A glimpse at the global movement to decolonize Protected Areas and return their stewardship to Indigenous people and local communities
Stop. Listen. The world is slowing down. The pace of geopolitical and technological change may be frenetic but human stories are unfolding at a slower pace. Countless voices have yet to be heard. Voices of people who live their lives away from the headlines. True stories that force us to acknowledge our mistakes and rethink our worldviews. There is a lot of unlearning to do.
In conservation the narrative is being shaped by the decolonization of Protected Areas, dismantling wildlife protection systems built on the notion of Euro-North American superiority and local exclusion. Since the 1950s and 60s, big conservation organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature have perpetuated “fortress conservation” policies, which seek to protect natural areas by excluding human activities within them.
Consequent of Big Wildlife’s clout, countless Indigenous and local communities across the world have been forcibly removed from their lands in the name of Protected Areas, leading to the loss of culture, livelihoods, and identity. Indigenous tribes were removed during the inception of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and Virunga National Park in Rwanda, to name but a few.
As we begin to decolonize conservation and reconcile for past mistakes, we are hearing the stories of the subalterns — people who were socially, politically, and geographically excluded from Protected Areas across the world. Many new voices are speaking out.
“We know our lands,” says Kipchumba Rotich, of the Sengwer tribe in Kenya. “We know our territories. We’ve been conserving these areas better than they’re able to. These lands are still there because we lived in them and conserved them over centuries. We want them to use us to conserve these lands. They will be able to see the difference that will come.”
As a Canadian of French and British heritage who grew up in Africa and Asia, I am acquainted with colonial systems and post-colonial struggles. I witnessed first hand the systematic subalternization of colonial populations and, as a White expatriate, enjoyed a surfeit of privileges that they were denied. Consequently, I am keenly aware of White privilege.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s my father was a management consultant for the United Nations which took him to over a dozen newly independent countries to help them transform their systems in the post-colonial era. Dad’s work typified the trend back then — First World expert mansplaining development to Third World neophytes — a legacy of White man’s burden. Later in his career, however, he focused more on grassroots initiatives and small scale enterprises and began to listen to the knowledge of Indigenous people. I am now the same age he was when he began working with First Nations in British Columbia. That’s where my work as a grant writer has recently taken me. And it has opened my eyes.
“First Nations title, rights, and sovereignty are crucial to the health and sustainability of lands and waters in the unceded and/or treaty territories across what is referred to as British Columbia. As the inherent rights-holders of these lands and waters who have protected and cared for them for millennia, First Nations in BC must have a central role in decisions and stewardship of these lands and waters.”
No, these are is not the words of a marginalized Indigenous group remonstrating against the European settler establishment of Canada’s westernmost province. It is a statement by the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia (REFBC). Established 40 years ago by the provincial government and the province’s real estate industry, REFBC has donated $100 million+ in grants for socially just land use, projects aimed at bringing about relationships between people and land in BC — an area larger than France and Germany combined. (Ever wondered where the interest from your deposit goes when you buy a home in BC. To REFBC.)
Five years ago REFBC had a epiphany and decided to completely change direction. As CEO Mark Gifford stated in a recent letter, “We are trying to start and stay on a path of reconciliation that is grounded in truth. We are striving to embrace the opportunities of working in the spirit of reciprocity, building good relationships, decolonizing our ways of knowing and working, and upholding the rights and responsibilities of First Nations and Indigenous Peoples.”
Central to their commitment is taking steps to uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). In 2019, British Columbia became the first jurisdiction on Earth to sign UNDRIP into law. “We made a solemn commitment,” said Murray Rankin, BC’s minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation. “Everybody in the legislature stood up that day to say we agree with the Declaration Act, and now we’re putting meat on the bones.”
While much work still needs to be done to unpack 175 years of public policy grounded in denial of First Nations rights, recent developments have been notable. Last April, the Haida Nation acquired aboriginal title to the entirety of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago of more than 200 Pacific islands. Since June, the Klinse-Za conservation area in the province’s north-east has been co-managed by two First Nations. And July saw the launch of the Great Bear Sea initiative, a network of marine protected areas spanning an area the size of Iceland off BC’s north coast that will be co-managed by 17 coastal nations.
The BC government must now share its decision-making power over land management with First Nations, which could affect licences for forestry, mining and construction. It’s a massive step forward that puts the province in the lead globally for decolonization.
In my memoir, Gorilla Tactics: How to Save a Species I describe meeting Mwamba Shete, assistant director of the East African Wildlife Society on my first ever business trip to Africa in September 1992. He picked me up at Nairobi airport and, on our way into town, we talked about the issue of people versus wildlife.
“For centuries, Africans lived side by side with wildlife in a symbiotic arrangement,” he said. “The land and wildlife surrounding a village were considered communal property. And because animals provided food and other products vital to the survival of the community, they received special protection. Then along came the Europeans with their conservation policies. Suspicious of our intentions and abilities, they fenced off protected areas, established ranger patrols, and severed our connection to wildlife and ecology.”
