[blind-democracy] The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 22:33:58 -0400

The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US
National Parks
Tuesday, 25 August 2015 00:00 By Stephen Corry, Truthout | Op-Ed
Yosemite National Park. Beginning with the 1864 Yosemite Grant Act, Native
Americans were evicted from almost all US park lands. (Photo: Tamara
Evans/Flickr)
Iconoclasm - questioning heroes and ideals, and even tearing them down - can
be the most difficult thing. Many people root their attitudes and lives in
narratives that they hold to be self-evidently true. So it's obvious that
changing conservation isn't going to be an easy furrow to plow.
However, change it must. Conservation's achievements don't alter the fact
that it's rooted in two serious and related mistakes. The first is that it
conserves "wildernesses," which are imagined to be shaped only by nature.
The second is that it believes in a hierarchy, with superior, intelligent
human beings at the top. Many conservationists still believe that they are
uniquely endowed with the foresight and expertise to control and manage
so-called wildernesses and that everyone else must leave, including those
who actually own them and have lived there for generations.
These notions are archaic; they damage people and the environment. The
second also flouts the law, with its perpetual land grabs. For nature's sake
as well as our own, it's crucial to expose how these ideas grew and
flourished, to understand just how mistaken they are. There's an ongoing
attempt to wipe from the map the quagmire around conservation's wellspring,
to pretend it's all now transparent and sunlit. It isn't.
Some conservationists, usually those lower in the pecking order, have the
morality to face reality. They must prevail. With enough support, they will
propel the industry from below toward a radically different approach, one
that stands a far better chance of saving the environment and one using far
smaller sums of money to do so.
This iconoclastic revolution is urgently needed, and there's no better time:
2015 is the 125th anniversary of Yosemite National Park, and 2016 completes
a century for the United States National Park Service. These are highly
symbolic anniversaries: Conservation dogmas were rooted in colonial conquest
and were inextricably bound up in the genocide committed against Native
Americans. Both lies - that of the wilderness and that of the inferiority of
some human beings - were in full flower by 1916, though they were seeded
earlier when the US began to invent the parks model that is still, all too
harmfully, exported around the world.
The Eviction of the Ahwahneechee People From Yosemite
The conservation movement (and its problems) really began with the 1864
Yosemite Grant Act. Conservation leaders like John Muir believed that the
indigenous people who had inhabited Yosemite for at least 6,000 years were a
desecration and had to go. Muir deemed them "lazy" because their hunting
techniques yielded a good living without wasted effort. Such prejudice is
alive and well today: An official in India said that tribal people don't
want to leave their forest because they get "fodder and income ... for free"
and are too lazy to work, so must be evicted.
White invaders saw the land as pristine wilderness because it didn't conform
to their European industrial image of productivity. In reality, Yosemite had
long been an environment shaped by its inhabitants through controlled
undergrowth burning (which created its healthy forests with big trees and a
rich biodiversity), tree planting for acorns as a food staple, and
sustainable predation on its game, which ensured species balance.
In the 19th century, the newcomers didn't hesitate to send in the army to
police this wilderness and get rid of everyone else. One historian, Jeffrey
Lee Rodger, is sympathetic to the cavalrymen, but admits their "improvised
punishments ... were clearly extralegal and may have veered into arbitrary
... force." He might have compared such "punishments" with those still
supported by conservation today, particularly in Africa and Asia, where
tribal people are routinely kicked out of parks and beaten, even tortured,
when they resist.
Native Americans were evicted from almost all the American parks, but a few
Ahwahneechee people were tolerated inside Yosemite for a few more decades.
They were forced to serve tourists and act out humiliating "Indian days" for
the visitors. The latter wanted the Indians they saw in the movies, so the
Ahwahneechee had to dress and dance as if they were from the Great Plains.
If they didn't serve the park, they were out - and they all did finally die
or leave, with their last dwellings deliberately and ignominiously burned
down in a fire drill in 1969.
As Luther Standing Bear declaimed, "Only to the white man was nature a
wilderness … to us it was tame. Earth was bountiful." The parks were and are
supposed to preserve their "wilderness," but they've never been very
successful. In the case of Yosemite: over a thousand miles of often-crowded
roads and hiking trails were constructed; trees were felled to make
viewpoints; the balance of species was altered as animal and human predators
were eliminated; trout were introduced to delight anglers; a luxury hotel
was built; bear feeding areas were established to thrill visitors, so
conditioning the animals to scavenge for human food; and hoteliers carried
out a "firefall" for a century, in which burning wood was pushed over
Glacier Point to cascade thousands of feet into the valley (the scars remain
visible nearly 50 years after it was halted).
