Jessica Dempsey
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635459 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Dempsey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Dempsey |
| SIGNATURE | DEMPSEY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1269-9667 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 719 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives
Academics have spent decades analysing the harms and failures of market and finance‐led biodiversity policy. Yet, even though ‘selling nature to save it’ looks less like the promised green capitalism and more like a decades‐long bake sale in that its efforts are small, piecemeal and rely on copious amounts of cheap capital, the approach remains dominant. Adopting the term ‘Wall Street Conservation’, this article asks why it remains hegemonic, in …
A Parasite Not a Cannibal? How the State and Capital Protect Accumulation Amid Devastation
Nancy Fraser's recent book, Cannibal Capitalism , breathes new life into the eco‐Marxist concept of the ecological contradiction, arguing capitalism destroys its own ecological conditions of possibility like a serpent eating its own tail. Fraser's thesis appears to be playing out in British Columbia forests, where industry is closing mills and cutting jobs, decrying an increasingly limited “fibre basket”. But amid the ecosystem degradation indust…
Years late and millions short: A predictive audit of economic impacts for coal mines in British Columbia, Canada
Inconsistent, downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment
To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office…
Future Eco‐Perfect: Temporal Fixes of Liberal Environmentalism
In the last half century runaway wildlife declines have been simultaneous with the liberal environmental state’s ascent. Despite proliferating legislation to arrest these declines, states have fuelled economic growth at species’ expense. Through what tactics of power does the liberal environmental state manage this contradiction between promising species protection while authorising their obliteration? Manipulations of tense, futurity, temporal p…
How does the environmental state “see” endangered marine animals
Two icebergs: Difference in feminist political economy
In economic geography and beyond, a call for attention to difference or multiplicity - of logics, subjects, geographies - within capitalist and economic relations is often interpreted as a critique in the vein of JK Gibson-Graham: a call to explore capitalism's alternatives, weaknesses - 'cracks and fissures'. But there are feminist political economists for whom the multiplicity within and outside capitalism is a source of capitalism's power; cap…
Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste, Improvement, and Accumulation
How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife‐friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus , homo economicus plus , an…
Accumulation by difference-making: An Anthropocene Story, Starring Witches
What do witches have to do with the Anthropocene? More than one might think. In this article we undertake an in-depth book review of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to demonstrate how the rise of a division between the productive and reproductive realm, engendered in part through the witch hunts, is a founding condition of the Anthropocene
Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services, commonly defined as the benefits provided by ecosystems to humans, are an increasingly dominant approach to ordering and organizing human and nonhuman (or ecosystemic) relations, setting norms for the management and governance of socioecologies. The ecosystem services revolution aims to make visible and ideally quantifiable the often underappreciated and undervalued ecological structures and processes necessary for human life …
Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations
How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The "or not" of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value's necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play i…
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers
This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering-inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West's richest countries.In an announcement of Galeano's death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as "obsessed with remembering" in a "land condemned to amnesia." 2 Amnesia.If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifest…
"Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of "Selling Nature to Save It
Mainstream environmentalism and critical scholarship are abuzz with the promise and perils (respectively) of what we call for-profit biodiversity conservation: attempts to make conserving biodiverse ecosystems profitable to large-scale investment. But to what extent has private capital been harnessed and market forces been enrolled in a thoroughly remade conservation? In this article we examine the size, scope, and character of international for-…
Nature Inc: Environmental conservation in a neoliberal age
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? NatureTM Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
Fixing biodiversity loss
In the midst of the "sixth extinction" and declarations of the so-called Anthropocene, scientists and conservationists are debating the nature of planetary limits. They are also rethinking the very goal of nature conservation in a postnatural direction that is less oriented on saving pristine nature. To shed light on this contemporary debate, this paper looks back to examine three "circuits of power and knowledge" where biodiversity loss is const…
A Manifesto for Abundant Futures
The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and wa…
Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities
When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter i…
Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism
Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosyst…
Biodiversity loss as material risk: Tracking the changing meanings and materialities of biodiversity conservation
The Politics of Nature in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest
Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia's Environmental Politics
Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainfores…
Protected areas in Canada: Decade of change
The last decade has witnessed more changes in protected area systems in Canada than any other. The area set aside has more than doubled, and almost 7 percent of Canada's ecosystems are now protected compared with 3 percent in 1989. Several high‐profile reports have indicated a decline in ecological integrity of protected area systems. Major changes in legislation and policy have followed with a new National Parks Act, National Marine Conservation…
