Click on the image to see a larger version.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is on a full hunger strike
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson’s Video Message to Canadians
April 6th Statement
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is on a full hunger strike and has not consumed any food or water since April 3rd, 2013 at 9:00am.
Raymond will remain on hunger strike until Prime Minister Stephen
Harper agrees to meet with First Nations leaders on a Nation-to-Nation
basis;On Friday Raymond met with Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt only to have the Minister literally laugh in his face and refuse his request without any negotiation. Raymond offered to end his hunger strike in return for a meeting between First Nations Chiefs and the Prime Minister on a Nation to Nation basis.
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is putting his LIFE on the line, his demands are not unreasonable, and Stephen Harper must ACT NOW to save his life.
Monday morning will mark Grand Elder Raymond’s 5th day without food or water. It is unbelievable, and unacceptable, that this country has come to a point where First Nations Peoples are literally starving themselves just to get a meeting from a Prime Minister who is enacting radical genocidal legislation taking aim at First Nations, the environment, and the Canadian people.
Join us Monday night for candle light vigils across the country to send a strong message to Harper that Canada needs to begin to heal the wounds of hundreds of years of colonial, assimilationist, and paternal legislation.
Let’s stay peaceful, raise awareness, and come together as one in these difficult times that will un undoubtedly mark Canadian history forever.
Host an event in your town. 1) Pick a spot, 2) Create an event using this text 3) Send us the link
Take ACTION NOW!
RaymondRobinson.org
Communique 6 Avril
Grand Elder Robinson est en grève de la faim complète et n’a pas consommé de nourriture ni d’eau depuis le 3 Avril 2013 à 9:00 am.
Raymond restera en grève de la faim jusqu’à ce que le Premier ministre Stephen Harper accepte de rencontrer les chefs des Premières nations sur une base de nation à nation;
Vendredi, Raymond a rencontré le ministre des Affaires autochtones Bernard Valcourt. Celui ci lui a littéralement ri dans la figure et a refusé d’accéder à sa requête sans aucune négociation. Raymond a offert de mettre fin à sa grève de la faim en échange d’une rencontre entre les chefs des Premières nations et le Premier ministre sur une base de nation à nation.
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson met sa VIE en jeu, ses demandes ne sont pas irraisonables, et Stephen Harper doit AGIR MAINTENANT pour sauver sa vie.
Lundi matin marquera le 5e jour sans nourriture ni eau de Grand Elder Raymond. Il est incroyable, et inacceptable, que ce pays soit rendu au point où les peuples des Premières Nations se laissent littéralement mourrir de faim juste pour obtenir une rencontre d’un Premier ministre qui met en vigueur une législation génocidaire radicale ciblant les Premières nations, l’environnement, et le peuple canadien.
Joignez-vous à nous lundi soir pour des vigiles à la chandelles à travers le pays, afin de signaler clairement à Harper que le Canada doit commencer à soigner les blessures causées par des centaines d’années de législation coloniale, assimilationiste et paternaliste.
Restons pacifiques, éveillons les consciences, et unissons-nous en ces temps difficiles qui marqueront sans aucun doute l’histoire canadienne à jamais.
AGISSONS maintenant!
RaymondRobinson.org
———————————————————————————————————-
Statement from Grand Elder Raymond Robinson
For immediate release, Friday, April 5th 2013
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson will be meeting with the
Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt this afternoon. He will
be arriving at 2:00 pm, 30 minutes before the meeting which is scheduled
for 2:30 pm. He will also be available for comment immediately
following the meeting.
Grand Elder Robinson is praying for two things. The first
is that Prime Minister Harper remove new sections added to First
Nation’s comprehensive funding agreements that seek to implement recent
changes in government policy including bills C-38 and C-45. He is
unhappy that First Nations are being “blackmailed” into signing the
agreements or risk having their funding cut off.
The second is for the government of Canada to begin a
meaningful “Nation to Nation” relationship and dialogue. Grand Elder
Robinson also points out that Prime Minister Harper has not followed
through on the commitments made in the January 11th meetings. PM Harper
has not met with First Nations leadership “in the coming weeks” as
promised, nor did he send a representative from the PMO to the AFN’s
Treaty Forum held in saskatchewan last week.
