Speaker Series: Against Neocolonial Conservation with Professor Ashley Dawson in conversation with Professors Thembela Kepe and Ken MacDonald

When and Where

Thursday, February 06, 2025 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Room 100
Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8

Speakers

Professor Ashley Dawson

Description

About the Lecture:

As the climate crisis intensifies, big conservation organizations are increasingly touting "nature-based solutions" as a key tool to absorb greenhouse gas emissions. We are consequently witnessing the creation of a multi-billion-dollar financial scheme based on carbon offsetting and other fake fixes. Policies like the 30x30 goal adopted at UN Biodiversity COP15 treat Indigenous and local communities’ lands as a carbon stock so polluters can keep polluting. My talk will show that, while the conservation industry gets its hands on billions of dollars, and speculators profit widely, the local people who are supposed to be conserving forests are excluded from the decisions and the benefits.

About Professor Dawson:

Ashley Dawson is an author, activist, filmmaker, and photographer. Based in NYC, Ashley teaches as a Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his include Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024), People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). He is also the co-editor of a collection of testimonies by activists resisting neocolonial conservation entitled Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notion Books, 2024).

About Professor Kepe:

Thembela Kepe is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Geography, and is cross-appointed to the Department of Global Development Studies (UTSC). He has interdisciplinary training, including an undergraduate training in agriculture and land use planning. Over the last few years his research interests have been in the areas of land rights, rural resistance politics, politics of development and political ecology. His field research has mostly been in southern Africa, particularly his home country, South Africa, but has also carried out research in Liberia and in Canada. In addition to publishing about 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, he co-edited four books, on topics such as Land Claims; Rural Revolts; Domains of Freedom and Land Justice and Conservation. He is currently completing a biography of his late uncle, who was a commander and commissar in the underground armed resistance against apartheid in South Africa, between the 1960s and early 1990s. In 2020 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Society of South Africa Geographers (FSSAG), which recognizes outstanding contribution to the field of geography. Thembela is also the chair of the Department of Human Geography at UTSC.

About Professor MacDonald:

Ken MacDonald is the Interim Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and is cross appointed to the Department of Human Geography and the Dept. of Global Development Studies. His research has spanned several areas, with a focus on political ecology and biodiversity conservation. Much of his field research has been based in the mountains of northern Pakistan examining how conservation has benefitted the interests of the state, NGOs and private actors rather than local communities.  More recently he has focused on the cultural politics of environmental governance, exploring how institutions of environmental governance like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have produced biodiversity conservation as a means of capital accumulation, ultimately expressed through forms of valuation and financialization that result in new forms of dispossession and alienation from land. This work brings ethnographic practice to study of transnational institutions of environmental governance and has been published in a number of journals including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Journal of Peasant Studies, Global Environmental Politics and Development and Change, among others.

Co-sponsor:

Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability

 

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170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8

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