Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528

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Biological Conservation
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biocon

Conservation in conflict: Corporations, capitalism and

sustainable development
Clive L. Spash
Institute for the Multi-Level Governance & Development, Department of Socioeconomics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Gebäude D4,
Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In recent times arguments for conservation allying with corporations have been prominent and not least in the
Neoliberalism advocacy of ‘new conservation’. This has set up a false dichotomy between traditional conservation and concern
Corporate capitalism for humanity. The supposed intrinsic/instrumental, human/non-human conflict in conservation appears as a
New conservation
diversion from the actual problem which is the modern organisation of society as a capital accumulating machine
Environmental pragmatism
Sustainable development
based on competition and shifting costs on to others. This is particularly evident in the corporate and financial
TNC and WWF forms of capitalism which have been taking over conservation, and more broadly environmental policy debates.
Pragmatism in the form of ‘new conservation’ is argued to involve contradictions going back to Pinchot and
encapsulated in modern ideas of sustainable development. This has accelerated environmental destruction and
social inequity, exploitation and injustice. The loss of biodiversity will accelerate with the financialisation of
Nature via a range of new instruments (e.g. biodiversity banking, trading, offsetting, green/blue bonds, species
credits, extinction futures markets and climate catastrophe bonds) that are being promoted by major conser­
vation NGOs (e.g. WWF, TNC). Preserving, empowering and developing alternative social-ecological forms of
running economies is then seen as the central issue for protecting both humans and non-humans alike. Divisions
in conservation are argued to be real conflicts over the form and function of economic systems and the currently
dominant role of capitalism in its corporate and financial forms.

1. Introduction wealthy elites and capital accumulating organisations.

Conservationists, ecologists and environmentalists successfully
changed public perception and government policy in the 1960s and 70s
on a range of issues—environmental protection, pollution, endangered
species—to become a major threat to business interests by the 1980s,
leading to a sustained, especially corporate sponsored, backlash. For
example, in the United States of America (USA), the multi-billionaire
Koch brothers have for decades run the corporate conglomerate Koch
Industries, which profits by being one of the nation's most polluting
companies (impacting land, air and water) and has used political in­
fluence to craft the Republican anti-regulatory agenda (Dickinson,
2014). In the face of increasingly widespread recognition of the costs
competitive business enterprises shift on to others (both human and non-
human, present and future) a broad strategy has been to undermine the
science and scientists supporting direct environmental regulation
(Oreskes and Conway, 2010), while substituting corporate led alterna­
tives. Conservation is, indeed, merely one example of a much larger on-
going struggle for environmental regulation against the interests of
A decade ago this surfaced as an open fight between traditional and
‘new’ conservation, as highlighted by a special section in Biological
Conservation (Miller et al., 2011; Minteer and Miller, 2011). Today what
was advocated may seem of doubtful relevance to conservationists, not
least because some of the key protagonist (e.g. Peter Kareiva, Marc
Tercek) have disappeared from the conservation community's limelight.
However, as I will argue, this dispute evidences the ‘open conspiracy’ of
a corporate takeover of conservation, its highest profile environmental
non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) and neoliberalisation of
government policy on biodiversity and Nature protection. Contrary to
some recent claims, that there are “no distinct camps within the con­
servation community” (Sandbrook et al., 2019: 320), fundamental di­
visions in conservation exist concerning the role of the currently
hegemonic economic systems, including whether to ally with or oppose
major corporations, capitalism, in its various forms, and market mech­
anisms. However, I will also argue that the central conflict in conser­
vation of concern here is poorly understood by simplistic antagonistic
positions that seem to abound as dichotomies in the literature: the

E-mail address: clive.spash@wu.ac.at.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109528
Received 8 November 2021; Received in revised form 23 March 2022; Accepted 25 March 2022
Available online 31 March 2022
0006-3207/© 2022 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
C.L. Spash
anthropocentric vs. ecocentric; human utility vs non-human intrinsic
value; poverty alleviation vs wildlife protection; indigenous autonomy
vs international imperialism; sustainable development vs. wilderness.
Conducting debates over conservation policy in such ‘either/or’ terms
too easily becomes a rhetorical exercise losing track of the substantive
social and economic mechanisms causing both human exploitation and
species loss, social depravation and mass extinction. The link between
the actual forces causing Nature to be corrupted, dominated and
destroyed are treated as if divorced from the forces causing suffering and
exploitation of humans.
New conservation played directly on the oppositional rhetorical
framing of conservation as dichotomously divided. Its advocates put it
forward as pragmatic and serving the ends of people within existing
economic structures, where corporate capitalism was designated as
progressive, while characterising traditional conservation as backward
looking, based on building fortress parks against traditional land users
and showing total disregard for the poor (Kareiva and Marvier, 2012;
Kareiva et al., 2012). Conservation needed to become socially con­
cerned, pro-people and support economic development. In response, the
new conservationists were criticised for painting a picture of “nature
protection for its own sake [as] a dysfunctional, antihuman anachro­
nism” (Soulé, 2013: 895). The dispute was popularly summarised as
‘people vs. parks’, and this metaphorical caricature remains present in
current debates over restricting human intervention into Nature, e.g.
proposals such as Watson et al. (2018) to protect all remaining intact
ecosystems from economic development or ‘Nature needs half’ (see
response to criticisms by Crist et al., 2021). Conservation is then seen as
facing the stark choice of either being pro-human, supporting progress
as a form of sustained development (i.e. inclusive economic growth), or
anti-human, seeking to enforce the removal of mankind from Nature.
The new conservation critique picked-up on real concerns over the
historical development of conservation and how control of land use can
(under specific institutional conditions) harm innocent people. How­
ever, it failed to place expropriation, land grabbing and violation of
indigenous peoples' human rights in its social and political con­
text—racism, patriarchy, materialism, imperialism and colonialism.
