Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common

Give the Land Back

Ashley Dawson

In the May 2021 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Native American author and activist David Treuer published an article titled Return the National Parks to the Tribes.¹ In this piece, Treuer details the genocidal violence through which Native American tribes were expelled from some of the US’s earliest and most famous national parks. He begins with the story of the Mariposa Battalion, a white militia composed largely of miners who came upon the Yosemite Valley in 1851 during an expedition to hunt and kill members of California’s Miwok tribes. The militia set fire to Miwok wigwams and shot people as they fled, ultimately driving the tribes from Yosemite. Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the first national park, the crown jewel in what would become a continent-spanning archipelago of parks, an influential paradigm of conservation that resonates around the world to this day. Purged of Native Americans, the parks could be celebrated by John Muir and other conservationists as Edenic wild gardens. But, as Treuer notes, if the national parks are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, they are also all sites founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly. Viewed from the perspective of history, Treuer notes laceratingly, America’s national parks are a crime scene.

How should the nation atone for this violence against Native Americans? And how can the US National Park system cope with the increasingly crippling challenges of overcrowding, habitat loss, and lack of adequate scientific research? Treuer suggests a solution to both these grave crises: give the parks back to those who once inhabited and sustainably stewarded them—Native Americans. All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over, Treuer argues, to a consortium of federally recognized tribes. It’s a simple demand: give the stolen land back.

For a reader unfamiliar with Native American political movements, Treuer’s suggestion may come across as quite radical, linked to the kind of challenges to settler-colonial commonsense articulated in recent years by intellectuals such as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, whose essay Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor argues that decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people.² Yet however one might feel about the political prospects of Tuck and Yang’s decolonial demands, it is important to note that Treuer’s suggestion that National Parks be returned to Native Americans echoes and is consonant with the demands of a broader global movement for Indigenous rights—including for the return of stolen land and for respect for Indigenous sovereignty over land held under customary tenure.

The conservation movement has not exactly been respectful of Indigenous land rights, either historically or in the present. Indeed, things are set to get much worse. Over the last decade or so, big conservation organizations headquartered in the core capitalist nations have worked with governments around the world to massively expand the amount of land set aside in Protected Areas. Today, roughly 17 percent of the Earth’s land is sequestered in such areas, which are constitutively established to exclude human beings. If this area were contiguous, it would be as large as Russia. Powerful conservation organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), WWF, and the Wildlife Conservation Society are lobbying for a doubling of these Protected Areas over the current decade, using the catchy slogan 30×30. But as frontline Indigenous activists and allied groups such as Survival International have underlined, this project is in effect a massive landgrab, a dispossession that can only be called colonial.

The speeches and essays collected in this book are an expression of a global grassroots movement against contemporary neocolonial conservation policies. It takes great courage to challenge big conservation organizations like the IUCN, WWF, and the WCS on an intellectual plane since they operate using what has come to be mainstream common sense about how to cope with environmental crises. It takes even more courage to challenge their policies on the ground, in the exclusionary Protected Areas where asserting traditional land rights, challenging militarized conservation practices, or just going out to retrieve one’s cattle can lead to a bullet in the head.

The testimonies we have gathered document the resistance of individuals, ethnic groups, and a transnational movement more broadly against neocolonial conservation and the corporate greenwashing that is increasingly intertwined with the exclusionary efforts of big conservation organizations. As the climate crisis intensifies, dominant conservation policies are only going to become more of a site of conflict, as governments and corporations look to conservation to offset and greenwash the spiraling contradictions of the capitalist, colonialist world system. Decolonizing conservation is thus one of today’s most important—if relatively under-acknowledged—environmental struggles.

I began this introduction in Yosemite since, for many historians, contemporary practices of conservation originated there. For example, the scholars Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher trace the origins of fortress conservation to the model that arose in North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which, according to them, sought to protect natural areas from the impacts of rapid industrialization, while allowing such industrialization to continue elsewhere.³ As Treuer’s account of the founding of Yosemite makes clear, one cannot talk about conservation in the US without also talking about settler colonialism. Mainstream conservation, in other words, has always been—and today remains—a mode of dispossession.