By 2:30 this afternoon Grand Elder Robinson will have been
without food or water since April 3ed at 9:00am, which will bring the
hour count to 53.5
Today’s meeting will be held at:
Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada
Terrasses de la Chaudière
10 Wellington, North Tower
Gatineau, Quebec
Postal Address:
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H4
More Information: RaymondRobinson.org
Twitter: @GERayRobinson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrandElderRaymondRobinson
Friday, April 5, 2013
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary)
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 1/2
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 2/2
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 2/2
Thursday, April 4, 2013
The Life and Brutal Death of Sister Dorothy, a Rainforest Martyr On the Lawless Fringe of Brazil's Amazon Jungle - Where Illegal Loggers Have Devastated the Rainforest - the American Nun Dorothy Stang Defended the Poor,Then the Gunmen Came for Her
|
by Andrew Buncombe
| |
Sister Dorothy Stang lived among those who wanted her dead. When they finally
came for her she read passages from the Bible to her killers. They listened
for a moment, then fired. Her body was found face down in the mud, blood
staining the back of her white blouse.
The town of Anapu, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is
most notable for the dust that clogs its streets and for the number of
shops selling chain-saws. It is also the place that Sister Dorothy
called home for more than 30 years and where she organised her efforts
to try to protect the rainforest and its people from disastrous and
often illegal exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. Now Anapu will
be known as the place where Sister Dorothy is buried.
It has also highlighted the problem for the Brazilian government of balancing a desire to protect the rainforest with pressure to open tracts of forest to support strong economic growth as demanded by the International Monetary Fund, which loaned Brazil billions of dollars following a recession in 2002. Such a conflict of interests has hindered attempts by the authorities to fulfil the promise of the left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to find homes for 400,000 landless families. The promise is badly off target and showing no signs of rapid improvement. The President immediately ordered a full-scale investigation into Sister Dorothy's death and dispatched two members of his cabinet to the region, an area that is notorious for violence, crime and slave labour. One of those who was sent, Nilmario Miranda, the government's secretary for human rights, said before setting off: "Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honour for us. This is intolerable." Sister Dorothy was in the Boa Esperanca settlement when she was killed. She was travelling with two peasants to a meeting to discuss a settlement for the area, which has apparently been granted to peasants by the federal government but which is sought by loggers. The two men travelling with her escaped unhurt and may be able to identify the killers to police, reports suggest. While the suspects' names have not yet been released, Sister Dorothy's supporters say there is little doubt as to who was responsible. While the local people called her Dora or "the angel of the Trans-Amazonian", loggers and other opponents called her a "terrorist" and accused of supplying guns to the peasants. The Pastoral Land Commission of the Roman Catholic Church, which she worked for, said in a statement: "The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing. The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past that we had thought was closed." Sister Dorothy was originally from Dayton, Ohio, where she attended Julienne High School. It was while she was a student that she decided to become a nun and when she left school she joined the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Cincinnati. The order, founded in France in the early 18th century by Marie Rose Julie Billiart, is an proponent of liberation theology and social justice. Its mission statement dedicates the order to "take our stand with poor people especially women and children, in the most abandoned places". Her beliefs took her to Brazil in the 1960s and it was there, in the vast Para region, which encompasses large tracts of rainforest, that she found her calling - despite the obvious dangers she faced. Just two weeks ago, Sister Dorothy met Mr Miranda, the human rights secretary, and told him of the death threats that she and others had received and asked for the government's help and protection. Sister Elizabeth Bowyer, a senior nun at the Cincinnati convent, said yesterday that she believed Sister Dorothy may have realised she was going to be killed at some point even though she told her friends and colleagues that her status as a nun would offer a level of protection. "She knew she was on the death list. She said she would be protected because of her age and because she was a nun - she was wrong," she said. "We don't know who hired the gunmen but we know the loggers and ranchers were very upset by what she was doing. She was working with the human rights people to protect the small farmers who have been given the right to the land." The stakes could not have been higher. Greenpeace estimates that 90 per cent of the timber in Para is illegally logged. The danger of speaking out against such exploitation could barely have been greater. Campaigners say Para has the country's highest rate of deaths related to land battles. Greenpeace said that more than 40 per cent of the murders between 1985 and 2001 were related to such disputes. The Brazilian human rights group Justica Global said 73 rural