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK (DFGF UK), which I ran for 17 years, is a conservation organization set up by the American conservationist after whom it was later named, to save mountain gorillas. Built on the hubris of woman who believed the gorilla habitat was her own personal domain and who would shoot above the heads of uninvited visitors if they ventured too close, the organization was firmly rooted in the concept of fortress conservation.
Nevertheless, during my tenure (which began 5 years after her death) we designed and implemented an award-winning grassroots community conservation program, one of the earliest of its kind, around the mountain gorilla habitats: Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and the Virunga Volcanoes on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and DRCongo.
If the people living adjacent to the gorillas gained some benefit from their protection, they could become the front line of their conservation. Many African wildlife parks at the time were distributing a portion of their gate fees to communities, thereby incentivizing them to respect the park, but the locals had no stake in it. They were excluded from decision-making.
Our strategy was different. We recognized the people living next to the gorillas as stakeholders and included them in our strategic planning process. We demonstrated the consequences that encroachment into the park would have on their own livelihoods. In Rwanda, honey collection was a problem. Local honey collectors would tramp into the forest and use bundles of burning sticks to smoke out the bees from wild beehives before collecting the honey. Occasionally fires started, with dire consequences for the gorillas and the bees. So we brought in robust hives and partnered with a Rwandan beekeeping NGO to teach them modern bee-keeping. They soon saw the wisdom of setting up hives outside the forest and letting just the bees venture inside. The result was more honey, so we then teamed up with the honey marketing board to find a market for the surplus.
We faced an uphill struggle. Critics of our Afrocentric, economic-based approach to wildlife conservation were manifold. One of our own patrons, Lady Kleinwort, whose support was worth £50,000 a year, cut us off: “Important as it doubtlessly is to run small business initiatives in Rwanda in order to create alternative sources of livelihood for resident communities,” she wrote in a letter, “we should like our giving to be more directly involved in gorilla conservation itself.” Nonetheless, we stood proudly by our commitment to the people who lived by the gorillas.
Our partner organization in the United States cut us off too. They completely misunderstood what we were trying to do in these communities. “I didn’t join this organization to save people,” grumbled Judge Musgrave, a trustee on their board. We would officially part company with them after a protracted legal process that forced us to give up the name “Dian Fossey”. That’s how strongly they felt about maintaining fortress conservation.
Ashley Dawson’s book, Decolonizing Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common, contains accounts from Indigenous people across globe who have been marginalized by fortress conservation. One account from the Sengwer tribe in Kenya claims they were evicted at gunpoint from the Cherangani Hills with conservation funding from the EU, World Bank and IUCN.
“After we were evicted,” says Kipchumba Rotich, “we lost control of the forests. Other communities living around the forest could now access the forest and they began overstocking livestock in the forest. We lost control…we are facing ethnocide because we are being forced to assimilate into other tribes outside the forest. Within a few years there will not be a single person speaking our Indigenous Sengwer language, because we are being swallowed up by larger tribes.”
It’s condescending to suggest conservation cannot be managed by the people who have the most to gain from it. Forest conservation has been practiced by Africans for centuries. A driving force behind the Bantu migrations that took place between 3,000 and 500 years ago was iron smelting, a cornerstone of Bantu societies. Iron smelting allowed them to produce tools and weapons that gave them an advantage over other groups. These tools improved agriculture, making previously uncultivated land arable, and facilitated hunting, woodworking, and defence. As communities exhausted firewood supplies near their settlements, they moved to new areas with abundant resources, spreading their technologies and cultures as they went and leaving behind the deforested areas to regenerate and flourish again in their absence.
The Bantus moved southward from the shores of Lake Victoria into the Congo basin, following the Albertine Rift Valley, which brought them into contact with Indiginous groups such as the Batwa pygmies. Batwas had shared the Albertine forests with gorillas and chimpanzees since time immemorial. The Rift’s volcanic, nutrient-rich soil was a boon to agriculture and so the Bantu migrants stayed and grew bananas. They valued the Batwa for their forest knowledge and archery skills. Meanwhile the Batwa and great apes coexisted symbiotically in the afromontane forests until the 1990s when, under pressure from Big Wildlife, they were evicted from the newly gazetted Protected Areas. Now, as a landless, homeless people without access to their traditional foods and medicines, they are forced to beg on the streets in the towns and villages.
Survival is campaigning to end carbon offset projects in Protected Areas where the rights of Indigenous peoples are violated.
Fortress conservation also impacts food security. Writing for The Conversation, an independent news outlet, Terry Sunderland argues, “Conservation, especially when modelled on notions of ‘pristine nature’ — environments untouched by human influence — can create obstacles by limiting access to important food sources.” He says, if we are to achieve both biodiversity conservation and dietary outcomes, we must shift from strict fortress conservation to more integrated, sustainable use of rural landscapes. “Biodiverse wild and naturalized species are integral in rural food consumption, contributing to diverse diets, better nutrition and overall health and well-being, often for the poorest members of society,” he says.
My unlearning began in 2003 when I paid a visit to Professor Rudolf Rÿser in Olympia, WA. Rÿser devoted more than 25 years to developing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and was a leading spokesperson for Fourth World political development and governance, tribal/state conflict resolution and international cooperation between indigenous nations.
