The Conspiracy Theorists Who Sabotaged the Convention on Biological Diversity

How the United States became the treaty's last major holdout.

They were just asking questions. Threads image courtesy Freepik.

On September 30, 1994, Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas rose to address her Senate colleagues. The Senate was about to vote on a measure to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty most nations had signed at the Earth Summit in Rio more than two years earlier.

The Convention has three broad goals: conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of that diversity, and equitable sharing of the benefits of any technologies developed from its genetic material. Like most treaties, the Convention doesn’t prescribe policies, leaving the how and when of achieving its goals to later negotiations. Even so, President George H.W. Bush — who had campaigned as “the environmental president” — had declined to sign the treaty in Rio, citing concerns that participation would hamper the growth of the U.S. biotechnology industry.

Six months after the Earth Summit, Bush was out of office, and in June 1993 President Bill Clinton signed the Convention on behalf of the United States. The following June, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16 to 3 in favor of ratifying the treaty. If two-thirds of the Senate affirmed the committee’s position, the treaty would be fully ratified and the United States would be legally bound to pursue its goals.

The drive to ratification was interrupted by Hutchinson, who accompanied her September 30 remarks with several oversized, luridly color-coded maps that illustrated what ratification “might mean” for the nation. “I do not know if they are accurate yet,” she said of the maps, “but that is my point. Neither do the proponents of this treaty.”

I do not know if they are accurate yet. Decades before Donald Trump perfected it, Hutchinson deployed the “many people are saying” strategy against the Convention on Biological Diversity.

And the maps weren’t just inaccurate; they were fictional. Created by Maine property-rights activist Michael Coffman, they were inspired by a conspiracy theory that linked the treaty’s vague call to “promote environmentally sound and sustainable development in areas adjacent to protected areas” with a paragraph about habitat fragmentation in a draft United Nations report on biodiversity and the mission statement of the Wildlands Project, a small group of scientists and environmentalists calling for “the establishment of a connected system of reserves” in North America.

Got that?

None of these disparate bits of information was a mandate of any kind. But to Coffman and his allies, who had deluged Senators with phone calls, letters, and faxes all summer, they constituted a devious international plan to confiscate private land. Coffman’s maps “simulated” the implications:

One of Coffman’s fantastical maps. Annotation by yours truly.

Hutchinson and other Senate Republicans had already expressed their opposition to ratification. The maps, however, were a fever dream worth a thousand words. (They would remain in circulation, stoking right-wing opposition to the Wildlands Project well into the 2000s.) The ratification vote, scheduled for the afternoon of September 30, was canceled by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. It has never been rescheduled.

This week, the countries participating in the Convention on Biological Diversity are meeting in Cali, Colombia for their sixteenth formal conference. The United States remains the world’s last major holdout, and in Cali, U.S. representatives are relegated to the sidelines. I don’t need to tell you that global biodiversity continues to decline.

Coffman and his allies were fringe characters, but they succeeded in part because their basic beliefs were, and are, shared by many in the U.S. political establishment. In this worldview, any limits on absolute economic freedom for corporations and property owners — from laws banning child labor and air pollution to treaties intended to prevent global ecological collapse — pose a threat to political freedom.

Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their eye-opening 2023 book The Big Myth, trace the development of this “market fundamentalism” from the early 20th century through the present day, documenting its disastrous consequences for social and environmental policies. They write:

Market fundamentalism perpetuates a mistake in categories, conflating capitalism, which is an economic system, with democracy, which is a political system. We think that the properly framed choice is not capitalism versus tyranny; it is democracy versus tyranny, and well-regulated capitalism versus poorly regulated capitalism. Whether its advocates were cynical or sincere, market fundamentalism has hobbled our response to a host of problems that face us today, threatening our wellbeing and even the prosperity that markets are designed to deliver. The rhetoric of the magic of the marketplace made meaningful alternatives disappear.

As the negotiations in Cali stumble toward their conclusion, U.S. voters are preparing to choose not only between tyranny and democracy but between market fundamentalism and a fuller view of freedom. And in such freedom is nothing less than the preservation of the world.