Ecological Innovation in an Age of Bureaucratic Closure: The Case of the Global Forest
This paper has its roots in both activism and the academy. Through it, we hope to illuminate a shared challenge to political economy and environmental action-the challenge of taking seriously the nexus between nature and power. The abject failure of the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg exemplifies this pressing challenge
A Manifesto for Abundant Futures
The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and wa…
Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities
When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter i…
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations
How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The "or not" of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value's necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play i…
Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism
Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosyst…
"Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of "Selling Nature to Save It
Mainstream environmentalism and critical scholarship are abuzz with the promise and perils (respectively) of what we call for-profit biodiversity conservation: attempts to make conserving biodiverse ecosystems profitable to large-scale investment. But to what extent has private capital been harnessed and market forces been enrolled in a thoroughly remade conservation? In this article we examine the size, scope, and character of international for-…
Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia's Environmental Politics
Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainfores…
Biodiversity loss as material risk: Tracking the changing meanings and materialities of biodiversity conservation
Future Eco‐Perfect: Temporal Fixes of Liberal Environmentalism
In the last half century runaway wildlife declines have been simultaneous with the liberal environmental state’s ascent. Despite proliferating legislation to arrest these declines, states have fuelled economic growth at species’ expense. Through what tactics of power does the liberal environmental state manage this contradiction between promising species protection while authorising their obliteration? Manipulations of tense, futurity, temporal p…
Accumulation by difference-making: An Anthropocene Story, Starring Witches
What do witches have to do with the Anthropocene? More than one might think. In this article we undertake an in-depth book review of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to demonstrate how the rise of a division between the productive and reproductive realm, engendered in part through the witch hunts, is a founding condition of the Anthropocene
The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers
This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering-inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West's richest countries.In an announcement of Galeano's death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as "obsessed with remembering" in a "land condemned to amnesia." 2 Amnesia.If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifest…
Nature Inc: Environmental conservation in a neoliberal age
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? NatureTM Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
Two icebergs: Difference in feminist political economy
In economic geography and beyond, a call for attention to difference or multiplicity - of logics, subjects, geographies - within capitalist and economic relations is often interpreted as a critique in the vein of JK Gibson-Graham: a call to explore capitalism's alternatives, weaknesses - 'cracks and fissures'. But there are feminist political economists for whom the multiplicity within and outside capitalism is a source of capitalism's power; cap…
Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste, Improvement, and Accumulation
How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife‐friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus , homo economicus plus , an…
The Politics of Nature in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest
Protected areas in Canada: Decade of change
The last decade has witnessed more changes in protected area systems in Canada than any other. The area set aside has more than doubled, and almost 7 percent of Canada's ecosystems are now protected compared with 3 percent in 1989. Several high‐profile reports have indicated a decline in ecological integrity of protected area systems. Major changes in legislation and policy have followed with a new National Parks Act, National Marine Conservation…
Fixing biodiversity loss
In the midst of the "sixth extinction" and declarations of the so-called Anthropocene, scientists and conservationists are debating the nature of planetary limits. They are also rethinking the very goal of nature conservation in a postnatural direction that is less oriented on saving pristine nature. To shed light on this contemporary debate, this paper looks back to examine three "circuits of power and knowledge" where biodiversity loss is const…
A Parasite Not a Cannibal? How the State and Capital Protect Accumulation Amid Devastation
Nancy Fraser's recent book, Cannibal Capitalism , breathes new life into the eco‐Marxist concept of the ecological contradiction, arguing capitalism destroys its own ecological conditions of possibility like a serpent eating its own tail. Fraser's thesis appears to be playing out in British Columbia forests, where industry is closing mills and cutting jobs, decrying an increasingly limited “fibre basket”. But amid the ecosystem degradation indust…
Years late and millions short: A predictive audit of economic impacts for coal mines in British Columbia, Canada
Ecological Innovation in an Age of Bureaucratic Closure: The Case of the Global Forest
This paper has its roots in both activism and the academy. Through it, we hope to illuminate a shared challenge to political economy and environmental action-the challenge of taking seriously the nexus between nature and power. The abject failure of the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg exemplifies this pressing challenge
How does the environmental state “see” endangered marine animals
Ecological Innovation in an Age of Bureaucratic Closure: The Case of the Global Forest
This paper has its roots in both activism and the academy. Through it, we hope to illuminate a shared challenge to political economy and environmental action-the challenge of taking seriously the nexus between nature and power. The abject failure of the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg exemplifies this pressing challenge