It was a brisk and sunny day in the Pacific Northwest. Snow capped volcanoes loomed in the distance. Seagulls swooped between fishing boats and pleasure cruisers, and riggings pealed in the sea breezes. I rang the doorbell at the address I had been given, a house in the suburbs. A woman answered the door, said she didn’t know of any Rudolph Rÿser and sent me away. I pulled over a block away and called. “Oh, that was you?” said a voice on the phone. “Please come back.” Rÿser apologized for the furtive behaviour. “Since 9/11, the US government has been keeping a close eye on us,” he said. “Our work puts us in league with Indigenous groups who, because of their struggles, are deemed ‘terrorists’.”
I had come to seek his advice on working with the Batwa who had been evicted from the gorilla habitat. He spoke for 3 hours, made me listen and not interrupt and asked profound questions like, “Is the invention of the toaster really progress when it replaces gatherings round the fire with friends to toast bread?” He was a warm and generous spirit who gave me his time and knowledge. It was my first experience of Indigenous consciousness.
Using maps, he showed me how many Protected Areas, especially in South America, had lost their integrity after the Indigenous tribes who lived there were evicted. He derided my superciliousness, unequivocally assuring me that the Batwa’s right to those forests were not ours to take away, nor to give. “They must simply return to the forest,” he said.
Hundreds of millions of dollars continue to pour into keeping Africans out of Africa’s Protected Areas, and to create new Protected Areas. Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge fund billionaire from Memphis, Tennessee who bought a private reserve on the edge of Serengeti for $90 million is a case in point. In a recent interview in The Times Jones, who is a stalwart proponent of fortress conservation in Africa, said, “Populations are expanding so quickly that you have to pick and choose iconic areas and ring-fence them. So if you are going to protect landscapes, you have to pick them now and get as many resources as fast as possible.”
The Times went on to say, “Jones has influence not just because he understands the world of conservation [sic], but also because he has access to huge amounts of money.” In 2018, he bankrolled a gathering of conservation grandees hosted by Prince William at Buckingham Palace in London. Dubbed “Conservation Thought Leadership”, it brought together leaders, philanthropists, conservationists and strategists from Big Wildlife, ostensibly to perpetuate conservation policies that are top-down, repressive and militantly exclusive. “Preserving and even expanding these areas is what the conservation fight in Africa is about,” says Jones.
Someone ought to tell Mr Jones that, no matter how rich you are, buying up African land with no regard to Indigenous rights is a human rights abuse.
“Philanthropy never does well when it tries to use money to single-handedly muscle the world into its preferred shape,” says Ken Wilson in Mongabay magazine. Wilson has been working at the confluence of community rights, biocultural diversity, and philanthropy for the better part of 40 years. He says he is optimistic, he has seen a broad shift in conservation and conservation philanthropy toward more inclusive and community-oriented approaches beyond establishing strict protected areas.
Wilson is an advocate of “biocultural diversity“ which has recently gained momentum in conservation, helping to raise the profile of Indigenous rights and knowledge. Since the mid-2010s, many philanthropic foundations and “mainstream“ conservation NGOs have shifted toward more inclusive and community-oriented approaches, rather than strictly reinforcing Protected Areas.
Wilson says the concept of biocultural diversity has been embraced because “it is a term that somehow invites attention to the connections – tangible and intangible – between local cultures, territorial governance systems, sustainable livelihood traditions and the experience of sacredness.” Slowness and patience is key to this approach, and listening.
“Successful programs are those that somehow integrate livelihoods, lively creatures and community-building, alongside water cycles, song cycles and reporting requirements. The most generative efforts are those where other beings also somehow get their voice in, and the ones where people who had been divided get to know each other’s hearts. Change happens both chaotically and in waves, and at the speed of the seasons and with how fast trees grow. Waving a measuring tape at things doesn’t encourage the deeper kinds of change to happen.”
As far as I’m concerned, the writing’s on the wall for fortress conservation. It’s time to decolonize Protected Areas and embrace rights-based conservation. Coming to this realization has been a road-to-Damascus moment for me. It resonates with much of what I know about conservation, and with what I should know. Ken Wilson says what’s needed is “solid, listening and accountable allies who can bridge institutions and mindsets; who can back the restitution and devolution of rights and resources; and who can co-deploy new educational approaches to share suitably decolonized technical skills deep across grassroots movements.”
My eyes and ears are open. I’m slowing down to look and listen with an open mind and an open heart. I’m ready to hear stories that help me unlearn the untruths I’ve held so dear throughout my conservation career. And I’m ready to share my knowledge with new friends and weave new paths. Where better for me to begin than in the only place on Earth that has enshrined Indigenous rights into law, the area known as British Columbia. I’m home at last. If any of this resonates with you, the reader, please get in touch.
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More resources:
Decolonize Conservation – Survival International
To protect nature, bring down the walls of fortress conservation by Irene Wabiwa Betoko and Savio Carvalho
The Oakland Institute | Reframing the Debate Inspiring Action
How indigenous conservation protects Canada’s environment by Kira Walker
How to Decolonize Conservation by Erica Gies