Speaker Series: Against Neocolonial Conservation with Professor Ashley Dawson
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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).