Conservation’s long dark night of the soul
BuzzFeed’s recent three part exposé on WWF’s ongoing support for partners committing human rights abuses — and in some cases, even active support for them — reveals two things:
One: the national park model of conservation is a losing proposition.
Two: it’s time for a hard, long re-think of some of the most cherished conservation principles.
Conservation has a dark and violent history, going back all the way to 19th century colonialism. This legacy has never entirely been banished: many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are in former colonies and the primary drive and economic support for conservation efforts today comes from formerly colonial countries. Both Yosemite and Yellowstone national park were built on the expulsion of Native Americans from their land — and their slaughter. More recently, in October 2018, thousands from the Maasai tribe were violently displaced from their homes, after they were allegedly burned down by Tanzania Conservation Limited and the Ortello Business Corporation, in the name of ecotourism for conservation.
Nearly 12% of the earth’s land constitutes protected areas, with national parks and protected areas expanding exponentially from around 1000 in 1962 to 110,000 today. Together, these parks cover an area of land that is larger than the entire continent of Africa and nearly equals the world’s currently cultivated land. In spite of this, nearly 60% of our wildlife has gone extinct since the 1970s and a third of the world’s insects are facing extinction. By any standard, this would be counted a failure.
The human rights costs of creating these reserves is huge: according to rural sociologist Charles Geisler, displacement estimates for Africa alone range between 1 and 14 million people. India publicly admits to 1.6 million conservation refugees and with the recent Supreme Court order regarding the Forest Rights Act, will add another 1 million displacements to its list, bringing up the number to a cool 2 million. BuzzFeed’s report uncovers the violence involved in displacement and in national park management. The full breadth of this violence marks a glaring gap in our public knowledge: there are no numbers, no statistics and no records of this violence outside of scattered investigative reports and news exposés.
Indigenous people on the frontlines
On the other hand, indigenous people inhabit nearly 80% of the world’s biodiverse regions. A growing body of evidence suggests they’ve played an essential role in managing forests and watersheds: removing intrusive species, cultivating others and preserving rare plants. Many of the spaces we think of as the “wild” today have been shaped by human presences. Even when indigenous people “disappear”, the traces of their lives remain with us. Researchers in the Amazon were stunned to find that many of the tree species in the region are widely cultivated trees such as rubber plants, clustered around ruins of former civilizations. A meta-study of 117 studies comparing indigenous forest management systems versus protected area systems found indigenous forest management systems were at least as effective at preventing deforestation as protected areas.
Indigenous people and local communities across the world have been on the frontlines against intrusive and ecologically destructive development, whether the Lepcha tribe in Sikkim, the Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon, the Guna of Panama, the Lenca of Honduras or Native American nations at Standing Rock. Conservationists have alternately valorized and villainized these groups; celebrating them when they support conservation aims, decrying them when they find themselves forced to negotiate with timber-loggers or miners or worse, for simply growing food and grazing their small-holding livestock on forest land.
Rethinking conservation principles
The WWF expose poses a vital question for conservationists around the world: how far are we willing to go to protect wildlife? But perhaps a better question to ask is: why are we protecting wildlife?
The answer to this question must form the bedrock for future conservation actions. If the answer is the future of our planet, it implies a future for humanity, forcing us to question just who we plan on including in our global future.
The failures of our current conservation system points to the need for a larger and more integrated system of conservation. For years, conservationists have clung to a belief in a pristine and protected wilderness and the need to protect it. However, in this schematic, the other half of protected land is land open to industrial exploitation and degradation, increasingly fragmented habitats and the increasingly volatile aftershocks of climate change.
Indigenous and local community forest management systems have one significant advantage over protected areas: longevity. Where national parks have really only come into their own in the past sixty years, indigenous and local communities have been managing forests around the world across centuries, if not millennia. Theirs is a tried and trusted method — and it is suggestive that their lands intersect so significantly with some of the most biodiverse regions in the world.
Most importantly, indigenous and local communities have long integrated economy and ecology, flipping the idea that conservation can only take place by locking nature away on its head. As long as conservation remains enamored by the idea of the wilderness, a sustainable reintegration of economy and ecology to defragment habitats will never happen. But if economy and ecology are reintegrated, indigenous communities will be conservationists’ strongest partners, not least because their knowledge of local ecologies is in-depth and is longitudinal, giving them the ability to observe changing trends in ecologies — trends which scientists are increasingly finding helpful in pinpointing the exact effects of climate change on ecologies.
Which brings us to the last question for reconsidering conservation principles: are we doing what is most effective and sustainable — or are we chasing dogma? An honest answer is the key to unlocking meaningful conservation efforts in the future.