The Native Americans' own fires, their ancient practice of seasonal and
controlled undergrowth burning, was stopped. One result is the devastating
conflagrations that now plague California; those simply wouldn't have
happened on the Natives' watch.
This wasn't preservation, it was reshaping the environment to extract
tourist dollars. In spite of this, and the fact that the National Park
Service has presided over a loss of biodiversity and dozens of species
extinctions, many conservationists have continued to believe they're better
at protecting environments than the tribal peoples who live in them.
Scientific Racism in the Conservation Movement
The conservation movement's historically dismissive attitudes toward
indigenous people were intertwined with the ideas of scientific racism and
eugenics that were just beginning to emerge when the Yosemite Grant Act was
passed. Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species five years before
the passage of the act, and Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, was beginning
to develop his racist ideas of eugenics, declaring, "The feeble nations of
the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of
mankind." Eugenics enthusiasts in Britain included writer H.G. Wells and
playwright George Bernard Shaw, who thought those he saw as genetically
inferior, who couldn't "justify their existence," should be humanely gassed.
John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Marie Stopes joined up, together
with most of the liberal intelligentsia.
In the US, eugenics and conservation were born twins. Wealthy big-game
hunters, including Teddy Roosevelt and his friend Madison Grant, both major
conservationists, were among the most enthusiastic to embrace the racist
creed. Their initial priority was to conserve the herds that provided their
sport, and the easiest way to do that - so they thought - was to remove the
"predators" who were killing the game to eat (and for its leather) rather
than to hang horns on the wall. But these predators were principally human
hunters - both Native Americans and poor colonists trying to eke a living
from an unfamiliar world.
Ousting these subsistence hunters had the opposite of the desired effect.
Elk herds in Yellowstone, for example, grew beyond the carrying capacity of
the land. (The same is happening now, with elephants in Botswana.) Weak
animals, once the first to fall from hunter's arrow or wolf's fang, started
reaching reproductive age. The herd grew, but the animals sickened as hunger
took its toll. Seeing their precious trophies fading through their bungling,
the elite came up with ideas of "game management," still applied today. The
key is to cull, keeping the herd smaller but stronger.
They then turned their attention to the human "herd," which was expanding
rapidly from European immigration. Following Galton, they categorized
humankind into hierarchical "races" and feared the country being swamped by
what they considered to be lower races, including "Mediterraneans,"
"Alpines," and Jews.
The big-game hunting boys saw themselves as a different ilk. As the "Aryans"
from northern Europe, they saw themselves as the creators of "true"
civilization, science, culture, religion and wealth. They believed that
racial mixing would threaten their "race" and what they saw as its
irreplaceable talents. They passed laws to reduce immigration to the United
States from "non-Aryan" countries, they outlawed interracial marriage and
imposed segregation wherever possible, and they coercively sterilized anyone
they could get their hands on who didn't fit their bill; no one with a
mental, physical, or even social, problem was safe, particularly the poor.
The most important hunter-turned-conservationist, Madison Grant, was also
their principal writer. He was a key supporter, often founder or leader, of
a dozen or so conservation groups that still exist, though he barely appears
in their official histories. Among the most prominent were the Save the
Redwoods League; the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife
Conservation Society, WCS); and the National Parks Association (now the
National Parks Conservation Association).
His book, The Passing of the Great Race, was published in the year the
National Park Service was founded. Science Magazine's glowing review
enthused over its "solid merit." Thirty years later, it would be cited by
German Nazis who couldn't understand why they were on trial: They were, they
pleaded, simply emulating the United States, where scientific eugenics had
long been used to shape society. Grant had sent a translation of his book to
Hitler, who called it his Bible.
Widespread Support for Eugenics
Scratch the record anywhere in the early conservation movement, and eugenics
sounds loud and clear: Alexander Graham Bell, who falsely claimed to have
invented the telephone and who was one of the founders of the National
Geographic Society; two charter members of the Sierra Club, David Starr
Jordan (founding president of Stanford University) and Luther Burbank were
all prominent members of the movement. George Grinnell, founder of the
Audubon Society (and Edward Curtis' mentor) was Madison Grant's close friend
for nearly 50 years. The National Park Service's first director, mining
magnate Stephen Mather, was backed by Charles Goethe, of the Audubon and
Kenya Wildlife Societies, regional head of the Sierra Club and outspoken
advocate of Nazi eugenic laws.
