Conservation’s Friends in High Places: Neoliberalism, Networks, and the Transnational Conservation Elite
November, 2011
The Nature Conservancy’s “Nature Matters” Gala, hosted in NYC on June 2, 2014 honored Disney and The Butler Conservation Fund as leaders in conservation. Photographed: Kevin Callahan (Disney), Beth Stevens (Disney), Mark Tercek (TNC), Gil Bulter (Butler Capital Corp.), Jay Rasulo (Disney), Dan Harris (Disney-ABC News)
The paper Conservation’s Friends in High Places:Neoliberalism, Networks, and the Transnational Conservation Elite authored by George Holmes “explores the different parts of the transnational conservation elite—NGOs, the state, corporations, intellectuals, and the media—focusing on the interactions among them. A series of vignettes showing the elite in action briefly illustrates the arguments, showing how the elite functions and how money, influence, and ideas are mobilized.”“Fifteen of the twenty-six board members at The Nature Conservancy are or have been directors of large transnational corporations, as have twenty-six of thirty-six board members at CI and thirteen of twenty-one at WWF-US. In all cases, directors with a corporate management background have displaced and now greatly outnumber those with biological training or other “technical” backgrounds. In addition, these NGOs each have a business council, made exclusively from corporate directors, to advise the board of directors.”
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Conservation’s Friends in High Place
[George Holmes bio: “I am a human geographer interested in biodiversity conservation, particularly protected areas. My current work engages with geographies of conservation in the anthropocene, with a particular interest in rewilding and synthetic ecosystems. I am positioned halfway between the humanities and biological literatures on this subject – I am more interested in the politics of how people try to do conservation in the anthropocene, and what the implications of this are.”]
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One Comment
Posted this article on my homepage Exposing Enviro NGO Corruption and Greenwashing. I’ll post it on my Facebook page too.
Thanks for your tremendously effective work exposing the NGO corporate controlled complex!
Now we need CD actions to make the tread meet the road.