Whose Environment is the Environmental Defense Fund Defending?: Simulated Habitat and Sage-grouse Credits

Keywords: Commodities, Crisis, Biodiversity Loss, Environmentality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43

Abstract

This paper argues that the Wyoming Conservation Exchange is an instrument of neoliberal environmentality connected to and writing the desires of fossil fuels within the landscape of Wyoming under the guise of Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) conservation. Environmental Defense Fund’s instrument is tasked with the manufacture and circulation of fictitious commodities born of and referring to ecological crises through connecting private landowners with extractive industry thus producing a workforce laboring under the tyranny of false images and indicating the construction of an incomplete ecological crisis commodity market. EDF’s instrument is parasitic upon the Wyoming Core Area Protection strategy and its development model was first tested at Fort Hood, Killeen, TX to support the US military’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan during the build up and heyday of the Second Gulf War. The investigation provides a short genealogy of instrumental development seating it within an understanding of environmentality related to the production of landscape both on the ground and within scientific optics guiding ecological modernization in WY. This analysis shows the Environmental Defense Fund as defending environments produced by extractivism through policy frameworks, instrumental and technological development, and the production of simulated habitat guiding political decision-making related to space and the production of species through sage-grouse credits.