In 1937, Goethe wrote to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director of "racial
hygiene" in Frankfurt, saying, "I feel passionately that you are leading all
mankind herein," according to Garland E. Allen's 2012 essay, "Culling the
Herd," in the Journal of the History of Biology. Verschuer was doctoral
supervisor and collaborator of Josef Mengele, infamous for his barbaric
experiments on children in Auschwitz. He continued to excel after the war,
as professor of genetics at Münster.
In one article, "Patriotism and Racial Standards" published in a 1936 issue
of Eugenical News, Goethe enthused, "We are moving toward the elimination of
humanity's undesirables like Sambo, the husband to Mandy the 'washerlady.' "
In 1965, on his 90th birthday, Goethe was dubbed the state's "number one
citizen" by California's governor. He fought immigration from Mexico, making
the racist argument that Mexicans have low IQs.
Eugenics grew into the establishment belief of the first half of the 20th
century and didn't falter seriously until 1945, when an American battalion
stumbled into Buchenwald, just after its prisoners had seized it from
fleeing camp guards.
When the Nazis had built it, their second concentration camp, an oak tree
growing inside its fences had consciously been conserved. It was symbolic,
though not about nature: Goethe (no relation to the conservationist) had
written poetry, including some of Faust, under its branches.
The military defeat of Nazism was to unveil scientific eugenics as a true
Faustian pact, absurdly false and grotesquely violent. That should have been
its end. But as with much in this history, the fog of obfuscation hangs over
the landscape: Eugenic affiliations are continually denied or censored.
Acclaimed figures in post-war European conservation included former Nazis
like Prince Bernhard, a founder of WWF (who joined the allies before the
war), and Bernhard Grzimek, the self-proclaimed "savior of the Serengeti,"
cofounder of Friends of the Earth Germany, and former director of the
Frankfurt Zoological Society - one of Europe's biggest conservation funders.
He made sure the Maasai and other tribes were expelled.
So did Mike Fay of the World Conservation Society, the creator of the
Nouabalé-Ndoki Park in the Congo, which kicked out the Mbendjele people
(whom they called "Pygmies"), using US taxpayers' money. The World
Conservation Society trained the guards who now beat Mbendjele people for
suspected poaching. Given the way they're treated, it's frankly not
surprising that those who once lived on and from the land "poach" if the
opportunity arises: Conservation breeds poachers.
When today's environmental leaders press for curbs on immigration and
population, it can only call to mind this violent past. Did David Brower,
for example, founder of both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island
Institute, have to assert that having children without a license should be a
crime - given that he had four of his own?
Few environmentalists protest at the theft of tribal lands or stand for
indigenous rights. For example, John Burton, of the World Land Trust,
formerly of Friends of the Earth, and Fauna and Flora International, openly
opposes the very idea, though other key players, some in Greenpeace for
example, have signaled support for tribes.
The unexpurgated history of conservation matters because it still shapes
attitudes toward tribal peoples. Conservationists no longer pretend to be
saving their "race," but they certainly claim to be saving the world's
heritage, and they mostly retain a supercilious attitude toward those they
are destroying.
Such attitudes must change. Conservation nowadays, particularly in Africa
and Asia, seems to be as much about land grabbing and profit as anything
else. Its quiet partnerships with the logging and mining industries damage
the environment. Tribal people are still abused, even shot, for poaching,
when they're just trying to feed their families, while "conservation" still
encourages trophy hunting. The rich can hunt, the poor can't.
In spite of the growing evidence to the contrary, many senior
conservationists can't accept that tribal peoples really are able to manage
their lands. They're wrong. It's a great con trick and it's time it was
stopped.
Other conservationists are keen to do better. They deserve to know there's a
groundswell of public support behind them, pushing for a major change in
conservation to benefit, finally, tribal peoples, nature, and us all.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
STEPHEN CORRY
Stephen Corry is the director of Survival International, the global movement
for tribal peoples' rights. The organization has a 46-year track record in
stopping the theft of tribal lands. Survival's work on conservation has wide
endorsement from environmentalists.
