Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
What is wilderness?
The 1964 Wilderness Act describes it as “An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
To indigenous cultures isolated from Judeo-Christian influence who have no word for wilderness, it is simply ‘what is,’ their home, not some area beyond their community.
There lies the conflict.
In Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, investigative historian and journalist Mark Dowie follows the history of ecological preservation from the early 1900s, a period that has seen the establishment of more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas worldwide, causing the expulsion of millions of indigenous people from their homelands.
But Dowie doesn’t point to conservationists as the bad guys. As he says at the beginning of this provocative sometimes haunting book, “What you are about to read is a good guy versus good guy story.”
Both the transnational conservation and the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples care deeply about the planet, he writes. Together they are capable of preserving more biological diversity than any other two institutions.
Yet they have been at odds with one another, sometimes violently, due mostly to conflicting views of nature, radically different definitions of wilderness, and profound misunderstandings of each other’s perspectives on science and culture.
He begins his story with the creation of Yosemite National Park. It’s mystique was created by photographers like Ansel Adams – but his images knowingly left out its inhabitants or any signs of them. Adams and his friends sought to preserve an idealized version of nature called ‘wilderness,’ as a place humans had explored but never touched. “It was the beginning of a myth,” writes Dowie, “a fiction that would gradually spread around the world, and for a century or more drive the conservation agenda of mankind.”
John Muir emerges as a complicated figure who lobbied to evict the Miwoks and other tribes who had lived in Yosemite’s valleys for 4,000 years. Muir was revolted by the Indians’ habits, and asked that they be removed. And they were, it fueled California’s war of extermination.
Muir’s vision of wilderness – a pristine area cleared of all human inhabitants and set aside for recreation and fulfillment of the urbane human’s need for spiritual renewal – laid the foundation for the exclusionary model of wilderness preservation.
The Yosemite Park model spread to seven other national parks and beyond, to Australia, Canada, New Zealand then Europe, who created similar parks—clearing out the natives so colonials could enjoy the aesthetics of wild nature, and in the case of Africa, selectively hunt the game for trophies.
This philosophy has guided the big conservation BINGOs – Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy. Dowie commends the BINGOs’s for their contemporary pledges to involve indigenous peoples in the establishment and management of protected areas in ways that respect their traditional knowledge and self-determination. Yet he cautions global conservation’s complicity in staying silent as national governments violate the rights of indigenous peoples in the act of creating newly protected national networks.
He describes the experiences of other indigenous cultures: the Ogiek and Maasai hunters of the Serengeti, the Pygmies of Central Africa, the Adivasi people of India’s forests, and the Karen of Thailand, all evicted or who had severe restrictions put on their land once it was declared a park or a reserve. Whole societies who had lived on those lands for hundreds or thousands of years have slid into poverty. Living in squalor or on the lowest rungs of the economy, some have turned to illegal poaching on their former homelands. Some face extinction.
Dowie doesn’t romanticize the lifestyles of indigenous peoples. Not all indigenous peoples are perfect land stewards, he writes. But he argues their that traditional ecological knowledge, their collection of botanical, zoological, hydrological, cultural, and geographical knowhow rooted in spirit, culture and language, and the fact that ancient societies have been found living in biodiverse habitats for millennia, should be an indicator that sound TEK principals work. He endorses a conservation model that would allow indigenous people to stay inside conservation areas, and involve them in conserving resources – no commercial hunting or logging, for example.
True ecological conservation requires balancing both interests, he writes. Together, they can create a new and much more effective model for conservation. He elucidates the need for native peoples and Western science to integrate traditional knowledge with modern ecology, to acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival.
“If we really want people to live in harmony with nature, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out of it,” writes Dowie.
Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples │By Mark Dowie │MIT Press $27.95.
Reviewed by TERRI HANSEN
