Interesting perspective on Conservation - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

Botnst · #1 11-18-2005, 07:52 PM

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie_FT.html

LOW FOG ENVELOPES the steep and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist noted, "part of the fauna."

In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and other extractive interests.

In response, three forest reserves were created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all of which overlapped with the Batwa's ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.

However, when the reserves were formally designated as national parks in 1991 and a bureaucracy was created and funded by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility to manage them, a rumor was in circulation that the Batwa were hunting and eating silverback gorillas, which by that time were widely recognized as a threatened species and also, increasingly, as a featured attraction for ecotourists from Europe and America. Gorillas were being disturbed and even poached, the Batwa admitted, but by Bahutu, Batutsi, Bantu, and other tribes who invaded the forest from outside villages. The Batwa, who felt a strong kinship with the great apes, adamantly denied killing them. Nonetheless, under pressure from traditional Western conservationists, who had come to believe that wilderness and human community were incompatible, the Batwa were forcibly expelled from their homeland.

These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation.

Tomas Mtwandi, who was born in the Mgahinga and evicted with his family when he was fourteen, is adapting slowly and reluctantly to modern life. He is employed as an indentured laborer for a local Bantu farmer and is raising a family in a one-room shack near the Bwindi park border. He is regarded as rich by his neighbors because his roof doesn't leak and he has a makeshift metal door on his mud-wall home. As a "registered resource user," Mtwandi is permitted to harvest honey from the Bwindi and pay an occasional visit to the graves of his ancestors in the Mgahinga, but he does so at the risk of being mistaken for a poacher and shot on sight by paid wardens from neighboring tribes. His forest knowledge is waning, and his family's nutrition is poor. In the forest they had meat, roots, fruit, and a balanced diet. Today they have a little money but no meat. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.

It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.

In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: "Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return." During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was "conservation."

Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the "activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands." These are rhetorical jabs, of course, but they have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.

"We are enemies of conservation," declared Maasai leader Martin Saning'o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn't always felt that way. In fact, Saning'o reminded his audience, "we were the original conservationists." The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: "Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems." Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.

"We don't want to be like you," Saning'o told a room of shocked white faces. "We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us."

Although he might not have realized it, Saning'o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called "soft eviction" or "voluntary resettlement," though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard, the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs.

The rationale for "internal displacements," as these evictions are officially called, usually involves a perceived threat to the biological diversity of a large geographical area, variously designated by one or more BINGOs as an "ecological hot spot," an "ecoregion," a "vulnerable ecosystem," a "biological corridor," or a "living landscape." The huge parks and reserves that are created often involve a debt-for-nature swap (some of the host country's national debt paid off or retired in exchange for the protection of a parcel of sensitive land) or similar financial incentive provided by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility and one or more of its "executing agencies" (bilateral and multilateral banks). This trade may be paired with an offer made by the funding organization to pay for the management of the park or reserve. Broad rules for human use and habitation of the protected area are set and enforced by the host nation, often following the advice and counsel of a BINGO, which might even be given management powers over the area. Indigenous peoples are often left out of the process entirely.

Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.

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peragro · #2 11-18-2005, 11:43 PM

Sounds similar to what the environmental movement did to Yellowstone in the beginning of last century when they practically destroyed it.

kerry · #3 11-19-2005, 01:28 PM

As I see it, indigenous hunter gatherers and herders are not conservationists at all. Conservationism is a post-industrial movement carried out by people with plastics, oil and cars, who have realized the limits of natural resources. Indigenous people are not ideologically conservationists but natural conservationists. Their cultures never developed the agriculture and industrial techniques necessary to exploit natural resources to the max. Hence, they end up in the awkward position of being the people living on the land that post-industrial ecologists see as the most 'natural' and most in need of preservation, the way Europe was BC or North America in early AD. Post industrial ecologists don't want the people on those lands to follow the same 'natural' path that industrial societies followed and end up raping that land.

So, it seems inevitable that the people who will end up paying the price for our realization that preserving as much biological diversity as possible is probably in the best interests of humans, will be the ones who have had the least to do with destroying the biological diversity to begin with. It's not fair, but probably inevitable.

peragro · #4 11-21-2005, 02:44 AM

We are human, we modify our environment. Who wiped out the wooly mammoth in NA? Most of us enjoy having some nature present to experience so we try to preserve what we think is natural. It is arrogant and pointless to think we can control it or effect it on a grand scale. It may sound somewhat anthropocentric, but in an out and out fight nature always wins.

boneheaddoctor · #5 11-21-2005, 08:39 AM

Damned overhunting of the Dinosaurs brought about their distinction......Damned neaderthals........

(thats a joke...I know people weren't around then)