Bram Buscher: If you keep on doing the same kind of things and do not take the root causes, the root structural forms of power, into account, you may have nice terms like nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, natural capital, but they do not actually challenge the power structures to change something structurally. And hence, we see what we have seen over the last 60 years, an incredible increase in protected areas. We have moved from 1% protected areas around the world to 16%, 17% now. Conservation organizations have grown tremendously. They are ginormous now, WWF, Conservation International, and at the same time, the extinction crisis has worsened across exactly the same period of time. In Dutch, we have a saying: it is mopping the floor with the taps open. If you do not go for the root causes, you keep mopping the floor, but the taps are wide open and the water keeps on coming. You need to do something about the bloody tap.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I am your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, experts, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Bram Buscher, a political ecologist at Wageningen University. Buscher joins me this week to discuss political ecology, the relationship between the environment and political, social, and economic factors. These underpin all of conservation, explains Buscher. The crux of our discussion is understanding the power dynamics that shape how we treat our natural world and how we change them. Doing this, Buscher argues, is not accomplished through speaking facts to power, but rather through challenging the power itself by speaking truth to it. What this means exactly depends upon the context, but it incorporates these political and social realities and the history behind whatever problem is being addressed, rather than focusing solely on the science. Doing this is especially important in an era of post-truth, as Buscher describes, in which tech companies have monopolized social media platforms that are not beholden to factuality, but rather amplify whatever will generate the most engagement and profit. Opting out of or dismantling these platforms entirely and replacing them with nonprofit public infrastructure is, according to him, essential. This conversation covers a lot of ground on how power structures have made it incredibly difficult to protect wildlife, which has decreased 73% over the past 50 years, despite an increase in protected areas during the same timeframe. So Buscher makes the case that even if the conservation sector focuses only on protecting wildlife, it still needs to challenge the political systems currently in the driver’s seat of the health of our natural world. And the way to do this, he says, is to speak truth to power. Bram Buscher, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It is great to have you with us.

Bram: Thank you so much. It is a real pleasure.

Mike: So Bram, can you first give us a brief definition of what political ecology is?

Bram: Political ecology is an interdisciplinary academic field that basically is interested, very simply, in questions of politics around the environment. So very broadly, its history comes from more critical understandings of our environment within broader political-economic contexts. So really looking at both structural forms of power, particularly political-economic power, capitalism, those kinds of debates in relation to the environment, but also more specific everyday forms of power, of how different actors and different institutions, organizations, governments, or NGOs, what are their interests in relation to the environment and how does that lead to forms of, and this is I think the core of what many political ecologies focus on, access to and control over forms of nature. So yeah, if you want just an example of something that is important to political ecology, land. If you want to do anything in this world, generally you need some land, but especially if you want to produce stuff. But of course conservation also takes a lot of land. Uses of land and access to land, of course, are coveted all over the world. They are at the basis of our food production. They are at the basis of industry, of living more generally. And owning land, and who gets to access land for what purpose, is a typical political ecology subject. But of course political ecologists have taken it much further, looked at climate change, biodiversity, human-nonhuman relations, protected areas, you name it, and try to understand, yeah, take the ecology seriously, but always put it in this bigger framework and context of political relations between actors and the powers behind that.

Mike: So you write that political ecologists and conservation biologists are trying to tackle the same problem, basically, but they are coming at it from different viewpoints. So how does the viewpoint of a political ecologist differ from a conservation biologist?

Bram: Yeah, this is a good question, and it is hard to answer this in straightforward terms because conservation biologists, of course, are a big group. But generally speaking, a lot of conservation biologists, in terms of their studies, focus on animals, focus on nature, on species dynamics. They do fieldwork usually in specific areas, really focus on animals. And something that I have heard very often, and often makes me smile, is very senior conservation biologists who have been in the field for 20, 30 years, exclaim after all this time that they have now found out that conservation of those same animals is actually about people. It is about sitting in boring meetings, going to intergovernmental panels, negotiating between different countries, working across cultures. And you know, that from the start, right? Most conservation biologists in that sense are no different from political ecologists. We are all humans. But they focus in their studies mostly on animals, and from that point of view, trying to understand ecological relations, ecosystem relations, animal behavior, then try to make the jump towards conservation. Whereas political ecologists start from the fact that these natures are always embedded in different interests and power dynamics between actors, like what I said before. And that is quite a fundamental difference. It is not that big perhaps in the beginning, but it becomes bigger and bigger the further you go in your academic work, but sometimes also practical work because, yeah, and this is something that interests me a lot, and I think a lot of political ecologists, it also has to do with the history of how sciences have become more niche-ified, right? In order to do proper science, many people are forced into deeper and deeper niches to contribute new knowledge.

