This blog community will serve as a forum for discussion, an announcement board, and hub of information for the Environmental Justice and Conservation Workshop to be held at Harvard on October 21 2006. This workshop is dedicated to exploring the overlaps and tensions between conservation, environmental justice, and resource rights politics in international, comparative perspective. Some of the issues we hope to address include: tensions between conservation-based resource enclosures and customary resource use; similarities and differences between mobilizing around environmental justice and around resource rights; the class character of conservation in the U.S. and elsewhere; the kinds of collective affiliations (race, ethnicity, class, gender) that crystallize through environmental justice and resource rights politics; at what scale different natural resource commons are envisioned and how this influences conservation, environmental justice, and resource rights politics; when and where environmentalism challenges the privatization of resources; and the social and institutional complex of resource management.
This day-long workshop is brought to you by the Environmental Leadership Program and its Greater Boston Regional Network, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard University’s Political Ecology Working Group, and the Switzer Foundation. Ajantha Subramanian has taken the lead in organizing the conference.