The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That’s an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa writes Mark Dowie in the latest issue of Orion magazine.
Mark writes that he was curious about “this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people” and visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories he heard.
He concludes:
“Many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake – not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.
More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan – particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.
I don’t think it is as simple as Mark suggests.
There are instances where even recent arrivals, for example foresters in the Pilliga-Goonoo region of north west New South Wales, have been excluded from forest areas they were sustainably harvesting. While there are indigenous groups who have access to, for example, power boats for hunting dugongs, and appear to be harvesting beyond the sustainable capacity of these populations.
I have some sympathy for Duke University’s John Terborgh position which is, “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says.
According to Mark Dowie, John Terborgh bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer.
I hope that the Machiguenga people do acquire guns and motorboats. I don’t suggest that this be a reason for preventing their access to Manu National Park, but there will be a need to determine quota for sustainable harvest. And the only way to be sure any system is working is to have a proper monitoring program in place.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.