Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [14]
Conservation is widely viewed as the innocent and uncontroversial practice of purchasing special places threatened by development. In truth, for 30 years, the global conservation movement has been racked with controversy arising from its role in expelling indigenous people from their lands in order to create parks and reserves.14 The modern protection of supposed wilderness often involves resettling large numbers of people, too often without fair compensation for their lost homes, hunting grounds, and agricultural lands.
In 2009, the investigative journalist Mark Dowie, now professor of journalism at University of California, Berkeley, published Conservation Refugees, which estimated, “About half the land selected for protection by the global conservation establishment over the past century was either occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. In the Americas that number is over 80 percent.”15 Estimates vary from five million people displaced over the last century by conservation to tens of millions, with one Cornell University professor estimating that 14 million individuals have been displaced by conservation in Africa alone.16
In the early 1990s, indigenous groups spoke out against these evictions at various forums, including at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio. As a result, conservation groups pledged to respect and work with the communities living in or around protected areas. Over the next few years, conservation organizations prioritized working with local organizations including indigenous people in “stakeholder” meetings, “community-based conservation,” and “sustainable development.” Gorgeous photos of indigenous people started gracing the glossy annual reports and fundraising brochures of conservation groups. But by 2004, the conflicts had only increased. That spring, the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping resulted in a declaration signed by all 200 delegates that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.”17
In many parts of the world, parks have become anathema to conservation. Consider the 1982 effort to create a national park in Mburo, Uganda.18 In the name of preserving the wildlife, the government violently expelled thousands of men, women, and children from the surrounding region, without compensation. This expulsion proved self-defeating. In 1986, a new government encouraged these conservation refugees to resettle their former homelands, where they promptly slaughtered wildlife and vandalized the park facilities in retribution.19
In Indonesia, every major international conservation NGO has invested heavily to stem the tide of deforestation and the decline of iconic species, such as the orangutan. As a result, the country now has many protected areas. But you would never know it if you were to visit them because these areas are so heavily logged. Quantitative analyses of deforestation rates using satellite imagery reveal that forest loss is much greater inside protected Indonesian forests than in forests managed by local communities for sustainable logging.20
Conservation organizations counter these examples by saying that the displacements of people are old news. They point out that they have learned from past mistakes. Today, most conservation NGOs have policies of best practice intended to protect the rights of local communities, and conservation NGOs are increasingly hiring social scientists and anthropologists who incorporate indigenous people into their conservation strategies.
But conservation will be controversial as long as it remains so narrowly focused on the creation of parks and protected areas, and insists, often unfairly, that local people cannot be trusted to care for their land. In his 2005 book, Collapse, the geographer Jared Diamond famously claimed that Easter Island’s inhabitants devolved into cannibalism