Practices of exploitation were never unique to conservation, and remain
institutionalised in how economic organisations and nation states
operate to accumulate resources, control supply chains and maintain
economic growth. In historical context, such unethical conservation
practice would then appear as nothing more than a small part of a
general political and economic structure. However, the new conserva­
tionists' rhetoric quickly moved to tarring all past conservation, and
those who might advocated anything from the past, with the same brush,
while ignoring the actual mechanisms, institutions and causes of
ongoing social injustice and ecological destruction.
In what follows, I seek to clarify some key aspects of the conflicting
positions, in and around conservation practice and policy, that have
become evident in recent times. I start by reviewing the position termed
traditional conservation and the challenges it faces. I then move more
specifically to critically appraise new conservation. This raises the issue
of the relationship between conservation and economic development,
which is revealed to be a long standing tension rather than something
new. The occurrence of new conservation is argued to represent the
ongoing intensification in society of seeking to sustain economic growth
by capturing value from Nature. Conservation as a social movement is
then shown to have become partially co-opted into neoliberal capitalism
by corporate interests, while biodiversity (and related) policy is
increasingly being embedded in the world of finance. This raises the
question of how conservationists expect to achieve protection for Nature
and ethical treatment of non-humans without radical transformation of
current economic systems. Recognising where the value conflicts really
lie is necessary to address how conservation should move forward in the
22nd Century.
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Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
2. Values in and of conservation
2.1. Traditional conservation and its challenges
Traditional conservation, particularly in the USA, draws its inspira­
tion from writings of the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and
Aldo Leopold—descriptions of an untrammelled wilderness, vast ex­
panses of Nature in their free form, beautiful and outside of domesti­
cation by human activity. Retreat into Nature is perceived as a necessary
respite from the social world of humanity, as in the writings of Henry
David Thoreau, connecting with the non-human and recognising Na­
ture's values. Along these lines, a traditional argument for conservation
is that the non-human has value in itself, i.e. without requiring pro­
ductive use by humans or being acted upon by them. Conservationists
should then seek to maintain species, ecosystem and genetic diversity to
avoid restricting the potential of the non-human to flourish with au­
tonomy. The duty of a conservationist is to protect Nature against
harmful human intervention. A major protagonist supporting such a
position was Michael Soulé, a pioneer of conservation biology. As Soulé
(1985: 896) stated: “The worth of nature is beyond question and our
obligation to minimize its gratuitous degradation is no less”. The
traditional means of achieving this goal is to restrict and ban various
forms of resource use (e.g. designating certain land areas as out of
bounds to development or resource extraction). Legislation has then
extended to protecting species from harm due to habitat loss and frag­
mentation, land-use change and pollution.
Especially in light of recent criticisms, concerning proposed limits on
human use of remaining intact ecosystems (as discussed by Crist et al.,
2021), note should be taken of the fact that restriction of use is a normal
practice in human societies for the sustainable management of common
property resources. Historically this has been implemented via resource-
regulating institutions based on traditions, customs, kinship relations,
moral pressures and restraints. Institutions here are understood as
ranging from conventions and social norms to formal rules and sanc­
tioned regulation (Vatn, 2005). Such institutionalised practices are
found to be common aspects of social provisioning, operating in both
indigenous (Kibreab, 2000), and pre-capitalist European (e.g. see
Thompson, 1993), societies. Sacred areas also evidence designation of
non-use and human exclusion in order to maintain Nature and natural
social provisioning systems (Hegde et al., 2020). Indeed, contrary to the
popularised, ahistorical and unscientific ‘tragedy of the commons’, the
rise of capitalism, with its mechanisms of private property and the profit
motive, destroyed the social institutions of Nature protection, leading to
rapid growth in resource exploitation and environmental degradation.
This is the context in which high profile use of national parks was
pioneered in the USA. Their establishment involved a struggle for
preservation against ‘wise use’ utilitarianism, that had overtaken the
United States Forest Service (USFS) under the controlling influence of
Gifford Pinchot. Lands designated as National Forests in the USA, as
opposed to wilderness, did not receive protection, but rather were
employed to aid and subsidise logging (e.g. via publicly funded access
roads). The historical fight entailed a value conflict between the utili­
tarian USFS and preservationist National Park Service (Righter, 1982).
The caricature that preservation necessarily removes all human use is
incorrect. National parks generally do not exclude recreational use and
can, for example, be major tourist attractions, while also being wilder­
ness reserves, e.g. Yosemite, Yellowstone. In the United Kingdom (UK)
national park designation includes land from private ownership, in­
volves much heavy recreational use, and tends towards landscape
preservation rather than provision of habitat for protecting species.
Indeed, the form and design of protected areas varies greatly, but the
basic idea remains one of restricting various forms of human use and
impact. Protected area designation has then always raised the issue of
management and value conflicts, even for small scale local sites (e.g. see
Spash and Simpson, 1993). A tension then arises over the extent and
form of protected area management and the meaning of Nature,
C.L. Spash
wilderness, naturalness and the basis, role and extent of human
intervention.
Environmental managers wanting areas left untouched confront the
shift to ecosystems service provision which allies with quantified man­
agement and human intervention to achieve ‘production’ of desirable
outputs. Desjardins et al. (2019) argue that reducing ecosystems to
service providers facilitates regarding all change as good, because
change can result in novelty and then be justified as supplying new
ecosystem services, opening up to an ‘anything goes’ approach. Fewer
species and more carbon sequestration might, for example, be a result.
Such flexible and adaptive policy is further justified by explicit
commensuration of loss and gain, supported by arguments that the
worth of ecosystems as services and Nature as capital can be converted
into monetary values based on individual preferences, i.e. how much
people are willing-to-pay (e.g. Dasgupta, 2021). Without a quantified
monetary value Nature does not exist in this economic logic, and with
one it becomes a tradable asset. The managerialism of trade-offs and
compromises erode what is meant to be inviolable.