Protected areas in Canada: Decade of change
The last decade has witnessed more changes in protected area systems in Canada than any other. The area set aside has more than doubled, and almost 7 percent of Canada's ecosystems are now protected compared with 3 percent in 1989. Several high‐profile reports have indicated a decline in ecological integrity of protected area systems. Major changes in legislation and policy have followed with a new National Parks Act, National Marine Conservation…
Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia's Environmental Politics
Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainfores…
The Politics of Nature in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest
Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism
Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosyst…
Biodiversity loss as material risk: Tracking the changing meanings and materialities of biodiversity conservation
Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities
When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter i…
A Manifesto for Abundant Futures
The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and wa…
Nature Inc: Environmental conservation in a neoliberal age
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? NatureTM Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
Fixing biodiversity loss
In the midst of the "sixth extinction" and declarations of the so-called Anthropocene, scientists and conservationists are debating the nature of planetary limits. They are also rethinking the very goal of nature conservation in a postnatural direction that is less oriented on saving pristine nature. To shed light on this contemporary debate, this paper looks back to examine three "circuits of power and knowledge" where biodiversity loss is const…
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers
This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering-inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West's richest countries.In an announcement of Galeano's death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as "obsessed with remembering" in a "land condemned to amnesia." 2 Amnesia.If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifest…
"Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of "Selling Nature to Save It
Mainstream environmentalism and critical scholarship are abuzz with the promise and perils (respectively) of what we call for-profit biodiversity conservation: attempts to make conserving biodiverse ecosystems profitable to large-scale investment. But to what extent has private capital been harnessed and market forces been enrolled in a thoroughly remade conservation? In this article we examine the size, scope, and character of international for-…
Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services, commonly defined as the benefits provided by ecosystems to humans, are an increasingly dominant approach to ordering and organizing human and nonhuman (or ecosystemic) relations, setting norms for the management and governance of socioecologies. The ecosystem services revolution aims to make visible and ideally quantifiable the often underappreciated and undervalued ecological structures and processes necessary for human life …
Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations
How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The "or not" of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value's necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play i…
Accumulation by difference-making: An Anthropocene Story, Starring Witches
What do witches have to do with the Anthropocene? More than one might think. In this article we undertake an in-depth book review of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to demonstrate how the rise of a division between the productive and reproductive realm, engendered in part through the witch hunts, is a founding condition of the Anthropocene
Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste, Improvement, and Accumulation
How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife‐friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus , homo economicus plus , an…
Two icebergs: Difference in feminist political economy
In economic geography and beyond, a call for attention to difference or multiplicity - of logics, subjects, geographies - within capitalist and economic relations is often interpreted as a critique in the vein of JK Gibson-Graham: a call to explore capitalism's alternatives, weaknesses - 'cracks and fissures'. But there are feminist political economists for whom the multiplicity within and outside capitalism is a source of capitalism's power; cap…
How does the environmental state “see” endangered marine animals
Future Eco‐Perfect: Temporal Fixes of Liberal Environmentalism
In the last half century runaway wildlife declines have been simultaneous with the liberal environmental state’s ascent. Despite proliferating legislation to arrest these declines, states have fuelled economic growth at species’ expense. Through what tactics of power does the liberal environmental state manage this contradiction between promising species protection while authorising their obliteration? Manipulations of tense, futurity, temporal p…
Years late and millions short: A predictive audit of economic impacts for coal mines in British Columbia, Canada
Inconsistent, downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment
To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office…
Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives
Academics have spent decades analysing the harms and failures of market and finance‐led biodiversity policy. Yet, even though ‘selling nature to save it’ looks less like the promised green capitalism and more like a decades‐long bake sale in that its efforts are small, piecemeal and rely on copious amounts of cheap capital, the approach remains dominant. Adopting the term ‘Wall Street Conservation’, this article asks why it remains hegemonic, in …
A Parasite Not a Cannibal? How the State and Capital Protect Accumulation Amid Devastation
Nancy Fraser's recent book, Cannibal Capitalism , breathes new life into the eco‐Marxist concept of the ecological contradiction, arguing capitalism destroys its own ecological conditions of possibility like a serpent eating its own tail. Fraser's thesis appears to be playing out in British Columbia forests, where industry is closing mills and cutting jobs, decrying an increasingly limited “fibre basket”. But amid the ecosystem degradation indust…
Political science (17 works) · Economics (13 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Geography (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Biology (7 works) · Environmental planning (7 works)