However, by situating the origins of conservation in North America, historians tend to elide the international and explicitly imperialist roots of conservation. As historians such as Ramachandra Guha, Madhav Gadgil, and Richard Grove have shown, conservation as a discourse and practice began in the British colonies, when the hyper-exploitation of the natural world by the plantation economy in the Caribbean islands and by the Royal Navy’s insatiable hunger for lumber in India led to an alarmed recognition of unsustainability on the part of imperial functionaries.⁴ Wholesale forest clearance was visibly changing local climates in these places, as well as destroying valuable natural resources, and the answer was scientific management of the forests to ensure that they would continue to yield resources seen as valuable by the colonial power.

The first and most paradigmatic model for global conservation, according to historians, was the Indian Forest Act of 1865. With this law, the British Raj claimed the right to declare any land in India covered with trees the property of the colonial government. In one fell swoop, the customary rights of millions of Indian people to the forests that they had managed sustainably for centuries were revoked. The Imperial Forest Department, established the previous year, was empowered to penalize and even imprison anyone caught collecting wood, foraging for game, or engaging in any of the other myriad customary uses to which Indian people had put the country’s forests for millennia.

The dispossession of the forest commons in the name of conservation continues today. Adivasi (Indigenous) women in India are being brutally persecuted for defending their lands against a massive corporate and government mining rush.⁵ Draconian antiterrorism laws are used to silence land defenders, who are fighting to protect their land from mining projects slated to increase India’s coal production to one billion tons per year. Similar forms of violent dispossession, in which campaigns of assassination against activists are common, are unfolding around the globe.⁶ All too often, the Protected Areas designated by big conservation organizations include concessionary zones for precisely such socially and environmentally destructive extractive industries. For example, as Simon Counsell explains, Total Oil’s 2021 announcement of plans to plant a forty-thousand-hectare forest in the Republic of Congo in Central Africa helps obscure the company’s contemporaneous acquisition of an oil exploration permit for a 1.5-million-hectare plot in an environmentally sensitive region of the country.⁷

Around the world, Indigenous people and their claims to land rights are the major forces that stand in the way of corporations and governments caught up in this extractivist frenzy. Proposed expansions of exclusionary, fortress conservation such as the 30×30 plan and, worse still, the Half-Earth proposal of the late biologist E. O. Wilson, would dispossess hundreds of millions of people. In 2020, the Rights and Resources Initiative released a study showing that more than three hundred million people live in unprotected key biodiversity areas that cover 9 percent of the planet.⁸ The UN recognizes that Indigenous people protect 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, often on land over which they have customary title—a form of ownership that states in both core-capitalist and postcolonial nations are all too happy to ignore. Scientific studies have shown that Indigenous practices provide the same or better levels of ecosystem support and protection as Protected Areas.⁹

The transformation of these areas into exclusionary fortress-style conservation reserves would undo decades of struggle and substantial victories by Indigenous people. Powerful mobilizations among Indigenous and traditional peoples in the 1970s and ’80s challenged the exclusionary foundations of conservation. These political movements asserted the primacy of their customary rights to land over the dispossession carried out by states. In turn, some countries initiated reforms to recognize these rights legally, which also necessarily involved rethinking fortress conservation.¹⁰ For example, Brazil’s post-authoritarian constitution of 1988 recognized the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditional lands, a move that opened the way for the formal titling of large areas of the Brazilian Amazon to customary rights-holders. On an international level, political campaigns led to the recognition of customary rights of Indigenous Peoples to lands, territories, and resources, as well as to the restitution of lands taken from them without prior, informed consent. The struggle for the recognition of these rights featured prominently in the negotiations that led to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was formally adopted in 2007. Studies produced in this period revealed that 50 percent or more of Protected Areas had been set up on land traditionally used or occupied by Indigenous Peoples (in the Americas, of course, all Protected Areas are on land originally occupied by native people). At a United Nations meeting during the UNDRIP negotiations in 2004, an Indigenous delegate declared that conservation was the biggest enemy of Indigenous Peoples.¹¹

