The affluent white liberal conservation movement is actually destroying the very biodiversity of nature that constitutes the essential moral underpinning of their movement. Large corporations buying off environmentalist pressure with increasing amounts of money to the large non-profit, non-governmental organizations are only making matters worse for the planet. This remarkable analysis appearing in Orion Online is a must read.
Conservation Refugees: 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.Wilderness is the purest form of nature in the minds of many environmentalists and wilderness to them means land free of human inhabitants. Only when the permanent presence of human life is removed is it possible for nature to return to pristine perfection. The problem is that humans are part of nature and removing poor and defenseless native people from areas larger than the entire continent of Africa is bastard form of European colonialism, crueler and more destructive than the past. The irony is that you can’t love nature without loving mankind because we are an inseparable aspect of the whole.
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.