In a case study of Swedish environmental managers, Steinwall
(2015) contrasts hands-off management, or pure preservation, with
interventionist adaptive management, e.g. seeking specific and
measurable biodiversity targets. He argues that, “The interventionist
discourse involves a ‘disarticulation’ to remove ‘untouchedness’ from its
privileged position, either by denying the existence and thereby rele­
vance of ‘untouched’ nature, or rearticulating it (and sometimes also
‘naturalness’) as subjective/recreational” (Steinwall, 2015: 42). In
contrast, an advantage of the traditional approach to Nature preserva­
tion is the power it provides as a defense against reducing conservation
down to an economic productivist logic of efficient management for
meeting well defined goals and targets. As Steinwall (2015) explains, in
the Swedish context, the conceptualisation of achieving the ‘untouched’
or ‘undisturbed’ in Nature policy has “proven much more effective in
terms of resisting court challenges attempting to weaken protection in
reserves than in cases where the stated purpose only concerns certain
species and habitats”. The use of resources for hands-on management
also mitigates against protecting new areas and leaves existing areas
open to tinkering to meet the latest fashions in restoration. Strategically
then, the move in conservation to the purely instrumental, and the
claimed non-existence of Nature, are both disempowering. Steinwall
(2015) concludes that “[w]ith ‘naturalness’ out of the way, active in­
terventions to ‘maximize’ biodiversity or ‘create nature’ are harder to
argue against”.
Indeed, for those advocating a promethean discourse on the
Anthropocene, Nature as naturalness is rejected to be replaced by in­
terventions, with whatever materials or methods are deemed useful, in
disregard of how modification can substantially change what was
formerly autonomous. An interesting association then arises between
the advocates of the Anthropocene, post-modern attempts to dissolve
Nature into society and new conservationists. Baskin (2015) shows how
the promethean discourse on the Anthropocene has promoted an ac­
count of Nature, and its relationship to culture, that is a crude
“modernist dream of mastery” with a prescription of planetary man­
agement. The core ideas of the ‘end to Nature’ are used to advance
management by experts (primarily scientists/engineers) using the most
advanced technologies possible (i.e. eco-modernism). What constitutes
Nature as distinct from society is confused with the fallacious require­
ment that the two be separated physically in order to exist, while the
importance of naturalness as a quality, not a quantity, is absent (on
Nature and naturalness see Deckers, 2021; Soper, 1995).
Behind what Baskin (2015) is pointing out is a small vocal elite of
American, liberal, pro-growth, techno-optimists wishing to take over
environmentalism. Their Breakthrough Institute is a self-proclaimed
eco-modernist think tank advocating government funding for busi­
nesses to accelerate technological development to stimulate a new era of
economic growth. They aim to build a community of leaders in their
push for policies that support such things as nuclear power, genetically
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Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
modified crops, megadams, urbanisation and geoengineering the
climate. The Breakthrough Institute's senior fellows have in the past
included French sociologist Bruno Latour and new conservationist Peter
Kareiva. Latour merges Nature into society and advocates the sole ex­
istence of ‘hybrid Nature’ (i.e. only man influenced constructions),
despite the resulting contradictions (see critiques by Malm, 2019; Pol­
lini, 2013). This aligns with Kareiva's rejection of autonomous Nature
and claims that conservation only takes place within human-altered
landscapes. By definition the non-involvement of humans in ‘natural’
landscapes is then impossible and the door opened to the contradictory
Latourian concept of human created Nature.
2.2. The agenda and rhetoric of new conservation, critically appraised
Kareiva and Marvier (2012) set out the new conservationists' mani­
festo in a direct imitation of and challenge to the foundational article on
conservation biology by Soulé (1985). Human control is placed at the
centre of conservation on the basis that “ecological dynamics cannot be
separated from human dynamics” (Kareiva and Marvier, 2012: 962).
They criticise the conservation movement for painting humans as vil­
lains and fundamental threats to biodiversity, which, in their opinion,
might have been a useful unifying strategy for establishing conservation
biology but is now outdated and less ethical than their own approach.
They argue that: “conservation is fundamentally an expression of human
values” and that “biodiversity is not the only entity affected by conser­
vation actions and policies: People's lives and livelihoods also hang in
the balance. As a direct result of conservation, economic well-being has,
in some instances, been harmed, and there are well-documented in­
stances of human communities having been unjustly displaced and
disrupted for the creation of protected areas” (Kareiva and Marvier,
2012: 963).
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) became the flagship organisation
promoting new conservation shortly after Marc Tercek became Chief
Executive Officer and President in 2008, with Kareiva appointed Chief
Scientist and Vice President. Tercek, a financier, was previously a
managing director at Goldman Sachs. Kareiva, a biologist, was a key
player in the Stanford University ‘natural capital’ project, along with
Gretchen Daily, with its mission to convert ecosystems into environ­
mental services that can be traded like any marketed commodity.
Together Tercek and Kareiva promoted capitalism as natural, and
berated conservation biologists for not allying with corporations. In a
revival of social Darwinism, Kareiva and Marvier (2012: 967) even
claimed that: “In essence, corporations are the ‘keystone species’ of
global ecosystems”. This attempt to naturalise corporate power, as if
some deterministic evolutionary outcome that can be seen as positive
and progressive, neither relates to the institutional construction of the
modern corporation (Bakan, 2004), nor the historical origins of capi­
talism of which it is a development (Meiksins Wood, 2003). Indeed,
there appears little science and much rhetorical flourish in the promo­
tion of new conservation.
Tercek's position on the strategy received coverage in the New Yorker
(Max, 2014). The article reports that: “Tercek clearly knew how to win
over the people at Dow [Chemical]. At one point, he told them, ‘The old
model would be ‵We're doing it for conservation's sake.′ The new
approach would be ‵No, no, we're doing this for business' sake, and we
get the conservation, too.′ ’” The journalist found the whole approach
dubious, because it requires “trusting the main forces behind ecological
ruin to reverse it”. He noted that the TNC's new corporate allies—Dow
Chemical, Coca-Cola and Rio Tinto—appeared concerned only for their
own survival and likely to drop ecological concerns and continue
polluting if this conflicted with business-as-usual. The article concluded
that: “This leaves little room for conservationists to operate”.
