Event

The Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies External Speaker (CLALSES) Series presents “From catch fishery to Court: criminalizing practices of biodiversity conservation and the ‘global shark’” by Maria Carolina Olarte (Associate Professor at the Law School at the Universidad de los Andes). Hosted by Professor Carolina Angel Botero in support of her course Rights of/for Nature.

Hippopotamuses, bears and more recently the tollo shark have being attending Colombian courts amid legal disputes over conservation, biodiversity loss, and animal rights. In 2023, sharks became the center of attention, as a governmental degree allowed catch fishery after being banned by 2021. It reopened an earlier discussion framed as a question of fishery community practices versus shark protection, followed by an administrative injunction judicial case where animalist advocates sued the decree on behalf of sharks' protection. The shark attending court, I will argue, is the global shark, a shark that is everywhere and nowhere. In approaching how this shark came to be, we will discuss how conservation assumptions about nature, biodiversity metrics, and disputes over expert and local knowledge converge into a complex governance of socioenvironmental inequality in the current scenario of a biodiversity crisis. The presentation then seeks to explore new avenues for research that are located at the nexus of local inequalities towards biodiversity conservation and the increase of criminalizing practices in a scenario of biodiversity loss where fishery communities are scrutinized for not being green enough.

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