Conservation International assert that they have redefined conservation. Formed in 1987, Conservation International boasts of “single-handedly redefin[ing] conservation,” and “pioneering” the conservation transition by “keeping places intact as relics of the past” and aiming towards encompassing a vision “in which people [live] in harmony with nature.” A closer examination of Conservation International’s agenda reveals that they have succeeded in promoting a working model of conservation that will most likely destroy more environment than it protects. (2) A brief perusal of their project affiliates reveals a campaign of greenwashing, (3) and so it is fitting that within six months of opening their doors for business, Conservation International made history by becoming the “first environmental group in the world to do a debt-for-nature swap.” (4)

Aiming to conserve nature in this manner benefits corporate partners, like Alcoa, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, Cargill, CEMEX, ChevronTexaco, and not the environment.  This article will provide a critical overview of Conservation International’s organizational history. It will illustrate that rather than tempering environmental destruction, Conservation International’s work serves the opposite purpose. This article will provide a historically informed analysis of Conservation International’s global greenwashing agenda and extend former Conservation International media advisor, Christine MacDonald’s, critique of her former employers and the environmental movement more generally. (5)

…An exploration of the background of Conservational International’s BBOP cofounder, Forest Trends, highlights the problematic nature of the BBOP project. Set up in 1999, Forest Trends was created to “promot[e] market-based approaches to forest conservation,” and their current president and CEO, Michael Jenkins, has a background befitting such an organization. In the early 1980s Jenkins acted as a technical advisor for the US government funded “development” group Appropriate Technology International (now known as EnterpriseWorks); he then worked in Haiti for US Agency for International Development as an agroforester (1983-86), followed this by serving for ten years as the associate director for the MacArthur Foundation’s Global Security and Sustainability Program (1988-98), and in 1998, Jenkins held a joint appointment as a senior forestry advisor to the World Bank (an organization that has long served to “incentivise forest destruction.”) (16) In the same year Forest Trends was founded (1999), another project was launched under the auspices of Forest Trends known as the Katoomba Group.

This group describes itself as an “international working group dedicated to advancing markets and payments for ecosystem services.” Jenkins presently serves as the president of the Katoomba Group, and in 2005, this Group created an offshoot project called the Ecosystem Marketplace, which the Katoomba Group describes as the “world’s first global market information service for ecosystem services.” Headed by Jenkins, this project’s advisory committee is closely related to those representing the BBOP project, as Forest Trends Director, Kerry ten Kate, serves on the BBOP’s Secretariat, while other notable advisory committee members include Conservation International’s Ben Vitale, former international banker with Chase Manhattan Bank John Forgach, the Nature Conservancy board member Gretchen Daily, and Forest Trends board member David Brand. (17) As Forest Trends promotes market-based mechanisms for conserving the environment it is to be expected that its board of directors incorporates business representatives, like James Brumm of Mitsubishi International. However, it is interesting to scrutinize the background of their environmental representatives, which include Randy Hayes (the founder and president of the “Earth First!-inspired” Rainforest Action Network), (18) and David Cassells (the Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Region Forest Program).

Michael Barker has recently handed in his PhD thesis at Griffith University in Australia. His other articles can be accessed at michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com.

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