Neocolonialist Conservation: Bringing Back an Old World with New Tricks
If you had to choose between burning your land to the ground or letting it be taken by someone more rich and powerful than yourself, which would you choose? For the residents in the village of Carmelita in Guatemala, the choice is not very complicated. It isn’t without pain, but in the battle for retaining their land rights, burning the land would be better than the rich getting richer ‘from kicking the poor off their land’. In recent years, conservationists have taken to new tactics and approaches in order to make strides in environmental sustainability efforts. Or so they claim.
In Guatemala and many other parts of the world, people are being forced into the positions of warriors and protectors for land that is ripe for ‘green grabbing’. Simply put, green grabbing is the act of appropriating land and resources for environmental reasons. This usually takes the form of state agencies, nonprofit groups, philanthropies, and global conservation organizations using their power, influence, and financial resources to accomplish their goals. These accomplishments come at the expense of residents and native land owners who endure forced dispossession, poverty, and economic inequality.
In 1990, conservationists and a few environmental organizations in Guatemala were able to come up with the political support to create this strictly protected reserve known as the Maya Biosphere Reserve. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) was integral to the development of the Reserve. UNESCO is an agency of the United Nations that aims to promote world peace and security through the arts, science, culture, and education.
This area is the last remaining rainforest north of the Amazon. As such, many supporters of the Reserve and UNESCO members felt that implementing restrictions for the use of this land would help balance human activity with preservation of the biosphere. The designation of the area by the Guatemalan government prompted the residents and farmers affected by this decision to begin taking action.
What did this mean for the communities of people who lived within the borders of the Reserve? The end of logging, planting corn, and felling wood for building houses. One day, they have all the choice and agency over how they make their living and utilize their resources. The next, they are subject to completely new rules and regulations that govern very important aspects of their lives. No community input was sought from the people who would now have to abide by these new policies. They were just expected to fall in line. They did the opposite.
Initial protests against the creation of the Reserve did not accomplish much in terms of creating pressure to reverse course or change certain restrictions. These protests would often turn into violent clashes, yet the government largely ignored the pleas for change. It wasn’t until these residents started playing a political game that things started to change.
Years of organizing and advocacy led to the creation of concessions for community groups. The residents of the Reserve were backed by the support of international and local conservation organizations to create the Association of Petén’s Forest Communities (ACOFOP) in 1997. This association, and the political power it obtained, made the difference in being able to obtain concessionary access to the land. These concessions gave residents critical allocations of space to continue logging and logging adjacent activity. This was a smart move on the part of the residents, but that did not mean victory would be easily obtained or long-lasting.
Located within the Maya Biosphere Reserve are UNESCO-designated Natural and Cultural World Heritage sites. These are areas identified as having immense cultural significance to the world, and are thus legally protected under UNESCO governance in conjunction with the government of that country. In the Mirador Basin, located in the northern section of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, UNESCO archeologists began to lobby for the Basin to receive World Heritage designation and protection. They found success in 2002, under the presidency of Alfonso Portillo. Two of the concession sites were dramatically reduced to accommodate this designation. One of them being Carmelita.
It took about 3 years, many lawsuits, and an intense public relations campaign on behalf of the forest concessions, but eventually, the highest court in the Guatemalan government reversed the designation of the Basin and gave the residents of Carmelita and Uaxactún their land back.
There was still a lot to be said on the side of environmentalists who are pursuing land grabbing techniques to help deal with problems they are observing in the environment. YaleEnvironment 360 reported that conservationists tied to the Mirador Basin project felt a sense of betrayal and frustration with the concessions made for community members. As the third most biodiverse place in the world, preserving the existence of many species of plants and animals in the area was top of mind for them. And for many, it became personal. Some conservationists were unwilling to deal or collaborate with the residents benefitting from the community concessions. They dismissed them as being squatters and illegally using the land that they determined in their hearts should be strictly protected.
Looking at the outcomes of the creation of the Maya Reserve and the community concessions decades later, it is clear that the residents who fought for their rights to use and possess their own land proved to be more beneficial to the protection of this land than the government has.
The assumption was that these environmental groups and organizations like UNESCO would come in and institute changes and protections that would greatly improve the safety of the plants and animals in the region. Under government protection however, the largest national park in the area covering about 835,000 acres has lost about 270,000 acres of land to deforestation. This has been led by drug traffickers and illegal cattle ranchers. And what about the 900,000 approximate acres under the care of the local community members? Less than a single percent has been subject to loss by deforestation. If there’s any question about which technique has better empirical evidence for success, it would be the underestimated community concessions.
Similar effects are being observed worldwide. Some nonprofits are even recommending increasing the legal rights local people have to their communities. So why is green grabbing increasing in popularity?
A deeper dive into the economic processes of green grabbing highlights how organizations are given the opportunity and power to take neocolonial actions. It’s important to understand green grabbing as a function of neocolonialism (the use of political, economic, or cultural pressure to establish control or heavy influence over certain countries). Typically neocolonialism affects countries that were previously dependencies of Global Northern countries at some point. This allows for the continued extraction of goods and wealth of these countries.
