Just what is being protected?


Native peoples are being forced out of their homelands in the name of conservation
Here is one I bet you won't see in the next report of the "evils of capitalism." Mark Dowie writes it up for Orion.

However, when the reserves were formally designated as national parks in 1991 and a bureaucracy was created and funded by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility to manage them, a rumor was in circulation that the Batwa were hunting and eating silverback gorillas, which by that time were widely recognized as a threatened species and also, increasingly, as a featured attraction for ecotourists from Europe and America. Gorillas were being disturbed and even poached, the Batwa admitted, but by Bahutu, Batutsi, Bantu, and other tribes who invaded the forest from outside villages. The Batwa, who felt a strong kinship with the great apes, adamantly denied killing them. Nonetheless, under pressure from traditional Western conservationists, who had come to believe that wilderness and human community were incompatible, the Batwa were forcibly expelled from their homeland.

These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation.

Tomas Mtwandi, who was born in the Mgahinga and evicted with his family when he was fourteen, is adapting slowly and reluctantly to modern life. He is employed as an indentured laborer for a local Bantu farmer and is raising a family in a one-room shack near the Bwindi park border. He is regarded as rich by his neighbors because his roof doesn't leak and he has a makeshift metal door on his mud-wall home. As a "registered resource user," Mtwandi is permitted to harvest honey from the Bwindi and pay an occasional visit to the graves of his ancestors in the Mgahinga, but he does so at the risk of being mistaken for a poacher and shot on sight by paid wardens from neighboring tribes. His forest knowledge is waning, and his family's nutrition is poor. In the forest they had meat, roots, fruit, and a balanced diet. Today they have a little money but no meat. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.

It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Which is more important, perception of the land or the people who live there?

Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - November 20, 2005 at 04:48 AM  Tag


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