Mike: Right.

Bram: And hence you start to focus on smaller issues, or maybe not smaller per se, but more focused issues in order to really understand something new about a species or ecosystem, et cetera. And that leaves less time for theorizing and understanding how this happens in context. And this is, I think, one of the fundamental problems that we are currently facing, also when we are talking about truth to power, that we will be talking about later, is that historically different forms of knowledge have been separated in ways that make it harder to come across. They have their own languages, their own conferences, their own social ways of being. You often hear from political ecologists and conservation biologists that they find it difficult to even speak to each other because they speak such different languages. And that language is caught up with how you are situated in the world. The annoying thing about political ecologists like myself is that we take that as a starting point, that situatedness in the world, right, in terms of power politics, but also knowledge is really important. And hence why we also often study conservation and conservation biologists. I think you always need to do that in the most respectful way, but it can sometimes lead to frictions, to tensions, conflicts, because political ecologists sometimes want to say certain things about how knowledge is generated, whereas conservation biologists do not always necessarily appreciate it. Some really do. And again, like I said, conservation biologists are a diverse lot, and many of them are indeed very open to this as well, but may not have yet the theoretical tools to then join that conversation in the same way. And that sometimes leads to frictions. But frictions are also sometimes good, right? They can also lead to new insights.

Mike: Right.

Bram: And to good debates.

Mike: Yeah. I will say, I have interviewed a number of conservation biologists and ornithologists on this show who do understand these power dynamics and the political nature of ecology, and have actually opined to me that when they are in meetings with state and federal government agencies, they are the ones who do not really connect those dots, and it leaves them frustrated. Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in. If you are enjoying this discussion, or any discussion you have heard on the Mongabay Newscast, I encourage you to support us by becoming a monthly sponsor. Mongabay is a nonprofit news source, which is why you are listening to this podcast ad-free and open access. If you want to support our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to become a monthly sponsor. Even pledging a dollar per month is a very big help to us, so if you can do, consider donating. If you have feedback for us, feel free to offer your thoughts in our listener survey, which you can find in the show notes of this episode. Thank you very much, and back to the conversation with Bram Buscher. I have heard that before, but first I want to just really quick dig into, can you explain how accepting the fact that, as you put it, ecology is always political and embedded in power relations, can you explain how accepting this inherent political nature of ecology can enrich research rather than hinder it?

Bram: So two things are particularly important. First, it simply deepens your intellectual investment in ecological questions, in your own relation to nature, et cetera, because it is simply a broader way of looking at things. If you focus mostly on, and that already links to what you said, what you said just now, I fully see that. And again, what I said before was not in any way meant to stereotype or whatever any scientist or anybody interested or concerned about the environment. Everybody, right, bumps up against power relations and politics right from the get-go. So either in practice or in whatever way people think about this, they theorize this, et cetera. I think the point that I wanted to make in particular is that especially in scientific and academic traditions, that kind of theorizing is not necessarily part of the curriculum. And I do hear this all the time from my own students here at Wageningen University. We are a life sciences university. I do teach ecology students, and when they come and do our introduction to political ecology, many of them are like, why has nobody told us this? And I think that has nothing to do with the fact that conservation biology is not good. I mean, it is fantastic and super interesting, and you can spend a whole lifetime in that. But taking into account those broader dynamics that are always inherently part of life, that you have to deal with, like you said before many people recognize, allows you to position yourself in that, I think, a little bit more strategically and consciously. If you study that, it is, like the way I see it, a little bit simplistically perhaps, but a good grasp of political theory can make you feel a little bit less like a ping-pong ball in between all the big dynamics in the world. Often there is so much going on. We feel lost in that, but a little bit of a deeper understanding of that, it may not change it necessarily, but allows you to deal with it a little bit better. It makes you less naive, is what a professor of political ecology, a professor of politics actually, said to me when I studied. He said, we do not teach you how to solve things in the world, but at least you go into the world a little bit less naive.

Mike: Yeah.