workers were murdered in 2003 - 33 of them in Para. Last year 53 were killed. Of those, 19 were killed in Para. "The government is simply not giving adequate protection," said the group's director, Sandra Carvalho. "We think its actions in the region are extremely weak. The government put together a programme to deal with these problems but it is being carried out at such a slow pace. The government has not managed to carry out the land reforms it spelt out before coming to power. What they have done is far below what we anticipated." She added: "There is constant conflict with very few convictions because there is a culture of impunity. Generally these conflicts involve landowners and landless rural workers ... Dora was killed because she stood up to these people." And yet this fight appeared to energise the sprightly 74-year-old. Samuel Clements, 24, a student film-maker from Britain who spent the summer of 2003 filming Sister Dorothy's work, said she seemed to become a different, more animated person once she left dusty Anapu and travelled into the jungle to meet with the small farmers and peasants. In addition to fighting to preserve the rainforest she was helping encourage small-scale, sustainable agriculture. In a recent letter to Mr Clements, she wrote: "Our forest is being overtaken by the others daily ... Together we can make a difference." Mr Clements also believed Sister Dorothy may have had a premonition of the fate that awaited her and yet she still looked for the best in people. "She said once 'Humanity is like a fruit bowl, with all the different fruit - black, white and yellow - so different and yet all part of it'. She had incredible energy even though she was fighting incredible battles," he said. L�cio Flavio Pinto, an investigative journalist in the region who produces a weekly newspaper, Jornal Pessoal, knew Sister Dorothy since the 1970s. He has also been campaigning against the same people she was taking on and has also been on the receiving end of threats. "There were many people who wanted to kill Sister Dorothy," he said yesterday, speaking from the city of Belem, the state capital. It was to Belem that Sister Dorothy's body was taken on Sunday for a post-mortem examination and where dozens of supporters gathered outside the mortuary singing hymns and holding placards calling for an end to the rampant crime. Claudio Guimaraes, director of the state's forensic science institute, said it appeared that the gunmen were about 18 inches away from Sister Dorothy when they shot her. In Ohio she was remembered at a series of services which recalled her dedication and courage. "Sister Dorothy in her ministering to the poor remained faithful. We honour those who die for their faith," said Father Dennis Caylor, pastor at St Rafael church in the suburb of Springfield. And from those who worked with the nun, there were promises that the effort she had undertaken would continue despite her death. Mariana Silva, president of Brazil's National Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform said: "We won't step back even one millimetre from our projects in Para because of this. They want to intimidate us but they won't succeed." |
Conservation Refugees
When protecting nature means kicking people out
by Mark Dowie
Published in the November/December 2005 issue of Orion magazine
Photograph by Joy Tessman/National Geographic, used with permission
A LOW FOG ENVELOPS 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 created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all 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.
!Kung San, Botswana
Photograph | Peter Johnson, Corbis
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 culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will 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.
Wai Wai, Guyana
Photograph | John Martin / Conservation International
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 refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation 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.
Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.
Hmong, Thailand
Photograph | Jeremy Horner / Corbis
“The government has no idea who I am,” she says. “The only person in the village they know by name is the ‘headman’ they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out.”
In a recent outburst of environmental enthusiasm stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked “paper parks,” few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.
“Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns,” Kohn Noi recalls, “and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more “slash and burn.” That’s what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we’ve been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life.”
A week before our conversation, and a short flight south of Noi’s village, six thousand conservationists were attending the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. “We recognize that indigenous people have perhaps the deepest understanding of the Earth’s living resources,” says Conservation International chairman and CEO Peter Seligman, adding that, “we firmly believe that indigenous people must have ownership, control and title of their lands.” Such messages are carefully projected toward major funders of conservation, which in response to the aforementioned Ford Foundation reports and other press have become increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples and their struggles for cultural survival.
Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, CI, TNC, and WWF among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization—Conservation International. And all of the BINGOs have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate “partners.”
