Decolonising Nature ConservationMordecai Ogada in conversation with Tobias Haller

We are pleased to invite you today to our third lecture, titled “Decolonising Nature Conservation” with Dr. Mordecai Ogada, a carnivore ecologist and conservation writer who has been involved in conservation policy and practice for the last 18 years in Kenya and other parts of Africa, mainly on human-wildlife conflict mitigation and carnivore conservation. For the last few years, Mordecai has been examining the policy problems and prejudices that underlie the challenges in wildlife conservation, particularly in the global South. These issues form the central theme of ‘The Big Conservation Lie’, co-authored with John Mbaria and his 2025 book, Green and Evil: The New Empires and Their Regents.

We will also be joined by Prof. Tobias Haller, from the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, as the respondent. Prof. Haller is interested in sustainable resource management in relation to the commons and processes of land grabbing as they are made manifest in resource extraction.

Teaser:
Modern conservation is a “thickly veiled scheme to grab Africa’s resources”. Conservation politics are laden with racial hierarchies, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, lies, violence and misinformation used to subjugate locals in a bid to wrestle resources and land from them in ways that upset human-wildlife co-existence.
In the present, conservation and climate change crises take a new form in the commercialisation of ‘climate finance’, carbon trade, carbon offsets, and other financial instruments are overtaking the pace of actual reduction of emissions. Once again, communal and indigenous territories are placed at the centre. The financialization of these crises furthers the myth that we can purchase a clean environment instead of making actual changes, resulting in new businesses and not emission reductions.