RELATED STORIES
Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban
By Felicity Barringer, New York Times News Service | Report
Native American Tribes Seek Help from UN, World Court
By Bethania Palma Markus, Truthout | News
Native Americans Confront History of Dispossession
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
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The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US
National Parks
Tuesday, 25 August 2015 00:00 By Stephen Corry, Truthout | Op-Ed
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reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
• Yosemite National Park. Beginning with the 1864 Yosemite Grant Act,
Native Americans were evicted from almost all US park lands. (Photo: Tamara
Evans/Flickr)
• The support of readers like you got this story published - and helps
Truthout stay free from corporate advertising. Can you sustain our work with
a tax-deductible donation today?
Iconoclasm - questioning heroes and ideals, and even tearing them down - can
be the most difficult thing. Many people root their attitudes and lives in
narratives that they hold to be self-evidently true. So it's obvious that
changing conservation isn't going to be an easy furrow to plow.
However, change it must. Conservation's achievements don't alter the fact
that it's rooted in two serious and related mistakes. The first is that it
conserves "wildernesses," which are imagined to be shaped only by nature.
The second is that it believes in a hierarchy, with superior, intelligent
human beings at the top. Many conservationists still believe that they are
uniquely endowed with the foresight and expertise to control and manage
so-called wildernesses and that everyone else must leave, including those
who actually own them and have lived there for generations.
These notions are archaic; they damage people and the environment. The
second also flouts the law, with its perpetual land grabs. For nature's sake
as well as our own, it's crucial to expose how these ideas grew and
flourished, to understand just how mistaken they are. There's an ongoing
attempt to wipe from the map the quagmire around conservation's wellspring,
to pretend it's all now transparent and sunlit. It isn't.
Some conservationists, usually those lower in the pecking order, have the
morality to face reality. They must prevail. With enough support, they will
propel the industry from below toward a radically different approach, one
that stands a far better chance of saving the environment and one using far
smaller sums of money to do so.
This iconoclastic revolution is urgently needed, and there's no better time:
2015 is the 125th anniversary of Yosemite National Park, and 2016 completes
a century for the United States National Park Service. These are highly
symbolic anniversaries: Conservation dogmas were rooted in colonial conquest
and were inextricably bound up in the genocide committed against Native
Americans. Both lies - that of the wilderness and that of the inferiority of
some human beings - were in full flower by 1916, though they were seeded
earlier when the US began to invent the parks model that is still, all too
harmfully, exported around the world.
The Eviction of the Ahwahneechee People From Yosemite
The conservation movement (and its problems) really began with the 1864
Yosemite Grant Act. Conservation leaders like John Muir believed that the
indigenous people who had inhabited Yosemite for at least 6,000 years were a
desecration and had to go. Muir deemed them "lazy" because their hunting
techniques yielded a good living without wasted effort. Such prejudice is
alive and well today: An official in India said that tribal people don't
want to leave their forest because they get "fodder and income ... for free"
and are too lazy to work, so must be evicted.
White invaders saw the land as pristine wilderness because it didn't conform
to their European industrial image of productivity. In reality, Yosemite had
long been an environment shaped by its inhabitants through controlled
undergrowth burning (which created its healthy forests with big trees and a
rich biodiversity), tree planting for acorns as a food staple, and
sustainable predation on its game, which ensured species balance.
In the 19th century, the newcomers didn't hesitate to send in the army to
police this wilderness and get rid of everyone else. One historian, Jeffrey
Lee Rodger, is sympathetic to the cavalrymen, but admits their "improvised
punishments ... were clearly extralegal and may have veered into arbitrary
... force." He might have compared such "punishments" with those still
supported by conservation today, particularly in Africa and Asia, where
tribal people are routinely kicked out of parks and beaten, even tortured,
when they resist.
Native Americans were evicted from almost all the American parks, but a few
Ahwahneechee people were tolerated inside Yosemite for a few more decades.
They were forced to serve tourists and act out humiliating "Indian days" for
the visitors. The latter wanted the Indians they saw in the movies, so the
Ahwahneechee had to dress and dance as if they were from the Great Plains.
If they didn't serve the park, they were out - and they all did finally die
or leave, with their last dwellings deliberately and ignominiously burned
down in a fire drill in 1969.
As Luther Standing Bear declaimed, "Only to the white man was nature a
wilderness … to us it was tame. Earth was bountiful." The parks were and are
supposed to preserve their "wilderness," but they've never been very
successful. In the case of Yosemite: over a thousand miles of often-crowded
roads and hiking trails were constructed; trees were felled to make
viewpoints; the balance of species was altered as animal and human predators
were eliminated; trout were introduced to delight anglers; a luxury hotel
was built; bear feeding areas were established to thrill visitors, so
conditioning the animals to scavenge for human food; and hoteliers carried
out a "firefall" for a century, in which burning wood was pushed over
Glacier Point to cascade thousands of feet into the valley (the scars remain
visible nearly 50 years after it was halted).
