Presentation short abstract

This paper uses the metaphor of a “living monolith” to examine the emotional and political decay of neoliberal conservation. It argues that moral authority, financialised environmentalism and technocratic hope now persist as hollow structures, shaping illiberal transitions and post-liberal futures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper introduces the Living Monolith as a metaphor for understanding the emotional and political afterlives of neoliberal conservation in an increasingly illiberal world. The image derives from a diseased tree cut back to its trunk yet left standing, still upright but largely hollow. I suggest that neoliberal conservation resembles such a monolith: a once-confident edifice built on financialisation, digitalisation, multicultural virtue, and green consumerism, now structurally weakened and misaligned with rising authoritarian, nationalist, and patronage-based political currents.

Drawing on Stephen Grosz’s psychoanalytic insight that unspoken trauma repeats itself in action, I interpret contemporary conservation’s contradictions as symptoms of a system unable to articulate its own crisis. The emotional terrain surrounding conservation—polarisation, moral fatigue, ecological anxiety, and disillusionment with technocratic promises—reveals the extent to which its liberal foundations have decayed. These emotions are not side-effects but political forces shaping the emergent landscape of illiberal environmentalism.

From my professional experience in global finance and my current research in sustainability leadership, I argue that the financial and moral architectures of neoliberal conservation now persist as hollow structures. They retain institutional presence yet lack the moral alignment required for legitimacy within shifting political economies of inequality.

The Living Monolith framework offers a way to recognise this post-liberal moment without nostalgia or denial. It asks how conservation might navigate decline with honesty, how emotional reflexivity might replace technocratic moralism, and how spaces of care and responsibility might survive beyond liberal reason.