la_vie_noire | (no subject)

I'm still on my very credible hiatus, but wonderful

the_future_modernes wrote a magnificent, well-researched and extensive post about Conservationist Refugees: What happens when Western Environmentalists join forces with corporations? They end up creating Conservation Refugees.

Internets? I am so fucking angry right now. Why? I saw this two days ago: Thanks to GM, People Are Being Displaced So Their Forests Can Become Offsets for SUVs. and I’m thinking what the everloving fuck????? Then I am meandering about on Daily Kos and I see a book review for Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples (AMazon has it cheaper and then there are used books and the library, of course.

Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie tells this story.

This is a “good guy vs. good guy” story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples’ movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve species and ecosystem diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The result: thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or “assimilated” but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the economy.

Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters between native peoples and conservation. He then describes the experiences of other groups, ranging from the Ogiek and Maasai of eastern Africa and the Pygmies of Central Africa to the Karen of Thailand and the Adevasis of India. He also discusses such issues as differing definitions of “nature” and “wilderness,” the influence of the “BINGOs” (Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy), the need for Western scientists to respect and honor traditional lifeways, and the need for native peoples to blend their traditional knowledge with the knowledge of modern ecology. When conservationists and native peoples acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival, Dowie writes, they can together create a new and much more effective paradigm for conservation.

Indeed. It appears that the book recced in my earlier post did not but scratch the surface of what appears to be widespread fuckery on behalf of white western environmental organizations, who seem to have this quaint notion that the best way to fix their society’s poisoning of the earth and sea, by practicing environmental neo-colonialism.

It has lot of awesome links, but I can put them in the quote up there because my computer doesn't have the < > keys and copy-pasting is a pain in the ass. Yeah, I don't know how to configure a keyboard, sue me!

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I know not very much more than nothing about this issue, but what I do know is enough for anger and frustration. Unquestionably, it seems to me, a big part of the problem is the Western--maybe the better term here, though, is "Northern"?--conservationists' preconceptions about the nature of the nature they're trying to preserve. The common idea is that these places are "natural" and "untouched" when they may very well be some of the most intensely human-manipulated places on earth. If that were widely known and accepted, the conversation would be very different. But instead it's playing out in the same old inequitable ways. Blech.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Andrea Smith covers a lot of those aspects in "Conquest". Pretty good read.

very much the same battle is playing out here in Maine, and my fam is one of many in the middle of it.

The locals have even given it the name: "rural cleansing" as well as many players in the game. They range from poor whites, native peoples, displaced poc families like my own, Radical white anarchist Greenpeace types, Earth First! skullthumpers, Monsanto, and liberals in Southern Maine.

http://www.ruralcleansing.net/
http://prfamerica.org/speeches/6th/Rural-Cleansing-Maine.html
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_16440.cfm
http://www.city-data.com/forum/maine/245351-lurc-its-new-propsed-clup.html

Forcing rural people out of our land is becoming more and more common among the conservation types, and, honestly, it's hard to tell the difference between them and the corporations that pollute our planet.

Ah. Beautiful. As always, middle classed white people always know better what's best for Earth! You know, I would give them half of the economical problems displaced people have, and let see if they want to focus in screwing poor people instead, of, you know, focusing in big Energy Corporations.

.... MONSANTO doing rural cleasing? ..... MONSANTO. They want to.. help Earth? What.

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Rural Cleansing

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Re: Rural Cleansing