Who Owns Nature? Reciprocity and the Business of Conserving What No One Fully Owns, Professor Benjamin J. Richardson

Abstract
Nature’s ecological value is shared, butin Canada its legal title or use is often private—held by farmers, extractive industries, and others. This lecture argues that reciprocity, not exclusion, should govern land use: conservation easements and land trusts bind owners to obligations toward community, future generations, and nature itself,
resembling covenants more than restrictions. That relational model faces new pressure from scale—the global 30×30 biodiversity targets and corporate nature-disclosure frameworks like TNFD are mobilizing
private land and capital for public conservation goals. This talk examines how reciprocity can become the cornerstone of nature conservation and stewardship on privately owned or managed land in Canada.

Bio
Professor Benjamin J. Richardson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose diverse research spans environmental law, aesthetics and the arts,
corporate social responsibility, and Indigenous governance. Based at the University of Tasmania, he has recently been awarded an Eddie
Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada, to be held at the University of Manitoba from 2027.

His academic career, spanning three decades, has taken him through positions in Australia, Canada, England, and New Zealand, including as a Senior Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia and earlier a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He is the author or
editor of fifteen books, among them The Art of Environmental Law (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Time and Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Beyond academia, he has contributed to organisations including the Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law and the Tasmanian Independent Science Council, as well as being the custodian of a nature sanctuary in Tasmania that he secured with a conservation covenant.