Bram: And sometimes that is also very important. And from that basis, so that would be my first answer to your question, right? Why is it important? It is because it makes you a broader intellectual. It gives you a broader understanding of the world and thus allows you to position yourself, I think, a little bit more easily, better, in the world. But the second thing is that can also then be a basis for different types of action going forward. Understanding that, yeah, makes people realize that you need to not only, what I call, speak facts to power, because scientists often speak facts to power. They say, in your last podcast, it is getting worse with plastics, or this is the effect, or we are polluting the environment, or the CO2 is getting up, these effects. But just saying that does not necessarily affect people in their daily lives when they are caught in extremely complicated circumstances whereby their room for agency is perhaps not as big as one would hope. And hence that is the point. It increases different types of political action.

Mike: This is the crux of the matter here, and we are going to get into sort of the political theory a little bit later. But let us go ahead and address that speaking truth to power aspect here, because this is something that other people I have interviewed on this show have mentioned, is that facts and figures and data do not necessarily change hearts and minds. It is more about the emotional charge behind the writing, behind the communication, that draws people in. But you are saying that scientists too often speak facts to power and not truth to power. So I am curious to hear from you what that looks like in your view, especially in the context of authoritarian governments that we are seeing today. So you are saying you want people to speak more truth to power. I want to get very specific about what you mean by that and how that looks.

Bram: Yeah. That is the crux of the matter. So fact, for me, now I am being a little bit of a social scientist going back to definitions, but fact for me is something that is correct outside of three things: outside of positionality, so how a person, an actor, is positioned in the world, outside of history, and outside of context. So these things can be scientifically, or however you want to call it, correct, factual. And I am not denying that. It is really important because we live, all of us live with facts every day. We look at the bus, it says where it is going to go, we take that as a fact. We do not question a lot of these kinds of things, right? If I jump off the roof, the fact is I fall down. These are basic facts that we live with all the time. Even the most post-truth kind of crazy person in the world still lives according to facts in their life 99%, right? Because reality that we face has consequences and we need to deal with that. How you interpret those facts and what they come to mean and how you act on those, especially for bigger things like the environment, that changes dramatically for how you are positioned, for what the history is, and what the context is in which those things take place. And for me, that gets to the matter of truth. So truth is not for me some objective thing out there. Fact is much more an objective kind of thing, right? But truth is actually trying to take into account those three things, positionality, history, and context. In order to do that, you need to theorize, right? You need to have abstract ideas about how those things actually work. How are different people situated in the world, right? It depends if you are a man or woman, or if you do not ascribe to these binaries altogether. It matters if you are a white male like myself, or a Black female, or other types of racial designations that you would ascribe to. It depends on your age, it depends on your education, it depends perhaps on class, right? So a lot of positionalities, and these are just some that I am mentioning, right? There are so many more. You can talk about all kinds of differences between people, and they matter in terms of how they come to see the environment, right? So one example that, for example, I often use in terms of my own research in South Africa, is that a lot of conservation biologists continuously say that the rhino is critically important for the ecosystem, right?

Mike: That is a fact, right?

Bram: They are bigger herbivores, they change the ecosystem in a way that serves other species, they are really important, and hence we must not let them go extinct. Factually correct. But if you are a Black person whose ancestors were dispossessed from the park where these rhinos live, you do not see it in that way. You might factually agree, but you have been dispossessed from that land, and now it is white people who manage that park, right? And mostly tourists, who are mostly white as well, who come to the park to view those rhinos. And you are living in poverty, right? So your context in poverty, your history, and your positionality are very different from those who proclaim the facts about how important rhinos are. Speaking truth to power for me is about trying to understand those kinds of things, again positionality, history, and context, theorizing those and then still coming to statements that—

Mike: Are—

Bram: Commonly meaningful, that say something about a situation, about the environmental crisis, for example, that can resonate commonly with a larger group of people. And it is like an art, right? So Greta Thunberg is a good example, right? She has not studied, she did not study for years and years on end. She started doing the whole thing about climate when she was 16. And somehow what she said resonated with a lot of people because she spoke truth to power. She said things that other people may be thinking about, but do not dare to say. Especially because they understand that within the context, they cannot say this. Oh, I am a scientist. My positionality does not allow me to be too political. Or, oh, I cannot insult these people because I still need to get a job. Or, I am a journalist, so I have to be critical and I need to get viewers, so I must be more extreme. And so that, for me, yeah, speaking truth to power is an art form that tries to speak to something that many people feel, in a way that punctures all kinds of inhibitions that many people may have about that. And that is something that you feel, and that can resonate more broadly. That is perhaps the best way I could explain it.

