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.

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.

This short film illuminates some of the deeper tensions at play in struggles to protect sacred places: a clash of irreconcilable ways of understanding and relating to the land, and what happens when the State’s perspective has been codified into federal law and the input of Tribal Nations as sovereigns is disregarded.

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?