However, Kareiva et al. (2012) state that: “conservationists should
partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value
of nature's benefits into their operations and cultures”. Value and ben­
efits are to be measured by money. As Kareiva makes clear “a
C.L. Spash
cost–benefit approach to conservation is not only desirable but neces­
sary” (Nair, 2012). Similarly, Tercek advocates harnessing the power of
markets by creating tools to assign natural resources a monetary value,
which he associates with sound metrics from the world of finance (Max,
2014). In fact, prices in financial markets result from speculation and
market power, and fail to price non-market goods and services, so their
metrics can hardly be regarded as ‘sound’, or a basis for guiding human
behaviour. Neither is monetary valuation of the environment, let alone
biodiversity, some objective problem-free science (Spash, 2000, 2005,
2008). Still, Tercek believes that if you want companies to care about
Nature you must put a price tag on it because, the story goes, companies
only respond to prices.
This appeal to economic valuation of the environment and biodi­
versity is widespread amongst environmental pragmatists and big
ENGOs. For example, UK conservationist, Tony Juniper (2012) has
heavily promoted ‘pricing Nature’, despite a series of serious flaws in his
arguments (Spash, 2017). Most recently this same approach has
appeared at the heart of the review of biodiversity economics by
mainstream economist Partha Dasgupta (2021), supported by ENGOs (e.
g. the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, World Wildlife Fund
(WWF)) and naturalist Sir David Attenborough. Here monetary valua­
tion methods from costs-benefit analysis are meant to provide ‘ac­
counting prices’ that form the basis for calculating the ‘true value’ of
natural capital and biodiversity. There are a range of problems with this
capital approach and claims made for the ability of economists to pro­
duce credible monetary values even for artificial, let alone natural,
capital (Spash and Hache, 2021). That conservationists and ecologists
adopt and support such economics has undercut their own science
(Spash and Aslaksen, 2015).
A core problem with the ‘pricing Nature’ approach is recognising the
implications of corporate power, backed by government, for how actual
markets operate and the role prices play. Conservationists (like main­
stream economists) are misguided in the belief that powerful corpora­
tions passively respond to prices and consumer preferences expressed
via markets can control business behaviour (Fellner and Spash, 2015;
Spash and Dobernig, 2017). For example, corporate marketing extends
to directly targeting small children so that they nag their parents to buy
products (Henry and Borzekowski, 2011). Interestingly, Kareiva and
Marvier (2012: 967) note that: “A small number of global corporations
have a huge impact on land conversion, mining, energy extraction, and
consumer choices”, and “kids [in the USA] recognize hundreds of
corporate logos but fewer than 10 native plant species”. While admitting
that corporations shape the physical world, market structures, consumer
behaviour and children's psychological development, they regard
corporate power as something to partake of, rather than something to be
opposed. This ignores the structure and characteristics of the corpora­
tion which have been described as equivalent to psychopathy in an in­
dividual (Bakan, 2004), resulting in documented complicity in acts of
genocide (e.g. Black, 2001) and environmental destruction (Bienkowski,
2013), as well as manipulation of science to cover-up deliberately
harming others through their products (e.g. cigarettes, asbestos) and
pollution (Michaels, 2005; Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Corporations
are not the passive, intrinsically benevolent, caring organisations that
new conservationists promote. Basically corporate led conservation is
about buying a ‘green’ image in the fashion for sustainability branding
(Kumar and Christodoulopoulou, 2014), while fending-off environ­
mental regulation by claiming self-regulation works better. This has
been a successfully corporate strategy, e.g. establishing corporate
controlled certification of ‘sustainable’ palm oil production in the face of
environmental campaigns seeking bans and direct government regula­
tion (Lang, 2015).
3. Conservation and development
Besides failing to work with corporations, another major area of
criticism levelled at traditional conservation by Kareiva and Marvier
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Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
(2012: 963, 965) is the creation of protected areas through the
displacement and exclusion of human communities, creating disadvan­
tage, injustice and harm to economic well-being. However, contrary to
such claims of not caring for people, the conservation movement has
been aware of and sensitive to impacts on indigenous livelihoods and
culture, e.g. a special issue on the topic in Conservation and Society
(Agrawal and Redford, 2009b). The issue was also explicitly noted by
Soulé (1985: 727–728), along with the importance of understanding
such impacts via the social sciences. Blaming conservation is a blind to
the primary causes of human displacement, which are resource extrac­
tion and economic ‘development’ (Greenwald et al., 2013).
Consider a few facts. Estimates of the total number of people dis­
placed as a result of development-related projects between 1980 and
2000 are in the order of 200 million (Cernea and McDowell, 2000: 15).
Displacement for development projects and programmes—dam, reser­
voir, road and railway construction and urban expansion—has been
running at 10 million people per annum, while, in addition, millions of
subsistence farmers and pastoral groups have been displaced by mech­
anisation of agriculture (Cernea and McDowell, 2000: 190). This is
separate from and prior to China's urbanisation and economic growth
drive. In China the largest peacetime population transfers in history
have been taking place. Plans revealed in 2013 proposed to have 21
million people a year move into cities. In one region alone 2.4 million
farmers were removed from mountain areas in the central Chinese
province of Shaanxi to low-lying towns, many built from scratch on
other farmers' land, at an estimated cost of $200 billion over 10 years
(Johnson, 2013).
As Agrawal and Redford (2009a: 2) note, the violence that such
development projects inflict upon people continues to be stunningly
commonplace. For example, dam projects in developing countries (e.g.
Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Thailand) combine the interests of
nation states and large corporations resulting in military intervention
and violent evictions (Morvaridi, 2004: 722). The success of neoliberal
capitalism has been to get governments to operate in support of business
interests. Thus, the neoliberalisation of the Indian economy, since the
early 1990s, ushered in a new phase of conflict over land acquisition as
private investors sought to develop both traditional resource extraction
(e.g. mining projects) and establish international free trade areas, called
Special Economic Zones. This is a general trend, and “similar ‘land
grabs’ occur on a global scale in the current era of advanced capitalism”
(Nielsen and Nilsen, 2015: 204).
