We are currently witnessing the unfolding of multiple, interlinked global environmental crises, including biodiversity loss, ecosystem deterioration and climate change. These accelerating global changes pose complex practical, normative and conceptional challenges for nature conservation and restoration. References to the past have played a central role in defining conservation and restoration objectives. Managing ecosystems within the parameters of pre-industrial reference states, however, becomes increasingly unfeasible. At the same time, future ecosystem developments become more unpredictable. In addition, critical voices from the social sciences, environmental humanities and grassroots movement have argued that traditional conservation goals and strategies, which focus on the protection of ‘untouched’ nature or ‘wilderness,’ are based on a problematic Western philosophical and cultural notion of nature/culture dualism. For them, nature conservation’s historical connection to Eurocentrism and colonialism lead conservation communities to disregard issues of social and epistemic justice, by shifting the burden for nature conservation to the Global South, while privileging (Western) scientific ecological knowledge and cultural ideas. In this situation, researchers, policy-makers, practitioners and civil society actors find it increasingly difficult to agree on guiding ideas, objectives and strategies. In this seminar, we will discuss together how nature conservation and restoration can move forward in the ‘Anthropocene’, and how environmental ethics and environmental political thought may be able to contribute to this debate.

Bio: Rosine Kelz is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CETE-P. Her research project is called “Novel Natures? Nature Conservation and emerging high-impact biotechnology”. Rosine works in political theory and continental philosophy, where she explores intersections between ethics, the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, STS, and feminist and environmental political thought. She is the author of The non-sovereign self, responsibility, and otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on moral philosophy and political agency (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).