Into the wild

• Last Updated: May 21. 2009 2:23PM UAE / May 21. 2009 10:23AM GMT

Half Dome, Merced River Winter by Ansel Adams, who went out of his way to avoid shooting the Native American s that had lived in Yosemite for centuries. Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust / Corbis

Seeking to preserve the Earth, conservationists have expelled millions of indigenous people from their homes. Bradford Plumer examines the fiction that divides civilisation and wilderness.

Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
Mark Dowie
MIT Press
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Nature. What does that word mean, anyway? Crack open any book of Ansel Adams photos and you’ll see his famous black-and-white shots of California’s Yosemite National Park, which he first started taking in the 1910s. Pale granite cliffs peering up over the fog; a moonlit river bending through a juniper grove – surely this, in all its haunting majesty, is nature. It’s not hard to see why the images helped drum up public support for conservation efforts. We had to save this pristine landscape before we despoiled it – and lost it forever.

Yet the photos were actually a mirage of sorts. Adams had depicted Yosemite as a spiritual haven, a refuge from the dirty, noisy bustle of modern life. To do so, he had gone out of his way to avoid shooting the Native American tribes that had lived in the area for centuries, like the Miwok and the Ahwahneechees. Early American conservationists like John Muir didn’t see the Native Americans as integral to Yosemite either. Muir did concede that they “walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels”. But such “debased fellow beings,” he wrote, ultimately had no place in a “mountain mansion”. The only chance of preserving the park was to restrict all human activity – not just loggers and ranchers, but even those who had been getting along fine with the granite cliffs and junipers for centuries. Muir’s view prevailed. By 1969, the last Native American settlement in Yosemite had been destroyed, and the park finally existed as Adams had pictured it: pristine and unpeopled.

The idea that nature and human activity are fundamentally at odds with each other – and that saving the former means expelling the latter – has had a deep influence on western conservationists for most of the past century. As miners, loggers and oilmen encroach on every last fragile ecosystem on the planet, and as the list of endangered species keeps swelling like a broken foot, green groups have tried to follow Muir’s Yosemite example, protecting the most threatened and biodiverse areas by turning them into parks or wildlife refuges, off-limits to all but visitors. In 1962, there were 1,000 “protected areas” worldwide; that’s ballooned to 110,000 today, covering 12 per cent of Earth’s land, with more added each week.

As far as preventing the total wipeout of key rainforest habitats and savannah species, this approach has had modest success. But, much as it did at Yosemite, that success has come at a considerable human cost. In his new book, Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie writes that of those 110,000 protected areas, nearly half had previously been occupied by indigenous people, many of whom had lived in their regions for millennia without problems. All told, evictions of native people to set up parks and wildlife corridors have created an estimated 10 million refugees worldwide. Many were promised compensation that never came. Others were told they could stay in their homelands, but were so limited in what they could hunt, fish and farm that they had to leave or starve. It’s a genuine scandal, one that’s slowly forcing green groups to reconsider their very conceptions of nature.

Take the Serengeti in Kenya. What most of us think of as unpopulated safari country was once the longest-inhabited region in the world, and there’s no evidence that the native Maasai ever posed a threat to local wildlife. The same can’t be said for the Europeans who showed up in the 19th century and started mowing down big game left and right. Here’s how Winston Churchill described a trip to Kenya: “On the first day I killed one zebra, one wildebeest, two hartebeest, one gazelle, and one bustard.” In the 1920s, after the carnage had pushed many species to the brink of oblivion, British colonial governments in Kenya and Tanzania began the long process of converting the region into a wildlife refuge. The Maasai were gradually nudged out, their thirsty cattle herds seen as a threat to the dwindling numbers of elephants and rhinos. (Even today, Maasai often have to sneak into the park after dusk for water.)

One might argue that this is the price for saving what’s left of the world’s biodiversity – that it’s all well and good to blame young Winston for his itchy trigger finger, but unless we establish these reserves we’ll forfeit invaluable chunks of the Earth’s biosphere forever. Dowie’s first response is to ask (quite reasonably) why human diversity is any less valuable than biodiversity. If saving certain types of wildlife entails wiping out entire cultures, it’s by no means obvious that the fauna should win out.

The other objection, the real heart of Dowie’s book, is a practical one. When indigenous people are levered off their land and tossed into dire poverty, they often start resisting local conservation efforts. In Gabon, after Korup National Park was created in 1986, the local hunter-gatherers were forced onto arid farmland. Not only did the embittered (and suddenly very poor) evictees start raiding the park, killing wildlife for the bush-meat trade, but their new cultivation plots caused serious erosion. This isn’t an isolated case: studies tend to show a tight correlation between unstable populations and species loss.

The inverse is also true: the best way to protect an area from plunder is often to empower the people who live there and care most about its preservation. The Kaa-Iya Gran Chaco region is an 8.5-million-acre dry tropical forest reserve in Bolivia teeming with rare wildlife – 69 species of mammal alone. In 1991, the native Guarani Izocenos Indians persuaded the Bolivian government and the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society to let them manage the reserve themselves. Izocenos worked as park rangers and biologists, and invited western ecologists to help them protect endangered species. Similarly, in Melanesia, coastal villages were granted legal rights to nearby waters, then worked with scientists to regulate fishing and set up local no-catch zones. Both set-ups proved less volatile than arrangements in which locals are sent packing or forced to heed draconian rules imposed from on high.

