http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie.html
LOW FOG ENVELOPES the steep and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most
mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in
chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense
montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects
and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in
this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that
early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna
of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist
noted, "part of the fauna."
In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international
conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and
other extractive interests. In response, three forest reserves were
createdthe Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindiall of which overlapped
with the Batwa's ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply
existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa
stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the
diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.
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.
Photograph | John Martin / Conservation International
These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first
came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are
living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without
running water or sanitation. In one more generation their forest-based
culturesongs, rituals, traditions, and storieswill be gone.
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.
In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the
ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the
territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft
declaration states: "Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from
their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free
and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after
agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the
option to return." During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not
identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still
a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and
biggest enemy was "conservation."
Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the
International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed
a declaration stating that the "activities of conservation organizations
now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous
lands." These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation
community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two
of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task
for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
"We are enemies of conservation," declared Maasai leader Martin Saning'o,
standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress
sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over
the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation
projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn't always felt that way. In fact,
Saning'o reminded his audience, "...we were the original conservationists."
The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic
cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: "Our ways of farming
pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between
ecosystems." Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land
conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred
thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti
Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly
compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.
"We don't want to be like you," Saning'o told a room of shocked white
faces. "We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You
cannot accomplish conservation without us."
Although he might not have realized it, Saning'o was speaking for a growing
worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as
conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugeespeople
forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought,
desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate
chaosconservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily,
either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The
gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called "soft eviction" or
"voluntary resettlement," though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard,
the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at
meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation
often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five
big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they
have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs. Indigenous peoples
are often left out of the process entirely.
(clip)
--
www.marxmail.org
