Caribou Extinction, Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Environmental Knowledge Production in a Political Economy of Extraction

British Columbia’s woodland caribou are in danger of extinction. Despite decades of governmental funding for intensive conservation measures, herds have continued to decline and ultimately disappear. How is it that a proliferation of state-driven intensive conservation measures have failed to halt the continued to decline and ultimate disapearance of herds? How is it that BC's top conservation priority failed to halt the downward spiral of caribou (Dempsey 2019)? And how might this failure be related to the expansion of the province's oil and gas industry? In this talk, Adriana will build upon her previous work to argue that the reason state-driven solutions to the caribou crisis have largely been unable to address the underlying drivers of endangered species decline is due to their existence and creation within a larger political-economic context of extraction. Looking in particular at one of these solutions, a provincial wolf cull, she will discuss how it's possible to understand certain conservation measures as factors that don't combat, but rather sustain processes of extinction (Le Billion 2021). Finally, she will explore the wolf cull iteslf as a specific form of ecological management that emerges from the state's economic commitment to extraction on the one hand, and discursive commitment to biodiversity on the other.

Adriana DiSilvestro is a second year Master's student in the Department of Geography at UBC where she is advised by Professor Jessica Dempsey. She's conducted a range of work in the field of human-environment geography, much of it focused on the political ecology of global biodiversity conservation initiatives. Currently, her MA research explores the relationship between British Columbia's oil and gas industry and endangered caribou herds, with an emphasis on understanding the various tensions present in state-driven ecological management. Her favourite Green College dessert is chocolate cake.