Mike: Yeah. Is this what you mean when you say in your book that we have to make truth productive, in the sense that there are, and I am quoting you directly, truth tensions that exist as something solid, but also as something shifting and uncertain at the same time? That is what I read that you wrote. But perhaps it might be a good idea for us to define what truth tensions are. Are they what you just described to me, and do you want to use them in this way, in this way that you say is more productive?

Bram: Yeah. So the tensions lie exactly in the point that you are trying to speak to something more broadly, to something that resonates with the common, with the unconscious, or something with reality as many people experience it. So in a way it comes close to what I said about facts or objectivity in some way, but taking into account things that are absolutely not objective: positionality, history, and context, that are always situational. And that is where the tension is, right? That is precisely where the tension is. And you need to embrace that. When you try to come to facts, you do not need to embrace that tension, right? In a lab, you can try to get away from all context and history, you can isolate things precisely in order to say something that is as factual as possible. And still then, right, things change and become very complicated, as we know with discussions around genes and genomics, and you can get as factual as you can about the core, basic aspects of life, for every scientist, down to the basic elements that make up our world. And still how these things come together is incredibly complex, changes in their interaction, et cetera. But what scientists do is try to get all contingency, context, history out of that and isolate it to try to understand it and from that basis build something outwards. Real life, the way you and I and listeners live it, is always complicated by the fact that you are a person with a body and a positionality in life, a history that you have to deal with, a context that you are situated in. And these are precisely the things that philosophy, that social sciences, that the humanities, all the non-natural sciences, deal with and try to understand.

Mike: Right.

Bram: And they can never be as hard because they always change and they are also very complicated. But I do not want to just say, as a social scientist, that is, I think if I have to critique ourselves, what we often do say is, yeah, things are more complicated, or too complicated. That is, I think, where we need to step up and speak truth to power. We need to cut through the complications and say something more broadly applicable, more broadly, commonly meaningful. And that is what I mean with making truth to power productive. So how do you do that? You need to direct speaking truth to something. And that something for me is particularly power. Why? Because, like conservation biologists and many others who are worried about the environment, I also think things need to change. And if you want to change things, you need to change power structures. For me, that is as simple as one plus one is two. So you can speak truth to anything. When, during slavery, a slave speaks out loud to the person who holds that slave against their will, they can speak truth to power with big consequences. They could be abused or whatever, but they could say, you do not own me, whatever. That is speaking truth to power, and that can be super productive in that relationship, but also have backlash. Speaking truth to power more generally is about understanding power, how power shapes our reality, so different interests, how they clash, but also how they structurally come to shape how we live our lives through institutions, through governments, through culture, and all that. If you understand that and you speak truth to that, really meaning you try to understand that, then you can also move beyond it. And that is for me why speaking truth to power is so powerful. Because unless we understand how power works, so also authoritarian power, we cannot go beyond it, or speak truth to it, to do something deliberately and consciously different.

Mike: That is a great point. And I think this is a good place for us to bring up the forms of power that you have highlighted in your book. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe they pretty much come down to two things, which you have identified as platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism. And you say that confronting the logic and the power behind these is critical for environmental politics. So I would like for you to explain why that is. So perhaps you could start by defining what platform capitalism is, what surveillance capitalism is, and why understanding the logic and power behind these is critical for environmental politics to work.

Bram: Yeah. That is really critical. And maybe to do that, I want to take one step back. How did I get to this in the first place?

Mike: We are talking about—

Bram: In the social sciences—

Mike: Speaking truth to power, yeah.

Bram: Yeah, and talking about truth more generally. I write this in the book, in fact, because when I was studying in the social sciences, the idea of truth more generally was completely, widely discredited, and to a good degree still is. If you talk about truth, it immediately sounds and feels arrogant. Who are you to speak truth? Particularly me, as a white male from Europe.

Mike: Yeah.