This political pressure led conservation organizations to recognize the importance of what was referred to as community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) by Indigenous Peoples and other local communities. The outcome of this shift included community-based wildlife management programs such as Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program, community forestry programs in countries like Mexico and Nepal, and locally managed marine areas in the South Pacific. Prominent conservation organizations recognized the rights of Indigenous Peoples in documents such as the Durban Action Plan, an outcome of the 2003 IUCN World Parks Conference, which called for Indigenous representation in Protected Area management and the restitution of land taken from Indigenous people without their free and informed consent to establish Protected Areas. In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Aichi Targets on Biodiversity, which described both Protected Areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) as ways to safeguard ecosystems, with the latter category potentially including Indigenous- and community-managed lands.

Nonetheless, most reforms of Protected Area legislation since the World Parks Congress in 2003 are focused on enabling co-management of reserves or on making provisions for communities that already own land to include their territory in national Protected Area systems. There is not a single country where Protected Area laws recognize community land ownership.¹² States continue to arrogate the right to land that they won during the colonial era. This material fact vitiates much of the rhetorical respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples found in recently produced documents. As the Rights and Resources Initiative concludes, Although some progress has been made in the last decade, national laws still fall far short of guaranteeing respect for customary rights in Protected Areas.¹³

This necessarily brief historical survey demonstrates that the idea that mainstream conservation will reverse the sixth mass extinction is an illusion, one carefully cultivated by the corporations and governments that happily bankroll the big conservation NGOs. In the face of mounting environmental and social calamities, the only coherent stance must be to join Indigenous and local communities around the world in demanding the return of stolen land, respect for their sovereignty, and a radical transformation of the CO2lonialism that characterizes the unsustainable behavior and policies of the wealthy.

1 David Treuer, Return the National Parks to the Tribes: The Jewels of America’s Landscape Should Belong to America’s Original Peoples, The Atlantic, May 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com.

2 Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 26.

3 Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, Radical Conservation: Misdirections, New Directions, Great Transition Initiative (May 2022), https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/conservation-buscher-fletcher.

4 Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5 New Report Exposes Brutal Persecution of Adivasi Women Defending Their Land, News, Survival International, March 8, 2022, https://www.survivalinternational.org.

6 Mining Multinationals: Assassinations, Toxic Waste, and Lost Livelihoods, Monthly Bulletin, London Mining Network, March 29, 2022, https://londonminingnetwork.org.

7 Simon Counsell, Anatomy of a ‘Nature-Based Solution’: Total Oil, 40,000 Hectares of Disappearing Savannah, Emmanuel Macron, Norwegian and French ‘Aid’ to an Election-Rigging Dictator, Trees to Burn, Secret Contracts, and Dumbstruck Conservationists, REDD Monitor, April 16, 2021, https://redd-monitor.org.

8 Rights and Resources Initiative, Rights-Based Conservation: The Path to Preserving Earth’s Biological and Cultural Diversity?, November 2020, https://rightsandresources.org.

9 Richard Shuster et al., Vertebrate Biodiversity on Indigenous-Managed Lands in Australia, Brazil, and Canada Equals That in Protected Areas, Environmental Science and Policy, no. 101 (November 2019): 1–6.

10 Rights and Resources Initiative, Protected Areas and the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Current Issues and Future Agenda, May 2015, https://rightsandresources.org.

11 Rights and Resources Initiative, Protected Areas and the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, 3.

12 Rights and Resources Initiative, Protected Areas and the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, 15.

13 Rights and Resources Initiative, Protected Areas and the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, 18.

Decolonizing Conservation

Fiore Longo

The words you are about to read are not just words. They are precious stones, glimmers of light, sparks of hope, coming from the most diverse places of our wonderful world: from the Amazon to Oaxaca, from the Congo Basin to California. They are part of a journey that brings us to the roots of the environmental crisis, where the crisis is more urgent and evident, in the injustice faced every day by those least responsible for it. Because this crisis, like every contemporary crisis, has more to do with justice, with structural violence and racism, with land theft, and with colonialism than with what we, in the Global North, call environment, climate, and nature.