Yet, the whole new conservation strategy, as set out in the five goal
manifesto by Kareiva and Marvier (2012), is about promoting such in­
ternational ‘development’, and opening-up for trade-offs between eco­
nomic growth and maintenance of naturalness. Goal one emphasises the
maximisation of human well-being (undefined) and, while the protec­
tion of Nature should also be maximised, claims that highly modified
ecosystems can offer significant conservation value (undefined) in terms
of both biodiversity and ecosystem services. Goal two is about getting
people on board and part of the strategy is to broaden the concerns of
conservation to pay attention to economic development, jobs and
poverty (i.e. economic growth). Goal three bluntly states: “conserva­
tionists must work with corporations”. Goal four requires actively
seeking to optimise both conservation and economic goals, which, given
the focus on the USA, means development as economic growth under
State sponsored and supported corporate capitalism. Goal five brings in
some broader social goals, i.e. respecting human rights, gender and
equity issues. The passion for economic development of the new con­
servationists would, as note earlier, likely massively increase, not
reduce, human displacement and associated harms, and so violate such
social goals. Clearly, the manifesto is a statement of a traditional pro­
ductivist, economic growth agenda.
Much of what is being proposed by ‘new’, and related forms of,
conservation fits under orthodox advocacy of ‘sustainable develop­
ment’. Hector et al. (2014) argue that sustainable development should
be conceptualised as an economic growth-oriented project that is
C.L. Spash
distinct from, and not complimentary to, sustainability. Sustainability
they argue is (or rather should be) connected to preservationist argu­
ments and harmony with, not domination over, Nature. They believe
sustainable development has more in common with instrumentally
driven conservation going back to Pinchot. As they state: “in a
sustainable-development paradigm, it is assumed that humankind has a
special moral status that places humans above the rest of nature, and
that nature should be ‘looked after’ only to the extent that it is in human
interests to do so” (Hector et al., 2014: 9).
Pinchot was the archetypal utilitarian conservationist, opposed to
wilderness, and a man who “believed that nature should be used,
managed and controlled by man in an efficient manner” (Righter, 1982:
19). As Pinchot (1910: 42–44) put it himself:
“The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for devel­
opment. […] The first principle of conservation is development, the
use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the
benefit of the people who live here now. There may be just as much
waste in neglecting the development and use of certain natural re­
sources as there is in their destruction. […] Conservation stands
emphatically for the development and use of water-power now,
without delay. It stands for the immediate construction of navigable
waterways under a broad and comprehensive plan as assistants to the
railroads. […] In every case and in every direction the conservation
movement has development for its first principle, and at the very
beginning of its work. The development of our natural resources and
the fullest use of them for the present generation is the first duty of
this generation.”
On this basis new conservation would appear to be rather old wine in
new bottles.
Some forty years after Pinchot died, ‘wise use’ development got a
rebirth courtesy of Norwegian premier Gro Brundtland and her report on
sustainability (World Commission on Environment and Development,
1987). Typically a single sentence from the Brundtland report is cited,
claiming the goal of meeting human needs (present and future) as
defining sustainable development (I.3.27). The rest of the report and its
anti-environmental and orthodox economic statements are generally
overlooked. That is where the report infamously promotes 5–10 fold
increases in economic growth rates for developing countries (II.5.66),
and a minimum of 3–4% growth rates for industrial countries (III.1.32).
This ‘new era of growth’ (I.3.28) was supposedly the means for getting to
a sustainable future and reducing poverty within a few decades, while
addressing environmental problems through efficiency and technology
(i.e. eco-modernism). Sustainable development aimed to mainstream
environmentalism. Some 35 years later, there is increasing wealth
disparity, billions below the poverty line, and sustained economic
growth and capital accumulation has led to ecological crises. For
example, over the last 30 years global carbon dioxide emissions have
been steadily rising and are now 60% higher than they were in 1990, the
wealthiest 10% have been responsible for as much as half of the cu­
mulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% more than twice that
of the poorest 50% (Stoddard et al., 2021: 655–656).
A common argument amongst economic growth advocates is that the
environment is a luxury that only the rich can afford. However, the
concerns and struggles of the poorest cannot be divorced from the need
to maintain ecosystems structure and function, and Nature as other upon
which they depend is embedded in their cultural values and practices
(Martinez-Alier, 2002). Neither can decades of failure to address poverty
be blamed on conservationists. The majority of rich countries have never
met even the modest international commitments they made in 1970 to
allocate 0.7% of gross national income to official development assis­
tance. The redistribution of wealth has simply failed to occur. Indeed,
the readiness of states to fund military expenditures over and above all
else stands in stark contrast to the efforts to address either social or
environmental problems. Yet, the reason is straight forward, military
5
Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
power enables control of resource supply chains and exploitation of
others, and is highly correlated with economic growth, and corporate
power is integrally linked with both (Spash, 2021a).
4. Conservation, corporations and capitalism
Since the 1980s, and the rise of neoliberalism, many ecologists and
conservationists, especially in the international arena, have adopted the
language of mainstream economics, referring to ecosystems as goods
and services, Nature as capital, pollution as an ‘externality’ and getting
the prices right as ‘the solution’ (Spash and Aslaksen, 2015). Everything
is to be measured and weighed-up in order to determine the most ‘effi­
cient’ level at which to undertake conservation, including the ‘optimal’
rate at which species should become extinct (e.g. Dasgupta, 2021;
Swanson, 1994). After climate change, biodiversity policy became an
explicit target for the forces of neoliberalism, which spread a ‘new
environmental pragmatism’ amongst the conservation movement
(Spash, 2009).
