Many of the environmental groups working to protect the last vestiges of wild nature fail to include native peoples in their long-term plans. Mark Dowie makes this provocative claim in his latest book, Conservation Refugees. It’s a mistake, he says, to separate humans from the non-human species and geographical conditions to which they have adapted over the centuries. But it’s all too common an occurrence. Sometimes this attitude arises from simple ignorance; with a bit of educating, ecologists and other activists come to recognize valuable indigenous knowledge for what it is.
However, many programs smack of covert or overt racism, with genocide a distinct possibility down the line as people are driven from their lands to languish in substandard conditions elsewhere. (Yet some conservation groups actually feature smiling brown faces on their fund-raising merchandise, clearly proud of their “ethnic sensitivity.”)
Dowie, an award-winning journalist, has already written several books on environmental movements. In this new book, he pulls no punches. He accuses many non-governmental organizations of seeking funding dollars at the cost of the people most knowledgeable of the ecosystem in question—and ultimately of the very wildlife they dearly wish to protect from exploitation or extinction.
The underlying and misguided principle of so many would-be saviours of nature is that the ideal set-up is “wilderness” as a place devoid of resident humans. Any members of our species found in a designated area must be visitors e.g., scientists, hikers. It does not end up that way, as the number of parks used by mining, logging, and bio-prospecting operations attests. Money and cultural imperialism, in such dire cases, tend to trump habitat integrity.
As powerful as the image may be, a pristine, human-free zone—an Eden before Adam and Eve, if you like—is a highly unrealistic goal. Everyone on the planet still relies on nature—but none more than resident indigenous peoples. A people that has depended for centuries on a relatively small area of forest, for example, must be doing something right or it would have disappeared long ago. Outsiders would do well to take note.
At the same time, Dowie downplays the very real ecological violations perpetrated by some of those very groups (albeit ones involved with outside operations). The thriving bush meat trade in Asia and Africa, for example, threatens the last great apes, and other species.
Partially because it is written by a man with a bone to pick, this book can be a difficult read for the hard-line conservationist. First, the stories (plucked from several continents and spanning centuries of folly) are heartbreaking. Second, Dowie unearths plenty of unsavory tales featuring professionals who may or may not have their facts and values straight. Their blindness is unsettling, and ultimately infuriating.
Perhaps the question is not how much corruption exists in the otherwise admirable operations he describes (e.g., protecting the Amazon from loggers), but whether environmental do-gooders are unique in having dirt on their hands.
It is a very messy subject, but Dowie does a fine job of intensifying the discussion.
Louise Fabiani is a Montreal science writer, naturalist, and poet.
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While the idea of hardcore environmentalists getting it wrong is a very strong possibility in a world where the capitalist-free market system is in full force, I for one would like to know what Dowie suggests as an alternative. Brave New World? The noble savage? What exactly is he saying? Let things slide as they are sliding without the intervention of these do gooder tree huggers? Whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not, the day humans first picked up that bone to smite that fellow creature trying to drink out of the same pond is the day we doomed ourselves. That technology is now about to strike back and all the finger-pointing in the world (nay, the universe) is not going to help us.