Bram: I do not think I hold the truth at all. So who am I to start speaking about truth and the truth about nature more generally? This really started with the post-truth moment that we all went through, I think globally, in 2016 with the election of Trump, right? It was back then, of course, and Brexit and all the rest of it. And what I saw around me at the time was that it felt that environmentalists, climate scientists, many environmental or conservation NGOs had been making quite some headway in getting the environmental crisis accepted. This was just a fact that we all needed to deal with and that we would be making bigger steps to address it. Boom, in comes Trump, right? All of that is out of the window. US pulls out of the climate treaty. We all know that history. And in return, what a lot of conservationists started to do was, like what I said, to speak fact to power, to ramp up their trying to speak truth or to speak fact to these menacing forces that did not even want to accept that we have such a thing as climate change or a biodiversity problem or a plastics issue or whatever. And I felt very uncomfortable in that moment because I fully agreed with pushing back against Trump and all that, whilst at the same time felt very uncomfortable using the word truth that a lot of people were starting to use. Extinction Rebellion also talks about the first of three demands as “we must speak the truth.” What then does that mean? And that led to a journey and to the idea of platform or surveillance capitalism. So I do not necessarily see those as two forms of power. Platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism are basically two words for the same type of power, used by different people. They are about the power of contemporary big digital global platform corporations like Amazon, Facebook or Meta, Google, et cetera. Some use the term surveillance capitalism to emphasize the fact that a lot of this is based on constant surveillance, right? That you are being tracked the whole time, that your data are used the whole time through your phone, through your internet use and all that. Others use the term platform capitalism.

Mike: And—

Bram: I feel that the latter term is more important because it comes a little bit more to the core of what these platforms try to do, what these corporations try to become. So they do the surveillance, right? So that is without a doubt. All of us sign these things almost blindly when we go onto—

Mike: Right.

Bram: Google or Apple or whatever, and we give them all our data, and they sell it to advertisers. Everybody now knows how that works. Platform capitalism, or the idea of the platform, means that it is like an online intersection that you have to go through in order to do something, to get somewhere. So platform is like an intermediary, an in-between, one thing and another thing. And this is literally what these corporations try to do. They try to be in between everything and everybody and everything else. If you want to go somewhere, Google Maps shows it to you. When you go somewhere, you do not even realize that you are always going through Google.

Mike: Right.

Bram: If you want to search something, you go through Google. If you want to do something with friends, the idea for Facebook is that anything that you do socially goes through them.

Mike: Right.

Bram: So they become this intermediary, this online intersection. If you go anywhere, do anything, you go through them. And that in-between platform function gives them an incredible exposure to everything that we do, but also an incredibly powerful position. That, I think, is at the heart of the type of power that we are getting at. But if you ask me, there are two different fundamental forms of power. I would say more broadly, I have been looking at capitalist forms of power for 500 years. And capitalism, of course, is a political-economic system—

Mike: Right.

Bram: Focused on growth, markets, commercialization, et cetera—

Mike: Right.

Bram: Whereby we all have to sell our labor in order to make a living, unless you are a subsistence farmer, but most of us do not do that anymore. It leads to global markets, et cetera, et cetera. That is the most fundamental power system in the world that we have. It is not something that stays the same. It has changed dramatically over 500 years. So platform capitalism is the latest, I would say, form of capitalism and how capitalism has changed. And markets used to be quite straightforward.

Mike: Right.

Bram: And in fact were not always capitalist more generally, right? If you read the Bible, there are markets.

Mike: Right.

Bram: Right. They become capitalist markets when there is an imperative for markets to do anything, to sell labor, et cetera, not just voluntarily, but explicitly. The way that system has been developing, very many markets were, of course, localized and direct. People knew each other in one way or another. But that has changed dramatically. And now we have faceless corporations, Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, in between us and what we want to get online through Amazon or whatever.

Mike: Right.

Bram: So they are literally in between us in our relations with each other and with the rest of the world. And that is an incredibly powerful position. What do they do with that? They want to try to keep that free for us so that we can all sign up. We sign our freedom away, and our data and all that, like I said before. But at the same time, they depend on having as many people on that as possible so that they can sell our data to advertisers. In order to do that, they need to keep us online as long as possible, so they need to make sure that we stay online, whatever the cost. And that is their basic post-truth, the basic post-truth nature of platforms, right? So if you are on Google or on Amazon and you want to buy a book that is highly critical of capitalism, you can buy it there. Not a problem, right? If you want to do something for the environment and you want to read books about the environment, you can go to Amazon, all good. If you hate the environment, you can also go to Amazon. For the algorithm and for the platform, it does not matter at all anymore whether something is right or not, as long as you stay on the platform and you go through the platform. So it is literally post-truth. If you understand that, you can start to use it and abuse it. If you understand the depth of the fact that algorithms do not give a—sorry for the term—do not give a shit about what you actually want to do, but they will serve you whatever you want, you can try to manipulate that in all kinds of ways, namely flood the zone, all the terms that we know right now. Because as long as you get likes, as long as people buy it in market terms, it seems legitimate. This may not be a good product, but many people buy it. Yeah, it should be produced because there is a market for it. And under capitalism, whatever sells in some way, with limits of course, right—

Mike: Right.

