‘Climate Conservationism’: An Identity Crisis for the Environmental Movement in the Anthropocene?

Climate change will cause the environment movement is to reconsider its identity, self-definition and practice as ‘nature’s guardian’. Accelerating global warming is compounding the impacts of other ongoing anthropogenic disruptions and fragmenting the building blocks of previously relatively stable terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Biodiversity is threatened at every level by these forces. As a consequence, the relatively static institutional arrangements – such as national parks - championed by environmentalists and established in the late 19th and 20th Centuries to ‘protect’ remnant nature are becoming increasingly irrelevant as global warming mobilizes, disperses or extinguishes ecosystems and species’ habitat. Measures essential for protecting biodiversity in the age of global warming include the intensification of en situ preservation (resilience building), relocation of species, the creation of species ‘banks’ (zoos and vaults), and the engineering and dispersal of climate-resilient species and ecosystems. Such choices will increasingly have to be made in the face of competing demands to use land and oceans for food security. Additionally, climate engineering to limit global warming is increasingly a focus of discussion – including in the movement. Related measures undermine the ‘preservationist’ view of and relationship to nature as ‘other’ which has been central to the ‘recent’ environment movement’s identity. ‘Novel’ choices associated with radical forms of manipulation of ‘nature’ - such as aggressive technological intervention, species triage, and wholly integrated landscape management – may arise in response. Increasingly, the movement will have to consider what of ‘nature’ it is aiming to save, and how, and why. In all, global warming is recreating and ‘re-socialising’ nature as a site for contestation. This paper will therefore consider the implications for an emergent ‘climate conservationism’ for environment movement identity and its associated mobilizing values, and for environmental institutions.