In 2007, the G8 + 5 established a project called The Economics of
Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), that was hosted by the United Na­
tions Environment Programme (UNEP). This was headed by Pavan
Sukhdev, then a Managing Director in Deutsche Bank's Global Markets
division, with the philosophy of ‘you cannot manage what you cannot
measure’. TEEB (2010) concluded that ecosystems and biodiversity
needed to be placed within a set of quantitative ‘sustainability’ metrics
to complement Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and corporate profit­
ability. The aim was to commensurate everything using money metrics
in the belief that anything can be traded-off for something else. TEEB
was quickly followed-up by the UNEP's Finance Initiative proposing to
hardwire biodiversity and ecosystems into finance, supported by
powerful corporations and financial players, including Rio Tinto, In­
dustrial Development Corporation, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Uni Credit
Group, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Barclays Bank, Bank of America Merrill
Lynch (UNEP Finance Initiative, 2010).
A central idea of switching away from an ecologically science driven
approach, involving plural values, to a mainstream economic framing,
adopting monistic money values, is that this attracts corporations and
ruling neoliberal political parties. For example, the UK Secretary of State
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Caroline Spelman, made the
following endorsement of TEEB (in the publishers publicity blurb): “We
need to understand the true cost of losing what nature gives us for free,
and integrate this into our decision making across government, business
and society. At the national and international level TEEB for Policy
Makers helps us think about how this can be done”. Similar claims to
(undefined) truth in values is foundational to the recent Dasgupta re­
view on biodiversity economics, where all market prices are to be cor­
rected to his ‘accounting prices’ by calculating social costs (e.g. pricing
environmental damages), where “accounting prices reflect the true
value to society of any good, service or asset” (Dasgupta, 2021: 503),
and biodiversity is defined as such an asset.
TEEB actually moved away from aiming to demonstrate that biodi­
versity or ecosystems services have some true value by which to correct
market prices, to focus on the main concern of financiers and corporate
executives: ‘How to make money?’. This TEEB termed capturing value.
Typically the financial concerns of corporate executives with respect to
the environment were the costs and delays of meeting regulations (e.g.
impact assessment) and being caught destroying habitat or polluting,
which (besides a usually insignificant, legally negotiable/contestable,
fine) might affect brand image, reputation, sales and share price. What
TEEB and the UNEP Finance Initiative proposed was to identify financial
returns from new markets. Destroying and replacing biodiversity and
ecosystems services became a profit making opportunity, rather than a
cost, risk or liability. New innovative financial instruments offered a
major growth area for traders and speculators.
Biodiversity, ecosystems and species could be offset, banked and
traded. The USA developed wetland banking whereby companies or
C.L. Spash
individuals undertaking development or agricultural expansion are
allowed to degrade or destroy wetland ecosystems by paying for wetland
offset areas that have established ‘environmental credits’. This is
regarded as a “market-based method of wetland and water resource
replacement” (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2008). Bio-
banking was pioneered in Australia, where in 2006 a pilot project in
New South Wales allowed developers to buy credits to offset negative
impacts on biodiversity. These ‘biodiversity credits’ can be created by
‘enhancing’ other land (e.g. previously degraded by development). The
US Fish & Wildlife Service (2007) set-up endangered species credits, a
form of biodiversity offsetting that allows negative impacts on threat­
ened species and habitats. For a critique of biodiversity offsetting see
Spash (2015a). The markets have since grown and the financial in­
struments expanded. In 2021, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
announced on-going development of a new tradable asset class based on
‘Natural Asset Companies’ that will hold the rights to ecosystem serv­
ices—termed converting natural wealth into financial wealth. According
to NYSE natural assets produce around US$125 trillion annually in
ecosystem services, e.g. water purification, biodiversity (Mccrank,
2021). In a long capitalist tradition they seek to profit from the extension
of private property rights.
Increasing possibilities for trading financial instruments (e.g. biodi­
versity banking, trading and offsetting; green/blue bonds; species
credits; extinction futures markets; climate catastrophe bonds) has little
relevance for addressing either the consequences or, more importantly,
the causes of ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss (e.g. human
population increase, appropriation of resources and land for human use,
war, corruption and greed, colonialism). Developers with enough ready
cash, and/or the possibility to pass on costs in the market place, become
unfettered. These financial instruments remove absolute protection
while creating opportunities to engage in speculation, trade and value
capture. Green, sustainable, finance is not about conservation, but in­
vestment returns, removing regulation, increasing profiteering and, not
least, freeing-up the ability to shift costs on to others.
As was recounted above, rather than opposing reduction of Nature to
money and finance, some high profile conservationists and ENGOs have
joined with orthodox economists to promote it (see also Spash and
Hache, 2021). A range of ENGOs have formed alliances with some of the
worst corporate polluters and resource extractors in the world (Spash,
2015b). Green-washing has become a major occupation for some of the
largest ENGOs. Many have become apologists for corporate self-
regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiver­
sity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species
‘protection’ as eco-tourism.
A prime example is WWF, an organisation—formerly concerned with
wildlife conservation and endangered non-human species—that
declared in 2013 ‘we love cities’, with a campaign promoting urban
lifestyles as sustainable despite the contradictory urban material and
energy flows and international supply chains. Here there is a clear
switch from protecting wildlife to ‘sustainable development’. In essence
the organisation has adopted Green growth and offsetting over pre­
venting environmental degradation. That WWF was captured by
neoliberal corporate capitalism was evident when TEEB's Sukdev
became its President in 2017. In cooperation with the UNEP Finance
Initiative WWF then launched “The Net Zero Asset Alliance” to claim
greenhouse gases can be offset/traded to make corporations carbon
neutral and environmentally responsible (for a critique of such mecha­
nisms see Spash, 2010). The initiative comprises capital asset owners
representing more than US$ 2 trillion, in a network controlling US$ 4
trillion (UNEP Finance Initiative, 2020). Joining Sukdev in fronting the
‘Alliance’ was Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She is a member
of the B-Team, run by corporate billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin
Group, aimed at promoting corporate leadership in the face of envi­
ronmental crises, i.e. a business first approach. Virgin Group includes an
international airline and space programme dependent upon burning
6
Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
large quantities of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. The B-Team also
includes Yolanda Kakabadse, former President of WWF. No surprise then
that WWF treats Nature as capital that is valued for producing con­
sumption possibilities and financial returns (WWF, 2014).
