Bram Büscher’s research while affiliated with Wageningen University & Research and other places

Amidst the many socio-ecological crises facing the world today, the biodiversity crisis is considered one of the most foundational. According to scientists, we have entered yet another mass extinction event in the history of the planet, though the first triggered by the impacts of the combined, uneven actions of one species. This introductory paper to a Special Section on the "Political ecologies of extinction" frames this crisis through political ecology, and explores what political ecologies of extinction could look like and focus on in the 21st century. Building on emerging literatures and the author contributions, it agrees that extinction is much more than the endpoint of a long and rocky road of the decline of a species. It is an uneven, historical process that conjoins political, geographical, socio-ecological, and other factors. Most of all, a political ecology of extinction highlights the intertwined forces of political economy, power and ecology whereby I argue that a special focus should be on how biological diversity and our understanding of it has changed over time, especially the last two centuries. The capitalist intensification of pressures on biological diversity combined with changing perceptions of the value of diversity during this time have led to a moment where extinction decisively moves from a biological endpoint to a political inflection-point. How to relate these two 'points' to historical and contemporary, local and global forces of political economy and power is central to political ecologies of extinction, as exemplified by the articles in this Special Section. This introductory article lays out their core themes, and derives from them further pointers and questions for developing this field.

This response gratefully acknowledges and engages with the commentaries on my article ‘The nonhuman Turn: critical reflections on alienation, entanglement and nature under capitalism’. It highlights the importance of further defining key concepts like anthropocentrism, ‘the human’, more-than-life and others in discussions of the more-than-human. It challenges desires for ‘returning’ to idealised forms of relationality or animism or the idea that historical, ‘basic alienation’ between humans and the rest of nature rests on some notion of ‘The Fall’. Overall, it aims to reemphasize one of the core arguments in the original article, namely the dangerous intensifications of historical capitalism, how this is critical for both non-human turn scholars and their critics and how this may provide common ground for opening up space for postcapitalism. Central to this argument is a further elaboration of the dangers of intensified surplus alienation due to contemporary platform capitalism for the (more-than)human but also, more specifically, for academic exchange.

Conservation news from Africa generally seems to exude crisis. Over the last decade,especially, we have witnessed the increasingly visible decline of charismatic species such as the rhino, elephant, cheetah, lion, giraffe and others, coupled with an ongoing defaunation of many forested areas. What is much less visible is that in certain areas an important countertrend is also occurring: the growth of wildlife species, most notably through the stocking of private lands and initiatives to develop broader wildlife economies. This article explores these two trends and shows that they are key in understanding conservation in sub-Sahara Africa and its rapidly changing political economy more generally.Focusing on South Africa, especially the booming wildlife economy in the Greater Kruger area, the article argues that the private possession or commodified management of conservation spaces and its (over)stocking of species actually benefits from an overall decline of charismatic species. As the number of charismatic species declines across the continent, it increases the value of well-stocked, privately conserved lands, providing their owners with unique sources of profit and revenue. The result is an intensification of uneven wildlife geographies across Africa.

Increasingly, one hears furtive whispers in the halls of conservation: "REDD+ is dead; it's time to cut our losses and move on." In a recent Conservation Biology editorial, Redford, Padoch and Sunderland (2013) identify REDD+ (Reduced Emissions through avoided Deforestation and forest Degradation) as one of the latest in a long line of conservation "fads," defined as "approaches that are embraced enthusiastically and then abandoned" (2013: 437). They caution: "we must take such fads more seriously, to work collectively to develop learning organizations. . .and study where new ideas come from. why they are adopted, why they are dropped, and what residual learning remains" (2013: 438). This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Over a thousand rhinos were killed in 2013 and 2014 as the poaching crisis in Southern Africa reached massive proportions, with major consequences for conservation and other political dynamics in the region. The article documents these dynamics in the context of the ongoing development and establishment of “peace parks”: large conservation areas that cross international state boundaries. The rhino-poaching crisis has affected peace parks in the region, especially the flagship Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In order to save both peace parks and rhinos, key actors such as the South African government, the Peace Parks Foundation, and the general public responded to the poaching crisis with increasingly desperate measures, including the deployment of a variety of violent tactics and instruments. The article critically examines these methods of ‘green violence’ and places them within the broader historical and contemporary contexts of violence in the region and in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. It concludes that attempting to save peace parks through ‘green violence’ represents a contradiction, but that this contradiction is no longer recognized as such, given the historical positioning of peace parks in the region and popular discourses of placing poachers in a ‘space of exception’.

The natural resource political economy in Southern Africa is booming once more. Central in these dynamics are the practices, promises and consequences of 'investment'. Investment is ubiquitous in neoliberal discourse and has long been used as a synonym for 'development' and 'improvement', though it is also rooted in and often responsible for dynamics of dispossession. This article theorizes the ironic relations between these concepts and investigates them empirically by drawing on and connecting disparate investment spaces. Focusing on the Mozambican coal boom, the article connects the practices, promises and consequences of investment in resettled rural villages in Tete and an investors' conference in a 5-star hotel in Cape Town. It argues that 'everyday-type ironies' are an important way in which tensions and contradictions of capitalist investment are expressed and rendered manageable. 'Investing in irony', however, does not necessarily enhance the stability of the accumulation process. More importantly, the article concludes, it emphasizes its unpredictability. © 2015 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.

The idea of protected areas as fortress conservation has long been debated and heavily criticized. In practice, however, the paradigm is alive and well and has, in some cases and especially due to rapid increases in poaching, seen major reinforcements. This article contributes to discussions that aim to reassess fortress conservation ideas and practices by analyzing how new online media are changing the politics of access to and control over increasingly militarized protected areas. Focusing on South Africa's Kruger National Park, one of the most iconic and mediated conservation areas globally, this article argues that new media such as online groups, webcams, and mobile phone apps encourage a new politics of social distinction in relation to the park and what it represents. These politics of distinction lead to complex new ways in which the boundaries of “fortress Kruger” are rendered (more) permeable and (more) restrictive at the same time. The article concludes that it is precisely through rendering park boundaries more permeable that new media technologies could help to reinforce the racialized and unequal hierarchies of the social order that fortress conservation was built on.