Introduction / Big Picture

Text to appear inside timeline:

• Roughly 1600s-1800s: Colonization of Africa, Turtle Island, Oceania and other places by Western European nations. This is accompanied by massive changes in land use, dispossession of women, Indigenous peoples and local communities, and a decline in biodiversity. This period foreshadowed and set the stage for the relationships to land, nature, women and  non-Europeans we know today.
• March 1, 1872: Yellowstone National Park is created on occupied Shoshone, Blackfoot, Crow, Flathead, Bannock, and Nez Perce land. It is the first national park in the US and second in the world. This is a key step in establishing ‘protected areas’ as the primary tool in Western biodiversity conservation and marks the beginning of the global National Parks Movemet (Holdgate, 2010). This ingrained the notion that development and the exploitation of nature are justifiable if some areas are used to compensate for damage in others. It is also important in normalizing the idea that human activity inherently comes with environmental degradation and that the only way to protect ecosystems is to enclose them and remove humans from them.
• 1892: John Muir founds the Sierra Club, one of the largest conservation NGOs to date. John Muir is often referred to as the ‘Father of the National Park System’ and embodies the Western conservation ethos.
• 1916: The US National Park Service is created.  This paves the way for the expansion of national parks both within the US and as a global movement. As more national parks are established, ideas of compensation and sacrifice that are embedded in national parks become normalized, particularly that it is fine to sacrifice certain ecosystems for the sake of economic expansions if you protect or restore different ecosystems. The creation of national parks also comes with the forced and sometimes violent displacement of Indigenous Peoples form their lands. As many Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, languages, spiritual practices, and cosmologies are land-based, the displacement from their lands is tantamount to cultural genocide.
• 1948: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is created in France. It remains one of the most powerful conservation organizations.
• 1980: The World Conservation Strategy is created as a collaborative project by the IUCN, UN Environment Programme (UNEP), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UNESCO. This is the first time an international conservation publication of its kind created with the input of both international policymakers and conservation NGOS, marking an important overlap of influence and agendas which remains today. It’s central goal is to “help advance the achievement of sustainable development through the conservation of living resources”. This is the first time that sustainable development and conservation (the Strategy calls it ‘living resource conservation’) are so explicitly tied in a policy document with global reach. It entrenches the idea that Nature is fundamentally a set of resources as opposed to having its own intrinsic value. It also reinforces and ingrains the idea that perpetual economic development is both inevitable and desirable and that it can be made ‘green’ through western conservation practices of enclosure.
• 1989: The first carbon offsetting program is created by Applied Energy Services (an American energy company) in collaboration with the World Resources Institute.^[1] American Energy Services financed an agroforestry project in Guatemala to compensate for a new coal-fired power plant they built in Connecticut. It marks a new development in the compensatory logic seen in previous conservation initiatives–it now incorporates a market mechanism (carbon markets). This is especially significant as it sends the message that ecosystems that hold lots of carbon are more important to save than others.
• May 22 1992: The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD or CBD) is created. It is a multilateral treaty which is considered a key document on conservation and sustainable development. It is a key step in formalizing and legitimizing western conservation as the norm  and pushing the idea of ‘sustainable development’ at a global level.
• 1997: The Kyoto Protocol is signed. (However, due to the lengthy and complex ratification process of the Protocol, it only came into effect in 2005).One significant element of the Kyoto Protocol is that, in response to heavy corporate lobbying, it establishes emissions trading as the primary tool to lower emissions. Emissions trading consists of trading emission permits, which are permits to pollute. This sets the stage for carbon markets and carbon offsetting.
• 2005: EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is created. It is the first major carbon market and the biggest one to date.
• 2008: REDD (+) first suggested. Pop up box: The term stands for “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” and they are programs that fall under the umbrella of carbon pricing, alongside NbS. REDD (+) are programs implemented by UNFCCC in the Global South to supposedly reduce deforestation and support local economies. However, often REDD (+) projects have done more harm than good, especially to Indigenous communities, by grabbing their land to be used for monoculture tree plantations. Read more about REDD (+) here.
• 2009: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) wrote a position paper for COP 15 promoting NbS as “an integral part of broader adaptation and mitigation plans and strategies.”
• 2013: REDD+ is adopted in Warsaw
• 2015: 6th mass extinction declared by scientists.
• 2015: REDD+ included in Paris Agreement at COP21 push to involve NGOs in REDD+ efforts. This is significant, as in the past it had been the responsibility of governments, not NGOs. It’s pitched as necessary to limit the Earth’s temperature rising to less than 2 degrees.
• 2017: The Nature Conservancy (TNC) publishes “Natural Climate Solutions” paper, a landmark paper in creating what is today NbS. To this day, TNC is one of the major proponents of NbS among large environmental nonprofits
• NbS emerges, taking the place and/or supplementing REDD in many conservation conversations, but still using the underlying infrastructure of carbon markets and fortress conservation.
• December 2022: The Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is created at COP 15 of the UNCBD. It entrenches nature-based solutions and clears the way for creating biodiversity credits which are similar to existing carbon credits, among other things.
• 2030: What would you like to see in the future?
• 2050: If we commit to systems change, what might 2050 look like?

Text to appear under timeline:

In a nutshell, NbS is the latest version of a very old colonial model of land management. Throughout history, the fundamental principles of Protected Areas–the epitome of Western conservation–have been kept intact. There have been modifications along the way, which have enabled conservation to be profit-generating, but biodiversity has continued to plummet and initiatives aimed at returning people to the land have continued to be undermined by this model. NbS is in essence REDD+ expanded beyond trees, with new branding. This rebranding, pushed by large conservation NGOs, governments, and private industry, uses co-opted climate justice language and intentionally keeps the boundaries of what NbS actually means ambiguous enough to enable various ecology-exploiting offsetting schemes to fit together in a convenient and easy-to-sell package, while the public remains unaware of what is really going on behind the scenes.