Bram Büscher

The planet is currently witnessing a sixth mass extinction event. Given its importance, species extinction is receiving increasing, though fragmented, scholarly attention. Startlingly absent is research that brings together the manifold environmental and social dimensions of the extinction crisis, especially extinction’s multidimensional unevenness across time and space and how this is related to changing forms of capitalist development. This is important since species decline is often depicted as a linear process that straightforwardly mirrors capitalist development patterns. In reality, however, capitalist development and biological diversity influence, shape and transform each other in myriad, highly uneven ways that are ill understood and rarely theorized.

French actors, science and history are central to these transformations and how they have shaped contemporary meanings of both biodiversity and capitalist development. The project will investigate the historical dimensions of these transformations, particularly the foundational influence of key figures like Comte de Buffon, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and George Cuvier and institutes like the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, as well as more recent and contemporary French actors, ideas and institutions. This will feed into a more holistic understanding of the changing relations between biodiversity and capitalist development and their implications for human-nature relations in an age of extinction.