Events

NEPA, NHPA, and other federal policies were drawn up to protect sensitive ecosystems, sacred and historic places, and ancestral lands and waters against destructive industrial development, yet time and again they fail. This event explores current challenges as well as opportunities for communities, legal activists, conservationists and historic preservationists to creatively leverage the law, change it, or replace existing policies entirely with new protections that can better protect what is sacred for the generations to come.

How are Indigenous culture bearers, archaeologists, and conservationists exposing the failures of current state and federal protocols for wildlife conservation, taking on the institutions and agencies tasked with preserving natural and cultural heritage, and pointing the way toward a more just and sustainable future for all?

This free, 2-day virtual conference brings together community leaders, activists, scientists, scholars, and artists who are working to dismantle the enduring legacies of fortress conservation in institutions of U.S. federal law, historic preservation, and conservation.

What if we understood fortress conservation not as the invention of patriotic nationalists in the American west, but as the renovation of a centuries-long process of primitive accumulation, where capitalist relations to land were violently imposed upon the world we share in common?

In the name of conservation, natural landscapes the world over have been divided up, fenced off, and barricaded against the people and animals that call them home, fragmenting habitats and devastating lifeworlds. Join us for four days of events that expose this crisis of colonial conservation, and advance a more just conservation for our world in crisis.