Jessica Dempsey

The United States military is associated with extensive environmental and social harms, including the destruction of landscapes, the contamination of soil and water, and the production of significant global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet over the past three decades it has also become concerned with environmental issues, including climate change and conservation. New programs have emerged, such as the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program, which allows military bases to form partnerships with conservation organizations and other stakeholders to preserve “compatible land uses” by funding conservation and nature-based climate adaptation projects on lands bordering military bases. This thesis considers the politics of military land-use by examining the US military’s environmental and land-use management strategies. How did the US military become an institution at the forefront of nature-based solutions? And, what are the conditions which facilitate and uphold military-conservation partnerships in the United States today? Through historical research and interviews, I demonstrate how—despite an uneven history of environmental compliance and a long record of environmental destruction—the US military has institutionalized, and to some extent embraced, certain modes of environmental management in close alliance with The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Chapter 1 outlines how environmental management became understood as a problem for the US military and how the military responded to pressure from environmental interests by partnering with TNC to implement a form of environmental management that is not only compatible with military activities, but also perceived as essential to achieving broader conservation goals. Chapter 2 demonstrates the durability of these interventions by showing how this history laid the groundwork for the creation of the REPI Program, which was created in collaboration with TNC. Locating mainstream conservation within the military-industrial complex, I argue that TNC’s partnership with the military is premised on, while also reinforcing, US military hegemony. Historically and still today, conservation organizations help legitimate and naturalize militarized land-use in the United States through land-use partnerships which reinforce military lands as key sites for conservation, in turn expanding the military’s terrain of influence, widening its scope and power, and obscuring its broadly disastrous environmental footprint.

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“Limb for limb, the mangrove is perhaps the most important tree species on Earth,” declared Conservation International in a recent update. Detailing the abilities of these trees to palliate the threats of a warming and degraded planet, this piece appealed to a now-dominant logic of conservation practice: that protecting nature might not only be a problem to solve, but a solution itself. The ascent of the mangrove forest as a “nature-based solution” marks a shift towards climate and conservation policy that promises to remedy numerous social, ecological, and economic crises at once. But what kind of approach to managing socio-ecological problems does this solution reproduce? In this thesis, I aim to historicize this solution by following the political life of mangroves: how the fate of the mangrove forest became entangled with the ideology of the Washington Consensus, first as its victim, and now as its savior. Through historical research, interviews, and document analysis, I follow the mangrove through its most significant period of decline, its subsequent emergence as an object of international conservation concern, and its current articulation with finance capital as a leading market-based environmental solution. In Chapter 1, I trace how mangrove loss becomes explained as an issue of improper values, a problem that requires solving via the financial revaluation of the mangrove ecosystem, which obfuscates broader political economic drivers of mangrove degradation. In Chapter 2, I show how a lack of state capacity and structural limits on access to capital frame the problem of the financing gap for nature, a gap that subsequently justifies the need for private financial investment in mangroves. I argue that such conservation finance projects should not be understood simply as technical fixes to generate more funds, but as political economic projects with specific aims beyond mangrove conservation. Further, I show how “the mangrove”, as a dominant policy solution, promises that socioecological wellbeing can take place within the current structure of the global economy, while creating solutions that selectively narrate which conditions of socioecological inequality and vulnerability are in need of repair.

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Intensifying resource extraction poses an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity. This threat is exemplified in the case of British Columbia’s (BC) endangered woodland caribou herds (Rangifer tarandus), which are facing extirpation due to extraction-driven habitat destruction, primarily from oil & gas development and forest harvest. Notably, the decline of BC’s caribou is occurring despite the fact that they are both federally protected under the Species at Risk Act (SARA), and subject to a number of intensive conservation initiatives. In this thesis, I explore how caribou declines are occurring despite existing legal protections by examining how the province’s apparent economic reliance on resource extraction shapes available conservation solutions. To do so, I conduct a two part inquiry using a combination of Critical GIS and policy and textual analysis. First, I quantify the extent to which the province subsidizes oil & gas activities in federally designated critical caribou habitat. Then, I examine the province's dominant conservation solution to caribou endangerment, wolf culling, and unpack its relationship to BC’s extractive regime. Ultimately I find that from 2019-2021, subsidized oil & gas activities were occurring in critical caribou habitat. Additionally, drawing from existing literature on socio-ecological fixes, I demonstrate that because the provincial wolf cull does not challenge the root cause of defaunation, yet fulfills the state’s mandate for conservation action, it ultimately works to sustain the extractive status quo. Overall, this work demonstrates that the apparent economic imperative of resource extraction in British Columbia both undercuts the potential for comprehensive solutions to caribou declines, such as habitat protection, and constrains the realm of possible interventions to those that do not inhibit further extraction. In doing so this research contributes to questions of how global defaunation continues to accelerate despite an increase in legal mechanisms designed to protect vulnerable species and ecosystems.

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In this time of accelerating ecological crises, captive care has emerged as a triage site where nonprofit conservation organizations attempt to resuscitate species and ecosystems rapidly disappearing from the planet. Zoos and aquariums play a central and controversial role in this care. The Vancouver Aquarium, leveraging environmental crisis narratives to justify and garner support for its work, considers conserving aquatic life its central mission. My research focuses on the Giant Pacific octopus exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium, investigating how people at the Aquarium use this exhibit to implement conservation work by reconfiguring octopuses’ socioecological relationships. Using a mix of semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and multispecies ethnography, I examine how wild octopuses come to the Aquarium and how their socioecological relationships transform in this space. I then explore how staff hope to leverage the octopus exhibit for conservation, science, education, and entertainment. Through this work, I find that narratives about environmental crisis produce modes of caring for octopuses and their ecosystems which enclose octopuses within new forms of human control. This control only unravels where human care fails or ends. However, both the success and undoing of human care for octopuses produce violence and give life: reconfiguring octopuses’ ecological relationships in captivity restricts their movement and degrades their health even as failed care can kill, and liberating octopuses exposes them to environmental ills that captivity protects them from. This work therefore illustrates how the Aquarium’s conservation mandate operates in tension with an environmental crisis it simultaneously erodes and relies upon.

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