Many ideologies and tactics outside of those used in Guatemala are worth discussing. Four processes were identified as being part of this broader economic process: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistribution.
Privatization can be done by transferring the ownership of assets from governments to corporations and private entities. While privatization can be used to secure land ownership rights for poor people, oftentimes, it leads to violence, legislative trickery, and forced market dispossession. In essence, moving ownership and legal rights to pieces of land contributes to commodification of nature. On the surface, these actions are presented as care and consideration for the earth. Preservation. Beneath the surface, the cycle of inequality and poverty is perpetuated exponentially. A familiar example of how this has played out in the past is more domestic. The Homestead Act of 1862, allowed the U.S. government to take the land and use it for purposes that served the expansion of their power and influence. While this wasn’t a conservationist move, it was motivated by the perceived value of the land. It shows just how governments easily exercise these tools and the effects of doing so.
As for the financialization aspect, assigning value to land is the key component to making nature an object and commodity that can be traded and trafficked. How could we, as humans, possibly begin to take care of and value our planet without assigning any financial value to it? In theory, this likely began as a way to demonstrate the immense value of taking action to people who were skeptical of the need for preservation. But like many well intentioned strategies, it ends up making a mockery of the incalculable value a healthy climate provides to our existence. Imposing a financial burden on the concept of preserving our planet, which in turn preserves ourselves, is backwards. Even asinine. But at heart, capitalist. And when this process and the logic is spread and imposed around the world, like in Guatemala, it becomes a tool of power and possession. A tool of colonialism. This is a part of the economic pressure that can be used to obtain power and influence over certain countries. Exercising power to then dictate what can and cannot be done on their land and influencing how citizens are able to live and survive.
In addition to essentially forcing people to be under certain power and influence by means of neocolonial conservation, the land is exploited as much as the people. When the soil is “beneficial for this”, and the tree trunks are “beneficial for that”, it becomes a power struggle over how to extract wealth and project health. People need to know that this exercising of power is leading to benefits for earth and people, but it needs to be making a return on the money poured into taking care of it. Otherwise, if they can’t make money then others should not be able to either. We see this happen in the way Guatemalan residents are still fighting to ensure they can keep the rights to make a living from the land they already owned while abiding by strict policies and procedures to conserve the forests. And yet, the way these people who are native to the land take care of it while extracting minimal amounts of wealth from it, goes to show how faulty the publicly presented logic is.
Around the time the Mirador Basin Reserve was being created, there was a large trend of nations in the global south needing to sell their land to pay off debts to wealthier nations. Because this land has become financialized, as previously discussed, it became the method in which politicians could more easily solve the problems of their vulnerable governments. Faced with the pressures and stresses of owing other countries and institutions money, governments were able to turn to a source of untapped wealth potential and assign value to it. There is value in the land, in its biodiversity, in so many things. And it can be leveraged and marketed. It was. Problem solved. And there was no consideration or thought for the people being affected by this mismanagement of one crisis and perpetuation of another. And this is what this third economic force is concerned with, the manipulation of crises.
Policy and state-led redistribution as the fourth process does a lot to further the reach of capitalist ideology in the realm of conservation. By nature, governments enact policies and laws that favor those with capital and the generation of more capital. Land is able to generate large amounts of different resources that can all separately be sold and thus acts as a land mine (regardless of whether it is a literal land mine). This is causing many experts to predict green grabbing becoming increasingly worse in the next few decades. Scientists, and capitalists alike, will be drawn into a lobby system of making sure that the maximum value possible is awarded to land that is trading hands and generating wealth. How reasonable is it to expect a scientist not to become enveloped in this madness? The capitalist, of course, wants to maximize the amount of money that can be made in a situation like this. But the conservationists and scientists? They have an emotional attachment to their work. Their efforts and goals all revolve around obtaining the best results possible for the environment. This work cannot happen in a vacuum, however. If change is going to come about, compromise is needed. In using their voice for the environment, they want to make sure that for whatever is being given up, there is an exchange of high value objects that would make the trade (sale) “worth it”. And so, in that way, the state can push one domino and allow all the other actors to fall in line with a system that seeks to do good on the surface but does harm at the root.
With this understanding of the economic psychology behind green grabbing, how can we know what it will take to protect vulnerable people in the global South from the reaches of this neocolonial conservation effort happening worldwide? Guatemala is a great representation of what success looks like in fighting these forces back and keeping them at bay. The best antidote to colonial efforts in the name of conservation would be the targets fighting back themselves. It’s unfair, however, to put the onus on people minding their business and trying to live their lives. So what else can be done? Perhaps the answer lies in knowledge. Education for individuals like us. People who have the ability to voice their concerns and sway corporations in the court of public opinion. And education for potential victims. If you don’t know your rights, you don’t have them. Giving people access to the full scope of how their laws support their existence can be a tool for empowerment and self-advocacy in a way that reduces the success of green grabs in the name of conservation.
By: Olivia Ahossou
