Units and Unity in Chinese Eco-Civilisation: Infrastructure Led Conservation of the BRI

• In Event: The Belt Road Initiative: Infrastructural Futures and a Chinese Anthropocene?

Abstract

Cutting through thousands of kilometres of biodiversity hotspots and conservation areas, it comes as no surprise that the Belt Road Initiative will be disastrous for terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Echoing ecomodernist impulses, conservationists are advocating, conversely, that the project can become a “biodiversity opportunity” by catalysing a network of protected areas and wildlife corridors and by committing to the ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity. The ‘no net loss’ (NNL) of biodiversity is predicated on trades and offsets and is increasingly popular as a means, at least rhetorically, of mitigating the ecological damages associated with infrastructural land use changes. NNL facilitates the exchange of calculated and ostensibly equivalent ‘biodiversity units’ within restoration ecologies. This talk explores the ambiguities and uncertainties emerging between different Western versions of the Anthropocene and Chinese modalities of Eco-Civilisation. It comparatively frames ideas and ideals of value as units, and values of ‘unity’ and ‘unification’ in ecological thought and practice between the West and East Asia. The paper excavates the rise and fall of holism in ecological sciences against novel claims of unification proposed in market versions of the ‘good Anthropocene’ inflecting NNL and the ‘biodiversity/economic units’ this engenders. From here, it visits cosmologically distinct notions of "unity" in Neo-Confucian ecological thought, cynically espoused by the CCP, as Eco-Civilisation for the Chinese 21st Century. The aim is to explore how these ideals are combined or antagonised in creative ways in relation to conservation and mitigation strategies of an iconic infrastructure project like the BRI.

Author

• Louise Emily Carver, University of Lancaster