It shouldn’t come as a shock that indigenous groups are well-suited to conservation – most of them have lived sustainably in their own backyards for thousands of years. Indeed, they often put western ecologists to shame. When Canadian wildlife officials sought to protect the Peary caribou, they initially restricted hunting to mature male bucks only. Local Inuit hunters warned that this would be ruinous, as the social structure of herds depends on alpha males. Later studies showed the Inuit were right, and the policy had to be revamped.

If the cooperative approach is so obviously superior, why isn’t it used more? Politics, partly: governments don’t enjoy forking over land rights to minority groups, and even when they do, it’s easy to renege on the powerless. But Dowie saves most of his wrath for the big eco-NGOs, derisively dubbed “BINGOs” in some circles, who have a long history of ignoring indigenous people in their conservation projects. Dowie sees the grimy hand of big money at work here. Globally, some $1.5 billion gets spent on conservation efforts each year, and 70 per cent of that is handled by just five groups: The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, the African Wildlife Foundation and the Wildlife Conservation Society. These organisations get much of their funding from oil, timber and mining interests, and tend to partner with their donors. The BINGOs argue that these alliances are critical; it’s not realistic to hope companies will stop chopping down forests or drilling for oil, but at least they can be nudged in a more sustainable direction. Fair enough – but it’s reasonable to wonder if a too-heavy emphasis on linking arms with extractors leads to myopia on the possibility of working effectively with indigenous people.

Still, Dowie spends too much time chasing the BINGO money trail without always making clear how particular sources of funding affect specific decisions. Too often he seems content to stop at guilt by association. But the BINGOs’ mistakes in dealing with indigenous people appear to have had less to do with greed and more to do with the philosophy of nature implicit in much of western environmentalism.

The idea of “wilderness” as a lush, almost mystical place that stands apart from human activity only gained prominence in the Romanticism of the nineteenth century. (In his 1805 epic poem The Prelude, Wordsworth rhapsodised about finding in wilderness “The types and symbols of Eternity,” a stark contrast from just a century prior, when, in Paradise Lost, Milton had used “wilderness” to describe the “wild and grotesque” region humans into which humans were banished when cast from Eden.) And many environmentalists still define nature as the Duke University biologist John Terborough has done, as a “web of interactions involving plants and animals” that humans can only disrupt. A corollary is that all people, left unchecked as they lurch into modernity, will eventually start ravaging the ecosystem with chainsaws and shotguns. This is the bleak view, as the famous riff in The Matrix goes, that human beings are essentially viruses.

The notion that “nature” can only be tarnished by human activity has been prevalent among biologists – who, until recently, tended to fill the ranks of BINGOs. But in recent years, it has increasingly been challenged by anthropologists and indigenous people themselves. (As one Yupik scientist in Alaska told Dowie, “We have no word for ‘wilderness’. What you call ‘wilderness’ we call our backyard.”) Some human activity can actually enhance biodiversity. Consider the practice of “slash-and-burn” agriculture: setting fire to a small patch of forest, planting crops in the clearing for as long as the soil is fertile, then moving on. It creates hideous bare splotches in the woods that would horrify John Muir, but some ecologists have recently argued that, when practised properly, as it often is in traditional communities, it can fortify the ecosystem. The vast mahoganies in Puerto Rico, for example, couldn’t survive without it.

Happily, the view that people can be a key component of nature seems to be gaining favour. It has been enshrined in various UN declarations over the years, and in 1992 the president of the World Conservation Union opened the World Parks Congress by saying: “Quite simply, if local people do not support protected areas, then protected areas simply cannot last.” This tilt in attitude is partially due to the rise of a global indigenous peoples lobby, which surely must rank as one of the most jaw-dropping organising efforts in recent history – 370 million people spread across 4,500 cultures, most with no phone or internet access. The BINGOs, too, are proceeding more thoughtfully, though Dowie cities several cases where they are still ham-fistedly imposing conservation plans from above, rather than working with native people as equal partners.

So far, so good. The old style of exclusionary conservation caused a lot of needless suffering, and the community-orientated method is clearly a better option. “If we really want people to live in harmony with nature,” Dowie warns, “history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out of it.”

But it’s also worth wondering if this goes far enough. As humans gobble up more natural resources, we’re outstripping Earth’s “carrying capacity”, consuming more of the planet’s goodies each year than can be replaced – the type of Ponzi scheme that gets you jailed on Wall Street. This is putting excruciating pressure on even nature’s most careful stewards. In Brazil, for instance, the Kayapo people won the right to manage their rainforests after armed resistance against the government; in a sad twist, they were later found accepting bribes from timber companies in exchange for logging concessions. And if that wasn’t enough, as more carbon-dioxide gets pumped into the air and the planet warms, local habitats are disappearing or shifting locations, making a mockery of the whole idea of regional-based conservation.

We may need to rethink the strategy of just trying to protect specific areas, and instead realise that all of us – even those living far from “the wild” – are now land managers of sorts. In an age of global supply chains and greenhouse gases, it’s increasingly impossible to erect that fictional wall between civilisation and wilderness. Our lifestyles and consumption patterns are unavoidably entwined with the health of nature. Ultimately, it won’t be the skills of park managers, but our choices on this front, that determine nature’s fate and ours.

Bradford Plumer is an editor at The New Republic.