Another prime example is TNC. According to Tercek, in his time
running the ENGO, the pay-off from corporations for TNC was in the
order of $7 billion (https://marktercek.com/). While Tercek and Kar­
eiva have moved on from TNC their legacy remains in the form of
institutionalised neoliberal conservation allied to corporate interests.
TNC no longer makes a fuss about its corporate alliances or seeks to
justify them. However, they still pursue the offsetting of corporate
environmental damages such as biodiversity loss and carbon emis­
sion—renaming Kareiva/Tercek's ‘Development by Design’ the now
more popular ‘Nature Based Solutions’ (for a critique see Friends of the
Earth, 2021). Thus, TNC's website repeatedly promotes trees as the
‘solution’ to everything from healthy cities to climate change. Under the
title of ‘protected land and water’ the first approach presented is carbon
markets and the headline explanation is that “Carbon markets pay
people to not cut down trees”. Their agenda is pro-market with a focus
on supply chains, cities, technology, innovation, markets and efficiency.
Like WWF, concern for Nature and the non-human world is limited to its
being a useful means for achieving narrowly defined, and ethically
questionable, human ends.
Conservation has been placed in the front line of an on-going war for
Nature and the natural against the dominant economic powers seeking
their exploitation. ENGOs have been deliberately targeted by corporate
strategists, and in several cases they have been captured at management
level. For example, Holmes (2011) reports on some of the boards of
ENGO's that include large numbers of current or former directors of
large transnational corporations: TNC 15 out of 26; Conservation In­
ternational 26 out of 36; WWF-USA 13 out of 21. In addition, “these
NGOs each have a business council, made exclusively from corporate
directors, to advise the board of directors” (Holmes, 2011: 9). Besides
these three, Hari (2010) cites the National Wildlife Federation, Sierra
Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council as suffering from
corporate capture and conformity to the basic tenets of neoliberalism.
Adams (2017) has analysed the pragmatic reasons behind this alliance,
terming it “sleeping with the enemy” and a “Faustian bargain”, that is
sold as promoting the mythical Green and growing economy, i.e. sus­
tainable development.
Contrary to new conservationists' arguments, this approach has no
role in protecting people or increasing well-being of the poor. As
Büscher, Dressler and Fletcher note: “Without question, neoliberal con­
servation histories are replete with empirical case studies in diverse ge­
ographies where the logic of violence to ‘defend’ conservation is
inextricable linked to maintaining associated markets at ‘all costs’,
whether for forests, Rhinos or otherwise” (see Lansing et al., 2015:
2405); my emphasis. These and other authors have developed extensive
critiques of neoliberal conservation (Büscher et al., 2012; Büscher et al.,
2014; Fletcher, 2012; Sullivan, 2013). What should be remembered is
that not all conservation is, or need be, neoliberal, any more than it need
be racist, imperialist, sexist or patriarchal.
5. Unity or division in conservation
Some recent attempts have been made to move beyond the di­
chotomy created by new conservationists and to claim a unifying ma­
jority position exists. A series of articles, with some common co-authors,
have empirically investigated the grounds for claiming such unity.
Holmes et al. (2017) found the two expected (if slightly moderated)
positions of biocentrism and new conservationism, but also a novel
perspective, “conservation to benefit people but opposed to links with
capitalism and corporations”. The discussion of the results highlights the
divisions and cites previous work as also showing “similar resistance
among some conservationists to market-based conservation” (Holmes
et al., 2017: 361).
C.L. Spash
In contrast, Sandbrook et al. (2019) claim their attitudinal survey
shows that “the global conservation movement is diverse not divided”,
and imply that conservationists form a generally united movement.
However, they actually simultaneously provide empirical evidence for
division on specific issues, including protected area management, the
role of corporations and attitudes towards capitalism in conservation.
More specifically, they identify two groupings, termed ‘people centred
conservation’ and ‘science-led ecocentrism’, that are held by a majority
of respondents (and so apparently assumed compatible), while a third,
‘conservation through capitalism’, they regard as an area of contention
due to strong opposition amongst a substantive minority (28%).
When looking specifically at attitudes towards the role of markets in
conservation, Sandbrook et al. (2013) found two diverging dominant
discourses they labelled ‘outcome focused enthusiasm’ and ‘ideological
scepticism’, but overall regarded their sample as showing convergence
towards a position that they labelled ‘cautious pragmatism’. However,
the same study was cited by Holmes et al. (2017) as providing evidence
of resistance to (not pragmatism about) market-based conservation.
Then there is the study by Sandbrook et al. (2011) that found junior
conservation professionals did not share a unifying set of core values,
held a plurality of opinions about conservation and how it should be
pursued, and that their diversity of values posed a challenge to proposals
for unity.
Whether unity is even a desirable goal also remains contentious, as
does around what to unify, to what end and for whom (human or non-
human or both)? Paradigmatic unity within a science threatens to lead
to dogmatism, control, exclusion of voices outside the core and so leads
to lack of critical self-reflection in the community. Countering this re­
quires openness to critical self-reflection, debate and deliberation over
alternatives, which might nominally appear to require inclusiveness.
However, calls for ‘inclusive conservation’ have been criticised as in
practice constituting grounds for suppression of marginal views within
the conservation community. Thus, Matulis and Moyer (2017) advocate
an embracing agonistic plurality within conservation, because of their
concern that a plethora of viewpoints are being overshadowed and po­
sitions that are irreconcilable should be tolerated. They argue that the
formalised elite space discriminates against other factions of conserva­
tionists who exist in diverse fora, and that the desire to achieve
consensus on all things denies the role that conflict and disagreement
can play.