Bram: Violence, child pornography, or whatever. There are thankfully still limits. But it goes a long way. And that kind of post-truth nature of platforms, that really for algorithms and also for the corporations behind them, it does not matter what people do as long as they go through the platform. That, for me, is a fundamental form of power that renders us very much powerless.

Mike: Okay. So I understand it. Yeah. I get it. And I am sure people listening get it. But so we all understand that. How does understanding that make environmental politics work? Connect the dots for me here.

Bram: Yeah, good. I think that, of course, is the crucial point. So maybe to come back to one point about the beginning of what I was saying. When people started getting worried about Trump, they shouted from the social media rooftops that we have an environmental crisis and that we must speak truth to power and that we must, et cetera.

Mike: Right.

Bram: But they did that on an inherently post-truth platform.

Mike: Right.

Bram: And that, for me, was kind of the crux of my book, that whilst doing that on and through social media that are post-truth in nature, you actually literally directly solidify, reinforce, the powers that depend on the destruction of the environment.

Mike: So you are saying—

Bram: And we see—

Mike: Sorry to interrupt. So you are saying that continuing to use X, continuing to use Instagram, is just perpetuating the harm that it causes?

Bram: That is what I am saying, yeah.

Mike: Okay.

Bram: That is literally what I am saying.

Mike: All right. Yeah. So what is your proposed antidote to that?

Bram: Yeah. So let us get to that. The easy thing is to get rid of them altogether. That is not easy, but that would be the ultimate solution. But let us get to that in a moment. I think one of the most clear things in which we can now see that this is not good for the environment is through the data centers that are needed to store the insane amounts of data that we are collecting on a daily basis, and that are all going through these same corporations, right? The amount of data centers that are being built, the amount of water they use, the amount of electricity they use, where that electricity comes from, that is directly detrimental to people and to the environment in ways that are just absolutely phenomenal. The amount of CO2 that they emit is absolutely through the roof. And only yesterday or the day before, I think Meta or Alphabet and others said they will put $500 billion more into building more data centers.

Mike: This did not occur yesterday. This actually occurred in January of 2025 when the US President, Donald Trump, hosted tech leaders at a summit to announce plans for an initiative called Stargate, which is planning the construction of 20 data centers. The president claims that it will create 100,000 jobs and the investment is up to $500 billion. Tech companies involved include OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.

Bram: Now, this alone will put us back so far, and it is just to keep data that for most purposes in life is actually totally useless. Everything that we do is recorded. I am not a big fan of social media. I weaned myself off of it. It is very addictive, and that is also the problem. Thankfully, why some governments are now taking steps to protect kids from that. My 13-year-old daughter is not allowed to go on social media because I want to protect her. She can do a lot of things, but I want to protect her from this. Literally, I see this as an evil that she needs to be protected from. So the direct consequences for the environment through the storage of data already are huge. But of course they have also had huge impacts on democracy, on having proper debates about how we need to deal with the environment. So that is another big reason why I think we need to deal with that. So what should we then do? Like I said, if governments would want to, they could shut them down in no time. We never say these kinds of things because, oh, that is too big to think about. But it is super easy, right? Governments could literally just say, Amazon, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, we get rid of them. That is not going to happen anytime soon. I know, obviously not. But that would be a solution. I think that would make the world a lot better. You can also think a little bit differently, say, okay, there are also positives about being part of broader forms of communication. There is a lot of potential that you can see in terms of being connected to other people in the world. And of course, again, social media are not just negative. For many people they have very positive things and you can find interesting information or whatever. So why do we not look at what we want to keep in terms of good things, in terms of social media, like to have actual proper debates, to find information that we need to stimulate democratically astute citizens, you name it, right? All kinds of important goals that you can have in the world, to be better informed about the environment or what you can do about it, all those kinds of things. And then find and build social media structures that are geared toward that, so that are not geared toward the profit of Amazon, of Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, because that is all that they care about, because they are platform capitalists.

