'Problems in paradise', Mark Dowie, SF Chronicle

Thought this was an interesting piece on some unintended consequences of establishing conservation preserves on the scale seen in Africa and India.

Problems in paradise
How making new parks and wildlife preserves creates millions of conservation refugees around the world

Mark Dowie

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Bangkok, Thailand -- Against the wall of a large meeting room packed with committed environmentalists stands Martin Saning'o. The Masai leader from Tanzania listens intently to a panel discussing the human factor in conservation, and patiently awaits an invitation to comment. He stands out as the only black man in the room. When his turn comes, Saning'o speaks softly in slightly accented but perfect English, describing how nomadic herdsmen once protected the vast range in eastern Africa they had lost during the past 30 years.

"Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems," he explains to an audience he knows to be schooled in Western ecological sciences. He then tries to fathom the strange version of land management that had been imposed on and impoverished his people, more than 100,000 of whom have been displaced from northern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Their culture is destroyed and they live in poverty because none of them was fairly compensated for their land. This has all been done, Saning'o says, in the interest of conservation, which saddens him, he says, because he truly believes that "we were the original conservationists." Now he tells the room of stunned enviros, "you have made us enemies of conservation."

<snip>

Saning'o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of native people who share a common plight in conservation. The movement began in 1920 when a small delegation of pastoral nomads showed up at the door of the newly instituted League of Nations. All they sought was recognition and some protection from this new international body. They were turned away.

Undeterred, indigenous people from every nation have since been traveling in increasing numbers to international conventions like the Earth Summit in Rio and to the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, in September 2003, where Nelson Mandela pled with conservationists not to turn their backs on rural economies, and to treat Africa's native people as fairly as they would their own.

Encouraged by his remarks, the Indigenous Peoples' Forum, created expressly for the Congress, declared: "First we were dispossessed in the name of kings and emperors, later in the name of state development, and now in the name of conservation."

<much more>

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/11/INGN7IIL3E24.DTL&hw=Problems+in+paradise&sn=001&sc=1000

http://www.ashoka.org/fellows/viewprofile3.cfm?reid=144032

Mr Kariongi has been involved in Masai welfare issues for many years, and is well known as a powerful voice in the role of indigenous peoples as conservators of the planet. He should be much more widely known than he is.

Perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of the current 'conservation' movement is that it is largely controlled by the very white, middle-class people that, arguably, caused the crisis in the first place. In much of current conservationalist thinking is the presumption that indigenous peoples have little to contribute to the debate. Conversely, some 'radical' elements in the movement regard indigenous peoples as the last word in environmental management. Both views are based on fallacious assumptions about the role humans play in ecosystems and, perhaps more importantly, Western views about 'native wisdom' and other racist concepts.

Mr Kariongi has spent years working to correct these bigotries and mistaken assumptions. What he achieves will be of value not only to the Masai, but to all humanity.