Yet, while critical reflection has an epistemological role in science,
scientific understanding should not be confused with political repre­
sentation. Calls for an all-inclusive, undefined, eclectic pluralism easily
lead to an anything goes mentality that denies the existence of scientific
criterion for validation of knowledge. Such unstructured pluralism fails
to recognize that not all ideas or conceptual theories are equally valid,
let alone offer descriptive realism and causal explanation. Exactly on
such scientific grounds can various proposals, methods and polices be
criticised as flawed, making false claims and failing to achieve the goals
of conservation. For example, the recent Dasgupta review on biodiver­
sity economics provides a prime example, full of scientifically fallacious
claims including misrepresenting ecosystems as stocks and proposing
impossible to achieve environmental valuation (Spash, 2021b; Spash
and Hache, 2021).
While conservationists may agree on many things, there are also
irreconcilable positions on a number of issues—market-based in­
struments, corporate funding and control of ENGOs, commodification
and financialisation of Nature—that prove problematic for claims to
either scientific or political unity. The disagreement between new con­
servationists and others stems in part from a direct, acrimonious tension
between ideas “about different ethical values that underpin why con­
servation should be done and for whom” (Holmes et al., 2017: 354).
However, that tension has more to it than the falsely caricatured hard
split between the proponents of a ‘new’ anthropocentric utilitarianism
and an ‘old’ ecocentric intrinsic value position. At core the divisions are
about how human social and economic systems are being, and should be,
7
Biological Conservation 269 (2022) 109528
run, and what should be done about the currently hegemonic system of
financial capitalism. Common alternatives include seeking protection
from its destructive practices, seeking to radically transform it, or
pragmatically joining with the capitalist oligarchs. In this respect,
Moranta et al. (2021: 5) summarise the current debate amongst con­
servationists over policy relating to the post-2020 Convention on
Biodiversity Global Strategy Framework as follows:
“The different conservation strategies have caused rifts between
conservationists against economic growth who are seeking to divorce
conservation from capitalistic logics and those seeking conservation
through [economic] growth.”
This basic division separates the pro-growthers, environmental prag­
matists and apologists for growth from the degrowthers, radical envi­
ronmentalists and affirmers of diverse alternative economic systems. As
such it is not something unique to the conservation community.
6. Conclusions
A complex of social, political and economic mechanisms have com­
bined to drive humanity into social-ecological crises including biodi­
versity loss and mass species extinction. I have argued that this needs to
be understood from a structural perspective. The last 400 years has seen
the creation of an economic system that seeks to amass monetary wealth
on the basis of accelerating capital accumulation via monetary exchange
in commodified markets, while promoting the maximisation of indi­
vidual utility, based on ever increasing material and energy consump­
tion, as the ultimate aim of human life. That is, the social structure in
which much of humanity lives and reproduces itself has become the
primary causal mechanism preventing conservation of species and
ecosystems and accelerating their loss. Conservation of species and
ecosystems is challenged not just by too many humans and lack of space
but increasingly by human induced change in the qualities of the envi­
ronment, from toxic chemicals to plastics, from hormones in water to
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Those changes are driven by the
competitive, productivist, growth economy with its continuous tech­
nological change, throwaway fashion culture and planned obsolescence.
Conservation as an attempt to prevent human destruction of Nature
seems inevitably pitted against the forces of resource exploitation,
pollution, industrialisation, urbanisation, land-use change from non-
human to human use, and general encroachment of human activities
on non-humans, not least their survival and autonomy. This appears as a
fundamental value conflict with the economic ideology of development
= growth = progress. This means polices must go beyond merely
removing local pressures, or instances of environmental damage and
harm, or protecting the remnants of a species or a habitat. The challenge
is systems change.
Recognising the causes of the current combined social, ecological
and economic crises means setting out to transform the economic in­
stitutions of domination and exploitation. What has remained absent
from the dichotomised debate—parks vs people, non-human vs human,
anthropocentric utility vs ecocentric intrinsic value—is the bigger pic­
ture. That concerns the structure of capital accumulating, competitive,
growth economies in their various forms (e.g. American, Chinese, Eu­
ropean, Indian, Russian, and so on), whose major players are rich elites,
private and state corporations, financiers and bankers. Internationally
the corporation has become a dominant means for a minority to amass
power and wealth by shifting costs onto others, grabbing land and re­
sources. The corporation is not a ‘keystone species’, but it is a powerful
and controlling structure. It is also a socially constructed organisation
that can be deconstructed, given the political will to do so.
What are the real conflicts facing conservation? A major ethical
problem is allying with those who maintain power and wealth through
exploitative practices. A more basic problem is material: forging such
alliances means cooperating with those organisations that are
C.L. Spash
destroying Nature as an essential part of their self-reproduction. The
supposed political pragmatism of allying with international corpora­
tions entails supporting extractivism, capital accumulation and mass
consumerism, which are irreconcilable with claiming to conserve Na­
ture. Economic growth has become embedded in environmental and
biodiversity agendas via the promotion of sustainable development and
more recently sustainable finance. New conservation may be passé but
financialisation of Nature is alive and thriving, along with the sup­
porting rhetoric of putting a price on Nature and making Nature into
capital and biodiversity into a supporting asset. Neoliberal capitalism is
a core part of the problem, along with its Nature based solutions!
A central issue for conservation today is how to prevent biodiversity
and ecosystem policy from becoming a tool for profiteering and specu­
lation by spreading capitalist markets and trading in commodities and
financial assets. Conservation remains important for seeking to protect
Nature and naturalness and opposing structural causes of on-going mass
extinction of species. Its past regulatory success is exactly why conser­
vation has been targeted for control by those who might be subject to
regulation for causing pollution, species extinction and loss of habitat.
Direct regulation remains a powerful policy instrument. However, the
future requires that conservation seek more fundamental change in
human societies and their destructive practices in order to actualise
ways of living that are compatible with natural ecosystems functioning
and structure, while institutionalising values of tolerance and justice for
others, both human and non-human, present and future. The practical
consequence is that conservationists need to expose, disengage from and
oppose organisations promoting the exact opposite, and establish a
positive agenda on maintaining and actualising alternative social-
ecological economic systems.
Declaration of competing interest
There is none.
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