Mike: Right.

Bram: They are capitalists, right? They want to get as big profits as possible. That is their sole and most important aim. And they will do anything to get there. We must make them subject to broader social-democratic imperatives, including saving ourselves and the environment, and then build an infrastructure, a media or social media infrastructure, that actually is geared towards that.

Mike: So like creating—

Bram: Something. And that is also absolutely possible.

Mike: Creating something that is more like a public good, like actually a utility, like water is a utility or electricity is a utility, but make it social media, but for everybody. It is free, it is funded by taxpayer dollars—

Bram: Exactly. Like platform cooperatives.

Mike: Okay. In the interest of time, because we unfortunately are running out of time, I just want to get into this, because people, I am looking at this from the perspective of people listening right now who are probably thinking, okay, that is great, but how do I speak truth to power? How exactly do I do that? Especially in the advent of authoritarian governments that are arresting journalists or federal officers killing people. This is some scary stuff.

Bram: Yeah.

Mike: So—

Bram: Yeah.

Mike: How are we to speak truth to power in a situation like that? And also push for this radical structural change that you are talking about, which really is the dismantling of a lot of neoliberal development.

Bram: Yeah, yeah. The critical question. First and foremost, many people are already doing it, right? If you look at the US right now, it is scary what is going on. And at the same time, I am always amazed by the fact that Americans have a way to organize and to demand, to stand up for their rights. Many are speaking truth to power in many ways all the time, and often use social media for that. They often do that. They film ICE police officers to try to show what is going on.

Mike: Right.

Bram: But like I said before, and I think this comes to the crux, what was the first thing that power did when two people were killed on the streets of Minneapolis? To blatantly deny it, to simply say it did not happen or it was their fault. And as soon as, as long as, in a post-truth environment, enough people buy into that, makes you mad, they get away with it because they are immediately saying, yeah, it is something else. Speaking truth to power also means sometimes taking a step back and understanding, again, those complicated things that I talked about at the beginning, positionality, history, and context, to be a bit more nuanced about those things and to try to take them into account and not immediately blurt some things out. But that, of course, is what social media does and what you get into is like a, like I call this, truth wars, in my book.

Mike: Ah.

Bram: This happened. No, this happened. No, this happened. And the only one who benefits from that is social media platforms who say, yo guys, you keep on doing this, make more films and deny it more, and the more you do it on our platforms, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, we benefit from that. So even as people are speaking truth to power in some ways, the broader effectiveness of doing so is undermined by post-truth platforms, by those post-truth structures. And hence my plea in my book and generally is that power changes, and you must take that into account. Hence you must speak truth to power like many people are already doing. But in that process, increasingly take into account that we are dealing with post-truth forms of power and platforms that we need to confront in the process. If we do not do that, speaking truth to power will be quite useless. Hence why we need to understand this form of power. This is why I felt I needed to write that book. Again, you said most people increasingly start to understand this, right? And thankfully some governments are taking steps to protect kids from this form of power because their brains cannot handle it. But I think most adult brains also cannot handle it anyway. Parents are increasingly doing this to protect kids. Even people behind Facebook have come out, on a CBS documentary, and said we need to radically limit this kind of stuff. So from a personal perspective, there is a lot you can do, to get away and refind communication channels, protect yourself online, put things on your browser so that you do not get tracked by cookies, by Facebook, et cetera. Be critical about that as you do the other forms of speaking truth to power. And that would be my final recommendation. Connect the dots. To have a more structural understanding of speaking truth to power in relation to ICE, or in relation to authoritarian forms of power, also has to do with other things that are integrated into that, like social media platforms or institutions, et cetera. That takes a lot from many people, and not everybody has to do that same kind of work. Collective organizing, debating these things, and then taking them further, and then finding ways in which some people can say certain things that other people cannot, that would be, for me, the next big step. Maybe somebody in the US at this point cannot say the same things that I can from outside because I am not subjected to that same kind of power, and I can help by saying certain things that open up debates in new ways. And this, I think, is what, if we want to do something about the environment in particular, but more generally about another world, we must hone ourselves into in the next years before those forces become too overwhelming.

