Events

While the science of fortress conservation has been debunked, the ideology it was founded on persists in a vast array of responses to the climate crisis that benefit the few at the expense of the many. This panel asks what it means to unfence the future in our age of climate catastrophe.

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.

This panel brings together community leaders and activists from key sites of contemporary environmental struggle across the country, who argue not for bigger and better fences between their homelands and extractive infrastructure, but for the end of extraction itself.

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.