Variants of the half-Earth biodiversity conservation initiative, recently popularized by E.O. Wilson, have increasingly been gaining acceptance among conservationists. While the boldness of their proposal is commendable, placing half the Earth in protected areas only addresses the immediate causes of the biodiversity crisis, and even this conflicts with the land-use mandates of capital. As I argue in a recent article in Climate & Capitalism, ecological Marxism does not reject protected areas, but more fundamentally points out the need for a co-revolutionary struggle against alienation.
