An ecological-Marxist response to the Half-Earth Project

A paper I wrote together with Brett Clark critiquing a widely circulated "ecocentric" argument claiming that concerns for the fate of nature should override any concerns with social justice in conservation was just published Ahead-of-print in Conservation and Society. Building on the theory of metabolic rift, the paper offers an explicitly Marxist perspective on the proposal to set aside at least half the Earth's surface for biodiversity conservation. Here are the details:
DOI: 10.4103/cs.cs_19_99

Half-Earth: A biodiversity ‘solution’ that solves nothing

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.