The "pinkos" were right

"Conservation Refugees" is a book by journalist Mark Dowie on a subject little known to the general public in the Western nations: the conflicts between conservationists and native peoples in the "Third World". Even I found the book both shocking and revealing, and yet I knew about the problem already as a kid (yes, really).

I was a member of a Swedish environmentalist group for youth and children which refused to support the activities of the WWF because of their ties to big business and their support for some national park in apartheid South Africa where the government had displaced the local population to make room for the animals. Weirdly, this particular environmentalist youth group was connected to a very "respectable" Swedish conservationist organization! Naturally, the unruly youngsters were roundly denounced as pinkos in a Conservative daily paper. Maybe we were pinkos, who knows?

Still, not even yours truly knew that ethnic cleansing was virtually standard practice in conservation efforts, almost from day one. And while Dowie, who is some kind of Green himself, casts his book as a "good guy vs. good guy story", many readers will probably feel that the conservationist groups are the bad guys. Indeed, it's difficult not to use pinko terms such as "imperialist", "colonialist" and even "fascist" when describing the antics of the WWF, CI and assorted others!

The standard scenario all over the world is eerily similar: conservationist groups, which are often funded by big business, convince some Third World government to create a national park to save "charismatic megafauna" (the old argument) or "biodiversity" (the new argument). The national parks are supposedly pristine wilderness...except that, of course, they are not. The local population, who have lived in the area for hundreds or even thousands of years, are evicted in what amounts to ethnic cleansing operations. Their settlements might be destroyed, they might be tricked into leaving, or "allowed to stay"...on impossible conditions, thereby making them leave "voluntarily". Later, the national parks are opened up to Western eco-tourists, who pay large amounts of money to see exotic wildlife, in effect turning the parks into "Whites only" areas. Most of the money from eco-tourism never reaches the local communities. Since the conservationist groups are funded by multinationals, these often get concessions immediately bordering the national parks. Meanwhile, the former natives are forced to live in resettlement camps, where unemployment, alcoholism and prostitution are rampant. This basic scenario has repeated itself in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Botswana, Thailand, India... The total number of conservation refugees might be numbered in millions!

The very idea of "pristine wilderness", with its Edenic implications, seems to be a modern, Western, colonialist construct. There's virtually *no* pristine wilderness anywhere in the world: even Yosemite and Yellowstone used to be inhabited by American Indians, there were thriving city-states in the Amazon basin before European conquest, the "pristine" savannahs in East Africa have been roamed by pastoralists for thousands of years, etc. Dowie points out that while some indigenous peoples have indeed destroyed their environment, many others have lived on the land in a sustainable fashion for generations - otherwise they wouldn't have survived to the present day! Yet, according to the ideal known as "fortress conservation", all human impact on nature is almost by definition negative, making it imperative to remove the local populations. The real reason behind this kind of conservation is more sinister: national park artificially creates a fake Eden for the enjoyment of rich, prosperous eco-tourists looking for aesthetic or quasi-religious kicks (or even to hunt big game, in sustainable fashion, of course). National parks are big bucks, pun intended. A few national parks are close to artificial: a privately-managed park in Ethiopia actually imported rhinos from South Africa, while displacing the local people.

Dowie mentions a couple of deep ecologist/Neo-Malthusian writers, and easily exposes their misanthropy. The seemingly "radical" and "anti-establishment" notions of the deep ecologists actually fit, hand in glove, with the visions of powerful national and transnational elites. When stripped of its bizarrely utopian rhetoric, deep ecology is simply a fig leaf (pun intended again!) for the most recent colonialist agenda, thereby exposing its pretensions to be a socially neutral, supra-human philosophy. As a side point, Dowie points out the incredible hypocrisy among these people, who admit that predators are a necessary part of the web of life - herbivores need to be culled, after all - but deny that *humans* can and have played this role. Apparently, it just has to be a tiger! (A man-eating tiger?)

Dowie further questions the idea that biodiversity is necessarily incompatible with a human presence. In fact, human activities, such as cattle grazing and even swidden agriculture, might enhance biodiversity. A particularly ironic example is the Keoladeo National Park in India, where the prohibition of cattle grazing made thick grass grow out of control, choking the local wetlands and depriving waterfowl of their nesting grounds. Only the illegal (!) re-introduction of cattle improved the situation... Studies in Africa show that the grazing cattle of the Maasai prevent thorny scrubs and woodland plants from overgrowing, making it easier to graze for wild mammals such as antelope and zebra. What this suggests, of course, is that the "pristine" wilderness of the East African savannahs is really a man-made, cultural landscape.

The author also points out that in the long run, it might actually be counter-productive for conservationists to start conflicts with the indigenous peoples. Many displaced persons drift back to their original homelands inside the national parks as poachers, to steal wood, etc. After having lived in a sustainable fashion for millennia, the indigenous peoples are suddenly turned into threats against nature...by the national parks themselves. More originally, the Maasai have sometimes responded to threats of eviction by killing "charismatic megafauna" en masse, dumping the carcasses near tourist trails to make their point. There are also cases where displaced people eek out a meagre living at the outskirts of national parks, only to have their plots destroyed by marauding elephants and antelope who sneak out of the parks on a semi-regular basis. However, the displaced indigenes are not allowed to defend themselves against the animals, even outside the national park perimeters! What this might do to the future relationship between animal and human is easy to surmise.

"Conservation Refugees" isn't the most graceful read around. The book could have needed a better editor, and has a tendency to jump back and forth from subject to subject. Still, it's a good and disturbing introduction to what's really going on in the world of conservation.

It seems we pinkos were right, after all!