These powerful talks were gathered during the groundbreaking counter-congress Our Land, Our Nature, held in Marseille, France in September 2021, and organized by Survival International, Minority Rights Group, and Rainforest Foundation UK. The idea was to hold an alternative event to oppose the IUCN World Conservation Congress, a meeting that we believed was designed to promote false, unjust, and dangerous solutions to the many crises we are facing today: in particular, the idea of turning 30 percent of the Earth into Protected Areas.

But Our Land, Our Nature was not just a congress against, it was also a congress for.

We wanted to decolonize conservation. We wanted to give a platform to the marginalized and silenced voices of many Indigenous people. People who, for generations, have been abused, arrested, tortured, and raped, who have seen their family members killed, their houses burned—all in the name of conservation. Those people who, despite all odds, put themselves in front of our cameras during our field missions and told us their stories. Stories that nobody believed or wanted to hear at the time, and that some people still don’t want to hear.

For a long time, their voices have been ignored, denied, disbelieved, or just discarded for the supposed greater good of conservation. But we must ensure they are heard now. They tell us of the harm we’re doing, and how we must do better, how we must listen.

We must listen if we want to protect our planet and the vital and beautiful human diversity it has produced and which protects it—and which must continue to protect it in the future.

These voices, together with those of other non-Indigenous experts and activists gathered in this book, challenge one of the most deeply embedded Western myths of the last centuries—the myth of conservation.

Conservation is the idea that nature is separate from humanity, and that we can prevent the destruction of nature without addressing what’s wrong with the societies that destroy it.

Conservation is the idea that the only way to protect our planet’s biodiversity is through colonial and racist Western notions about whose land nature is, what is worth preserving, and who is worth sacrificing for this. This old but still very much alive idea is also based on a terrifying lie: that conservationist views are scientific and that their monolithic definitions of humanity and nature are true and nonideological.

Despite what they want us to think, not all societies see nature in the same way we do. Not all societies erode nature. Not all societies seek endless and wasteful accumulation. Not all societies think that we can carry on consuming far more than we need, and that we can just fence off a piece of nature, and abracadabra, the problem will be solved.

That myth is part and parcel of colonialism, neoliberalism, and of course racism. We have to understand this connection and reject the overwhelming propaganda the West has been promoting—for the last century and more.

We all know this propaganda by heart—that there are pristine, wild, untouched forests, grasslands, and hills which we have to protect from the locals (considered too primitive to understand how to do it). In reality, these places are protected by turning them into a capital resource for tourism, militarized nature parks, fraudulent carbon sinks, and playgrounds for the rich.

These were and are people’s homes. But their lands were considered empty, so they could be taken.

Over thirty years have passed since we first objected to the WWF evicting Baka people from a Protected Area in Cameroon. The WWF replied that the eviction couldn’t be helped and that the forests … do not have Indigenous tribal habitants. They continued: Few existing groups in Cameroon have escaped some influence towards sedentarisation. In other words, the WWF claimed that there was no problem, and anyway the people have no right to their lands because they’ve changed.

This is the lie we’re here to tear down—that everyone really wants to live like us, that all hunters and herders and subsistence farmers want to settle down, get paying jobs, and eat food from factories, that that’s where human evolution naturally leads everyone, that traditional ways are just out of date and must modernize.

We must tear that myth down, and at the same time build up a consensus around the truth—that the extraordinary diversity of humans and their ways of life have nourished the Earth at the same time as the Earth has nourished them.

And, most importantly, so many of these peoples have resisted and continue to resist—sometimes quietly, but nevertheless with determination—our society’s arrogant and violent assaults on their ways of being.

Everyone knows by now (hopefully) that the environment is in danger. But the people most responsible for that peril are the ones shouting the loudest about supposed solutions: 30 percent Protected Areas, planting trees, green finance, carbon offsetting, net zero, green energy, natural capital, nature positive … on and on, one slogan after another, mostly rubbish dreamed