The Native Americans' own fires, their ancient practice of seasonal and
controlled undergrowth burning, was stopped. One result is the devastating
conflagrations that now plague California; those simply wouldn't have
happened on the Natives' watch.
This wasn't preservation, it was reshaping the environment to extract
tourist dollars. In spite of this, and the fact that the National Park
Service has presided over a loss of biodiversity and dozens of species
extinctions, many conservationists have continued to believe they're better
at protecting environments than the tribal peoples who live in them.
Scientific Racism in the Conservation Movement
The conservation movement's historically dismissive attitudes toward
indigenous people were intertwined with the ideas of scientific racism and
eugenics that were just beginning to emerge when the Yosemite Grant Act was
passed. Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species five years before
the passage of the act, and Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, was beginning
to develop his racist ideas of eugenics, declaring, "The feeble nations of
the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of
mankind." Eugenics enthusiasts in Britain included writer H.G. Wells and
playwright George Bernard Shaw, who thought those he saw as genetically
inferior, who couldn't "justify their existence," should be humanely gassed.
John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Marie Stopes joined up, together
with most of the liberal intelligentsia.
In the US, eugenics and conservation were born twins. Wealthy big-game
hunters, including Teddy Roosevelt and his friend Madison Grant, both major
conservationists, were among the most enthusiastic to embrace the racist
creed. Their initial priority was to conserve the herds that provided their
sport, and the easiest way to do that - so they thought - was to remove the
"predators" who were killing the game to eat (and for its leather) rather
than to hang horns on the wall. But these predators were principally human
hunters - both Native Americans and poor colonists trying to eke a living
from an unfamiliar world.
Ousting these subsistence hunters had the opposite of the desired effect.
Elk herds in Yellowstone, for example, grew beyond the carrying capacity of
the land. (The same is happening now, with elephants in Botswana.) Weak
animals, once the first to fall from hunter's arrow or wolf's fang, started
reaching reproductive age. The herd grew, but the animals sickened as hunger
took its toll. Seeing their precious trophies fading through their bungling,
the elite came up with ideas of "game management," still applied today. The
key is to cull, keeping the herd smaller but stronger.
They then turned their attention to the human "herd," which was expanding
rapidly from European immigration. Following Galton, they categorized
humankind into hierarchical "races" and feared the country being swamped by
what they considered to be lower races, including "Mediterraneans,"
"Alpines," and Jews.
The big-game hunting boys saw themselves as a different ilk. As the "Aryans"
from northern Europe, they saw themselves as the creators of "true"
civilization, science, culture, religion and wealth. They believed that
racial mixing would threaten their "race" and what they saw as its
irreplaceable talents. They passed laws to reduce immigration to the United
States from "non-Aryan" countries, they outlawed interracial marriage and
imposed segregation wherever possible, and they coercively sterilized anyone
they could get their hands on who didn't fit their bill; no one with a
mental, physical, or even social, problem was safe, particularly the poor.
The most important hunter-turned-conservationist, Madison Grant, was also
their principal writer. He was a key supporter, often founder or leader, of
a dozen or so conservation groups that still exist, though he barely appears
in their official histories. Among the most prominent were the Save the
Redwoods League; the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife
Conservation Society, WCS); and the National Parks Association (now the
National Parks Conservation Association).
His book, The Passing of the Great Race, was published in the year the
National Park Service was founded. Science Magazine's glowing review
enthused over its "solid merit." Thirty years later, it would be cited by
German Nazis who couldn't understand why they were on trial: They were, they
pleaded, simply emulating the United States, where scientific eugenics had
long been used to shape society. Grant had sent a translation of his book to
Hitler, who called it his Bible.
Widespread Support for Eugenics
Scratch the record anywhere in the early conservation movement, and eugenics
sounds loud and clear: Alexander Graham Bell, who falsely claimed to have
invented the telephone and who was one of the founders of the National
Geographic Society; two charter members of the Sierra Club, David Starr
Jordan (founding president of Stanford University) and Luther Burbank were
all prominent members of the movement. George Grinnell, founder of the
Audubon Society (and Edward Curtis' mentor) was Madison Grant's close friend
for nearly 50 years. The National Park Service's first director, mining
magnate Stephen Mather, was backed by Charles Goethe, of the Audubon and
Kenya Wildlife Societies, regional head of the Sierra Club and outspoken
advocate of Nazi eugenic laws.