Mike: The last thing I want to talk about, in the time that we have left, is this. And maybe this will tie this all together for us. You advocate for a structural transformation rather than, as you put it, “policy fads,” which you have listed as things like nature-based solutions. And that transformation you call convivial conservation, which you say challenges the roots of neoliberal development. So can you define for us, or explain, paint the picture, what is convivial conservation and how will it solve the biodiversity crisis?

Bram: Yeah, so convivial conservation is our attempt, by a collective, a group of people from across the world, to do exactly what I said before, to try to connect these various dots now in relation to conservation, but taking into account broader issues with platform capitalism, with the economy, with race, with many issues in the world, and try to, in one particular domain, because you cannot do it for the whole world immediately, but in one domain, conservation, push the conservation sector and say, look, if you keep on doing the same kind of things and do not take the root causes, the root structural forms of power, into account, you may have nice terms like nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, natural capital, but they do not actually challenge the power structures to change something structurally. And hence we see what we have seen over the last 60 years, an incredible increase in protected areas. We have moved from 1% protected areas around the world to 16%, 17% now. Conservation organizations have grown tremendously. They are ginormous now, WWF, Conservation International. And at the same time the extinction crisis has worsened across exactly the same period of time. Now that, for me, is because in Dutch we have a saying, dweilen met de kraan open, it is mopping the floor with the taps open. If you do not go for the root causes, you keep mopping the floor, but the taps are wide open and the water keeps on coming. You need to do something about the bloody tap. You need to focus on the tap. Of course it is important to also save species, of course protected areas, but they are not the solution if the tap, our economy, the way that we pressure the environment, keeps on pushing more and more forms of life into oblivion and into smaller pockets where they cannot survive, or even in protected areas. Now with climate change and pollution, we have a lot of issues with animals like amphibians, birds, et cetera. And so convivial conservation is a different form of conservation that says we should not separate people and nature, like through protected areas, but bring them together, but in a different context, right, whereby we close that tap. So a post-capitalist form of conservation. And this seems to resonate with a lot of people that feel we structurally need to do something different, right? And so that story, that understanding, helps to speak truth to power also in conservation by saying, look, you guys have done tremendous work. You have saved a lot of species from extinction, a lot of ecosystems from destruction. But if we want to take the next step, we need to have a close look at ourselves and actually close, or at least focus on, that tap. More and more people are doing that. Climate scientists are also doing that, right? We have a degrowth movement that is doing that. That is the kind of stuff that we must be focusing on. And convivial conservation tries to do that for the conservation sector. And yeah, in the next couple of years, with help from different organizations now, we want to try to take that further. So if people are interested, yeah, we want to build this out and create a powerful movement that can challenge forms of power that want to keep the status quo.

Mike: And when you say “we” are, you are referring to you and your research colleagues where you work?

Bram: No. These are increasingly people from around the world. So we have just founded what we call a convivial conservation coalition. So we have four co-directors, two from the Global South, two from the Global North. I am one of them. But around that, there is a larger community, including from research, but also in conservation, also in government, also in other parts. And also a youth movement now of people who want to take that bigger, who want to start that or get on that bigger fight. It is more difficult. I am not saying it is easy. It is not romantic, it does not sound maybe as nice as nature-based solutions and technology is going to save us, blah blah blah. But it is, I think, the more realistic fight that we need to get into, and that collective is trying to do that in a positive way, to show that there is an alternative, to show that there is a difference, and that together we can take that forward.

Mike: And where would you direct people to go to learn more about convivial conservation? Do you have a website? Do you have an email they can contact? How would you like them to connect with you?

Bram: Yeah, convivialconservation.com is the website. I can send that to you. We are no longer on X for the reasons I explained. The only platform that we are still on, still doubting a little bit, is LinkedIn. So you can find us on LinkedIn. We have an email address on the website. I think it is [email protected]. And through that, yeah, you can get in touch with my colleagues and we are happy to hear from people.

Mike: All right, Bram Buscher, thank you very much for joining me today. It has been a pleasure speaking with you.

Bram: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Mike: You can find links to Bram Buscher’s book, The Truth About Nature, in the show notes. As always, if you are enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we do encourage you to spread the word about the work that we are doing and leave a review. But you can also support us by becoming a sponsor through our Patreon page at patreon.com slash Mongabay. As mentioned earlier, Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet. So when you pledge a dollar per month, you are really making a big difference in helping us offset production costs. So if you are a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline at mongabay.com or follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @mongabay, and on YouTube at Mongabay TV. Thank you as always for listening.