Convivial Conservation
The front page of the official Convivial Conservation page reads:
"Convivial (literally: ‘living with’) conservation offers a new and integrated approach to understanding and practicing environmental conservation. It is a Whole Earth vision that responds to the major ecological, social and political-economic challenges facing people and biodiversity in the 21st century. ..."
"Convivial conservation is inspired by many collectives and individuals doing conservation differently and holistically. Several research projects are ongoing to learn from their practices and to support them by providing a vision that unites different struggles in pursuit of a socially and ecologically just conservation. The idea is to build on promising examples to develop a general conservation model embodying more convivial principles both within these sites and elsewhere."[1]
Foundation
In 1973, in his influential book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich formulated an explicit vision of a convivial society, i.e., one built on ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence’. Alongside survival and the control of work as key conditions for conviviality, Illich names justice, which is commonly ‘debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares’, but in fact needs to be both distributive and participatory. Rather than equality being in the possession of industrial goods, justice to Illich emphasizes participation in decision-making and creating new images of the future that are not contingent on another person’s enforced labor, learning or consumption.[2]