Conservation Refugees

Transcription

1 Conservation Refugees The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples Mark Dowie The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

2 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please mitpress.mit.edu This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed on recycled paper and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dowie, Mark. Conservation Refugees : the hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples / Mark Dowie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Indigenous peoples Ecology. 2. Conservation of natural resources International cooperation. I. Title. GF50.D dc

3 A Word about Terms ill -a-hee: earth, ground, land, country, place, or world. Chinook Conservation: con ser va tion n. 1. the preservation, management, and care of natural and cultural resources. 2. the keeping or protecting of something from change, loss, or damage. 1 Until the latter part of the twentieth century, conservation tended to focus on the protection of so-called flagship species (also known as charismatic megafauna ) lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, pandas, and polar bears and their particular habitats. However, the emerging science of conservation biology gradually forced organized conservation into a new strategy that called for the protection of biological diversity wherever it thrived. Unless I state otherwise, assume the latter meaning. Western and Northern I use interchangeably to describe people, organizations, values, sciences, ideas, or institutions that are based either in Europe or North America. Racism In the spirit of show-don t-tell, I do not use the word anywhere in this book. I really didn t need to. The incidents I describe speak for themselves, as does the fact that close to 100 percent of the people who have been evicted from homelands in the interest of conservation have been people of color. The unspoken (and rarely written) rationale for this policy is a certainty that European and American (i.e., Northern) science-based conservationists naturally understand the tenets of conservation, while primitive aboriginals do not. I should also make it clear at the outset that I do not consider any Northern conservation leaders to

4 xii A Word about Terms be racist, or believe that racist outcomes are always the result of racist intentions. Imperial I have been chastised, and will be again, for using this term to describe transnational conservation at any stage of its history. I fully admit that applying it to contemporary conservation leadership is much less appropriate than it was a century or even two decades ago. But what else to call half a dozen northern hemispheric organizations, with combined assets equal to the GNP of many countries, and strong ties to neoliberal industries and institutions, whose representatives travel about the world imposing a conservation paradigm that all too often deprives native people of their land and livelihoods? Indigenous This is the tough one. The central issue for indigenous peoples is recognition, and recognition depends partly on the definition of indigeneity. There is no legal definition of indigenous peoples, partly because there is no legal recognition of the word peoples. Some Africans say that all black Africans are indigenous to Africa, so there is no point in differentiating between Batwa and Bantu, Basarwa and Tswana. The government of Botswana in fact has officially declared that all of its citizens are indigenous from the ancient Basarwa Bushmen who arrived there some twenty thousand years ago to the most recently settled colonist. By contrast, Richard Leakey insists there are no indigenous people in Kenya. Are the Karen, Hmong, Akha, and other hill tribes of Southeast Asia indigenous to Burma, Thailand, and Laos or to Yunnan, China from where they migrated a few hundred years ago? To where are the Maasai, Qashqui, Bakhtiari, or the Tuareg pastorals indigenous? The International Labor Organization s Convention 169 defines indigenous peoples as tribal peoples in independent countries whose social, cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of the national community, and whose status is regulated wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations. One problem with that definition is that many ethnic groups in Africa reject the term tribal when used to define them. The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs rejects all definitions. We assert our inherent right to define who we are. We do not

5 A Word about Terms xiii approve of any other definition, reads their official statement on the matter. Since there is so much confusion about who is and who is not indigenous, for the purpose of this text I am using the following definition: A people are indigenous to an area if they occupied the land where they reside, or in the case of pastoral nomadics, if they grazed their livestock through a region before the particular area in question was absorbed by the nation-state or states within which it now exists. 2