Between 31 October and 13 November 2021, the 26th United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference, known as COP (Conference of the Parties)-26, was held in Glasgow, Scotland. Despite pressure to find ways forward through the climate crisis and reduce emissions, the Conference was dismissed by many as a corporatised, greenwashed ‘spectacle’: an event that reproduced colonial inequalities by shutting out Indigenous leaders while focusing on solutions that would enable business as usual in the richer countries of the Global North. While world leaders gathered inside the walls of the SEC Centre, Indigenous leaders denied entrance gathered across the river Clyde to commemorate activists killed for trying to protect the planet from corporate greed and government inaction (Lakhani 2021). The main summit focused on achieving ‘net-zero targets’, which Indigenous movements, peasant organisations and land coalitions call out for being false climate solutions promoting further land grabs and bio-cultural destruction. Net-zero solutions were accused, here, of reproducing the dynamics of colonialism and extractivism that produced the environmental crisis in the first place, incentivising carbon capture markets through mass reforestation, biofuels and new technologies.

If you have chosen to read this book, you are probably familiar with critiques of COP and other global environmental summits. This is not a new story, and we could have opened with a similar account of previous COP meetings. As the popularity of the recent satirical film Don't Look Up (2021) made clear, many people know that sclerotic political institutions and powerful global corporations are intensifying, rather than halting, planetary ecological breakdown. Yet the problem is more deeply rooted and relates to the longer histories of modern environmentalism. The premise of this book is that digging into these histories will help us understand how to move beyond the blockages and blindspots of modern environmentalism to make more globally just ecological futures possible. This look into the past also enables us to appreciate that the consolidation of global environmental management since the 1990s is not itself a new phenomenon. Rather it marks a continuation of inherited assumptions and tendencies throughout environmentalism's history that reproduce what and who is counted as worthy of protection, and what and who isn’t. Examining how this situation has come about can help us understand – and perhaps avoid – making social and political dispossession part of the nature of environmental protection.