In 1937, Goethe wrote to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director of "racial
hygiene" in Frankfurt, saying, "I feel passionately that you are leading all
mankind herein," according to Garland E. Allen's 2012 essay, "Culling the
Herd," in the Journal of the History of Biology. Verschuer was doctoral
supervisor and collaborator of Josef Mengele, infamous for his barbaric
experiments on children in Auschwitz. He continued to excel after the war,
as professor of genetics at Münster.
In one article, "Patriotism and Racial Standards" published in a 1936 issue
of Eugenical News, Goethe enthused, "We are moving toward the elimination of
humanity's undesirables like Sambo, the husband to Mandy the 'washerlady.' "
In 1965, on his 90th birthday, Goethe was dubbed the state's "number one
citizen" by California's governor. He fought immigration from Mexico, making
the racist argument that Mexicans have low IQs.
Eugenics grew into the establishment belief of the first half of the 20th
century and didn't falter seriously until 1945, when an American battalion
stumbled into Buchenwald, just after its prisoners had seized it from
fleeing camp guards.
When the Nazis had built it, their second concentration camp, an oak tree
growing inside its fences had consciously been conserved. It was symbolic,
though not about nature: Goethe (no relation to the conservationist) had
written poetry, including some of Faust, under its branches.
The military defeat of Nazism was to unveil scientific eugenics as a true
Faustian pact, absurdly false and grotesquely violent. That should have been
its end. But as with much in this history, the fog of obfuscation hangs over
the landscape: Eugenic affiliations are continually denied or censored.
Acclaimed figures in post-war European conservation included former Nazis
like Prince Bernhard, a founder of WWF (who joined the allies before the
war), and Bernhard Grzimek, the self-proclaimed "savior of the Serengeti,"
cofounder of Friends of the Earth Germany, and former director of the
Frankfurt Zoological Society - one of Europe's biggest conservation funders.
He made sure the Maasai and other tribes were expelled.
So did Mike Fay of the World Conservation Society, the creator of the
Nouabalé-Ndoki Park in the Congo, which kicked out the Mbendjele people
(whom they called "Pygmies"), using US taxpayers' money. The World
Conservation Society trained the guards who now beat Mbendjele people for
suspected poaching. Given the way they're treated, it's frankly not
surprising that those who once lived on and from the land "poach" if the
opportunity arises: Conservation breeds poachers.
When today's environmental leaders press for curbs on immigration and
population, it can only call to mind this violent past. Did David Brower,
for example, founder of both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island
Institute, have to assert that having children without a license should be a
crime - given that he had four of his own?
Few environmentalists protest at the theft of tribal lands or stand for
indigenous rights. For example, John Burton, of the World Land Trust,
formerly of Friends of the Earth, and Fauna and Flora International, openly
opposes the very idea, though other key players, some in Greenpeace for
example, have signaled support for tribes.
The unexpurgated history of conservation matters because it still shapes
attitudes toward tribal peoples. Conservationists no longer pretend to be
saving their "race," but they certainly claim to be saving the world's
heritage, and they mostly retain a supercilious attitude toward those they
are destroying.
Such attitudes must change. Conservation nowadays, particularly in Africa
and Asia, seems to be as much about land grabbing and profit as anything
else. Its quiet partnerships with the logging and mining industries damage
the environment. Tribal people are still abused, even shot, for poaching,
when they're just trying to feed their families, while "conservation" still
encourages trophy hunting. The rich can hunt, the poor can't.
In spite of the growing evidence to the contrary, many senior
conservationists can't accept that tribal peoples really are able to manage
their lands. They're wrong. It's a great con trick and it's time it was
stopped.
Other conservationists are keen to do better. They deserve to know there's a
groundswell of public support behind them, pushing for a major change in
conservation to benefit, finally, tribal peoples, nature, and us all.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Stephen Corry
Stephen Corry is the director of Survival International, the global movement
for tribal peoples' rights. The organization has a 46-year track record in
stopping the theft of tribal lands. Survival's work on conservation has wide
endorsement from environmentalists.
Related Stories
Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban
By Felicity Barringer, New York Times News Service | ReportNative American
Tribes Seek Help from UN, World Court
By Bethania Palma Markus, Truthout | NewsNative Americans Confront History
of Dispossession
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview

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