conservationrefugees

media type="custom" key="4017153"books / Conservation Refugees
[|Conservation Refugees] is the latest book by Mark Dowie, an investigative journalist specializing in environmental issues. This book reviews episodes around the world in which conflicts have been created that pit conservationists against indigenous peoples.

Excerpts from the book
Who is the blame for what happened in Cameroon in 2003 after two 'flagship' nature reserves that had expelled their inhabitants and consumed more than $20 million in international support both lost their donor funding? Overnight, impoverished and embittered refugees invaded both reserves and plundered their natural resources. P. xxvii

International funding agencies dedicate the equivalent of billions of dollars every year to land and wildlife conservation. The five largest conservation organizations absorb about 70 percent of that expenditure. The rest is scattered among thousands of local conservation NGOs, many of them created by the larger organizations when funders insist some money be regranted to local groups. Indigenous communities receive virtually none of it. P. xviii

Indigenous people and their supporters are still patiently waiting for the first BINGO to step forward and actively oppose an eviction executed anywhere in the world in the interest of conservation. P. 63

Hard as it might be for Western scientists to believe, there is a huge body of remarkable sound science that has never found its way into textbooks. Anthropologists call it 'traditional ecological knowledge' and those who pay close attention to its teachings are eventually amazed by its precision and sophistication. P. 105

Australians, native and nonnative alike, speak of the 'two toolboxes' for natural resource management -- the Aboriginal toolbox and the scientific toolbox. The native toolbox is loaded with philosophy, cosmology and a body of ancient law that defines the tenure and responsibilities of people in country. P. 116

When you visit a community, walk in, don't fly. P. 221

The Convention on Biological Diversity documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions still run the highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas, most of it in placed occupied by human beings. If we really want people to live in harmony with nature, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out of it. P. 266

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Conversation
ron mader: Starting off ...

Mark, thank you for joining us in this slow conversation. You've written some of my favorite books that describe the current state of the environment and the challenges facing the global conservation movement. One of the treads that connect Losing Ground, American Foundations and Conservation Refugees is that there is a severe disconnect between those working at the grassroots and those in charge of finance. Has the situation changed at all in the past decade? It seems like nothing has been learned.

mark dowie: The funders of transnational conservation still appear to favor five very large, global organizations headquartered in Washington (aka. The BINGOs ..... Big International NGOs). I attribute this largely to an institutional laziness inside foundations and other funding agencies that encourages grant makers to make one large multi-million dollar grant to a BINGO rather than ten smaller grants to as many grassroots, local groups. It's a matter of convenience, it being much easier to monitor one big grant than ten small ones. But it is not efficient from the standpoint of conservation, and has resulted in the creation of five, institutionally bloated organizations pretty much controlling the global conservation agenda, and not very effectively, when the measurements of biological diversity and species survive al are taken into account.

ron mader: I'd love to see a public rating of organization x's active engagement of the local population, timely communication, participation in local events and overall success rate, though I'd give higher marks to public consultation than immediate success because it's more important to win people over to your side than to figure out how to succeed (or hide a failure). Are there any systems by which the organizations themselves are evaluated? Brainstorming, what are the criteria you'd suggest by which NGO efforts could be measured or ranked?

mark dowie: Not a bad idea. There is, as you may know, several organizations that rate eco-tourism outfitters, guides and lodges along some of those very lines. But rating services works better when actual consumers are involved, people who want to know that they are paying to travel with an organization or to a lodge that really takes all of those factors into account. Large international, donor-dependent NGO's with their massive PR offices and media reach would, I believe, be able to override whatever negative ratings they received. But I'm sure if someone wanted to try a rating service, one or more foundations would fund it.

From the Publisher
Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In //Conservation Refugees,// Mark Dowie tells this story.

This is a "good guy vs. good guy" story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples’ movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve species and ecosystem diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The result: thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or "assimilated" but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the economy.

Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters between native peoples and conservation. He then describes the experiences of other groups, ranging from the Ogiek and Maasai of eastern Africa and the Pygmies of Central Africa to the Karen of Thailand and the Adevasis of India. He also discusses such issues as differing definitions of "nature" and "wilderness," the influence of the "BINGOs" (Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy), the need for Western scientists to respect and honor traditional lifeways, and the need for native peoples to blend their traditional knowledge with the knowledge of modern ecology. When conservationists and native peoples acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival, Dowie writes, they can together create a new and much more effective paradigm for conservation.

[|MIT Press]

[|The Wrong Path to Conservation - The Nation]
[|When protecting nature means kicking people out - Orion]