Conservation Refugees

Probably the major question in Conservation in the future will be whether or not humans can live with nature as part of it. This is odd considering that humans have done this for over 100,000 years, and only in the last 300 years has this become an issue.

Conservation by Europeans works on the Romantic ideal of wilderness as land where humans take only photographs and leave only footprints. This means that they must protect these lands from harm by humans, which assumes that all humans damage their lands in the same way that Europeans and Asians do. In many cases this involves removal of Indigenous people to protect wildlife and habitats from the very people who have shaped these places.

Conservation can involve big money, especially for the people who found and run these organizations. Many people would rather donate money and pretend they are helping than actually try and understand what is going on in the natural world. Many of their methods are based on models and simplified ideas about how to protect and preserve, rather than working with Indigenous people who know how to do these things. A large part of this difference is rooted in the different ways of perceiving the natural world. Indigenous people want to continue to hunt and fish and take plants in areas that the conservation community wants to believe are pristine and untouched. This emerges from the Western concept of Wilderness as land that is untouched by humans.

As money has become a bigger part of conservation, conservation groups have allied themselves with corporations that are the worst exploiters. As a result, these conservationists have not been critical of damage caused by these exploiters because they don’t want to shut off the cash faucet. One big issue is that the Western view is basically the same, “We run things, stay out of our way”, regardless of whether the individual speaking is a corporate executive committed to exploitation, or a “conservationist” supposedly committed to preserving and protecting nature. It has been shown that local people who are determined to preserve their ways of life are the most effective conservators of habitats and ecosystems, but they can also be the biggest problem if they are forced to change their ways of life and become refugees. This is the situation with poaching in Africa. The problem was, as it often is, that Europeans, and especially Euro-Americans, felt that they had to be in charge and they often could not, or refused to grasp, differing concepts presented by Indigenous peoples.

The Dawes Act Lives: Rather than pay Indigenous people to live sustainably and work to protect the habitats, many whites tried to force indigenous people to do forestry and organic gardening. Although they won’t say it openly, the attitude of many conservationists is that they have the money and they are going to call the shots. They have cordoned off certain areas for conservation, and in their own minds they have a clear idea of what should be done. “They see themselves as scientists doing God’s work,” says one critic, pointing out the conservationists’ sense of “a divine mission to save the Earth.” This is deeply ironic coming from members of a culture who have caused the destruction to begin with. Indigenous peoples who are trying to maintain their cultures and ways of living have serious concerns about having areas important to them be “managed” by people with little or no understanding of subtle dynamics, e.g. the importance of specific individuals in population dynamics. They also feel that they are crucial components of the local ecosystems, which they consider to be composed of relatives.

The book we will read for this section of the course is Mark Dowie's 2009 book. Conservation Refugees: The hundred year conflict between global conservation and Indigenous Peoples. MIT Press, Boston. This book is available on Amazon for less than $20. It deals with a number of case studies from several continents, including the USA, Africa, and South America. Students giving presentations on this topic can choose one of these case studies as the topic of their presentation if they discuss it with Dr. Pierotti to make sure there is no overlap with the course presentations.

Other readings include Dowie's paper on this topic from Worldwatch Magazine, and from Orion,