustavo Figueiroa / Environmental Justice Foundation This is why a growing group, of which we are part, have been pushing hard for a systemic alternative, a ‘convivial conservation’ that confronts the root causes of the crisis: an unjust capitalist economy bent on continual growth through land use change, resource extraction and worker exploitation. To some, this seems radical. And if radical is defined etymologically as ‘going to the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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