book: Decolonize Conservation, edited by Ashley Dawson, Fiore Longo, and Survival International
“Decolonize Conservation” is a collection of speeches, essays, etc, from a variety of voices. It centers indigenous people and their stories and calls to action.
The focus of the collection is on critiquing mainstream conservation – fortress conservation. The colonial founders of conservation based the movement on their own philosophies, that Nature is something separate from Mankind, and that Nature must be protected from Mankind. Mainstream conservation recognises the most biodiverse areas, then “protects” them by forcing all humans off that land. By virtue of being most-biodiverse, these areas are lands belonging to indigenous groups that have tended to and protected that land for centuries. the people lose their homes, their culture, sometimes turning in desperation to harmful livelihoods; the forest loses its defenders, allowing poachers, loggers, charcoalers, whoever else can turn a profit enough to make the conservation organizations turn the other way. After all, the destruction caused by the land-grab can be blamed on the indigenous people who try and remain in their home , labelling them as “encroachers.”
A lecturer I had during my undergrad once described cities as “heterotrophic”, unable to obtain their needs and unable to manage their waste within their boundaries, instead extracting from their surroundings, “exporting” the consequences of their functions elsewhere (sewage to the sea, carbon dioxide to the atmosphere). This idea was always in my mind throughout. The Global North / Western society consumes more than it can produce itself, so it steals land and resources from elsewhere. It produces more waste than it can manage, so it exports it elsewhere. The model of continuous-growth capitalism in places like the USA and Canada and Europe causes destruction, climate change … to “compensate” or “offset”, land is grabbed from indigenous people and set aside for CO2 capture or carbon credits or what-have-you. and so on.
I would highly recommend this read to anyone, really. Conservation is an everyone problem, as the book points out. The climate affects us all. Foreign aid (your taxes) goes to conservation organizations like the WWF that spend money on guns & extrajudicially execute hundreds of indigenous people globally. The problems present, that are of your concern, are described by people from around the world, in detail, with their own messages for moving forward with.
...