Maasai, Tanzania
Photograph | Tim Graham / Getty Images
During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.
The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like “eviction,” “displacement,” and “refugee,” over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more difficult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.
John Muir, a forefather of the American conservation movement, argued that “wilderness” should be cleared of all inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urbane human’s need for recreation and spiritual renewal. It was a sentiment that became national policy with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” One should not be surprised to find hardy residues of these sentiments among traditional conservation groups. The preference for “virgin” wilderness has lingered on in a movement that has tended to value all nature but human nature, and refused to recognize the positive wildness in human beings.
Expulsions continue around the world to this day. The Indian government, which evicted one hundred thousand adivasis (rural peoples) in Assam between April and July of 2002, estimates that 2 or 3 million more will be displaced over the next decade. The policy is largely in response to a 1993 lawsuit brought by WWF, which demanded that the government increase PAs by 8 percent, mostly in order to protect tiger habitat. A more immediate threat involves the impending removal of several Mayan communities from the Montes Azules region of Chiapas, Mexico, a process begun in the mid-1970s with the intent to preserve virgin tropical forest, which could still quite easily spark a civil war. Conservation International is deeply immersed in that controversy, as are a host of extractive industries.
Tribal people, who tend to think and plan in generations, rather than weeks, months, and years, are still waiting to be paid the consideration promised. Of course the UN draft declaration is the prize because it must be ratified by so many nations. The declaration has failed to pass so far mainly because powerful leaders such as Tony Blair and George Bush threaten to veto it, arguing that there is not and should never be such a thing as collective human rights.
Sadly, the human rights and global conservation communities remain at serious odds over the question of displacement, each side blaming the other for the particular crisis they perceive. Conservation biologists argue that by allowing native populations to grow, hunt, and gather in protected areas, anthropologists, cultural preservationists, and other supporters of indigenous rights become complicit in the decline of biological diversity. Some, like the Wildlife Conservation Society’s outspoken president, Steven Sanderson, believe that the entire global conservation agenda has been “hijacked” by advocates for indigenous peoples, placing wildlife and biodiversity in peril. “Forest peoples and their representatives may speak for the forest,” Sanderson has said, “They may speak for their version of the forest; but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve.” WCS, originally the New York Zoological Society, is a BINGO lesser in size and stature than the likes of TNC and CI, but more insistent than its colleagues that indigenous territorial rights, while a valid social issue, should be of no concern to wildlife conservationists.
Maya, Guatemala
Photograph | AFP / Getty Images
It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer—an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Whole societies like the Batwa, the Maasai, the Ashinika of Peru, the Gwi and Gana Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen and Hmong of Southeast Asia, and the Huarani of Ecuador are being transformed from independent and self-sustaining into deeply dependent and poor communities.
WHEN I TRAVELED THROUGHOUT MESOAMERICA and the Andean-Amazon watershed last fall visiting staff members of CI, TNC, WCS, and WWF I was looking for signs that an awakening was on the horizon. The field staff I met were acutely aware that the spirit of exclusion survives in the headquarters of their organizations, alongside a subtle but real prejudice against “unscientific” native wisdom. Dan Campbell, TNC’s director in Belize, conceded, “We have an organization that sometimes tries to employ models that don’t fit the culture of nations where we work.” And Joy Grant, in the same office, said that as a consequence of a protracted disagreement with the indigenous peoples of Belize, local people “are now the key to everything we do.”
“We are arrogant,” was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.
If field observations and field workers’ sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.
In most such cases it is the native people who initiate the creation of a reserve, which is more likely to be called an “indigenous protected area” (IPA) or a “community conservation area” (CCA). IPAs are an invention of Australian aboriginals, many of whom have regained ownership and territorial autonomy under new treaties with the national government, and CCAs are appearing around the world, from Lao fishing villages along the Mekong River to the Mataven Forest in Colombia, where six indigenous tribes live in 152 villages bordering a four-million-acre ecologically intact reserve.
The Kayapo, a nation of Amazonian Indians with whom the Brazilian government and CI have formed a co-operative conservation project, is another such example. Kayapo leaders, renowned for their militancy, openly refused to be treated like just another stakeholder in a two-way deal between a national government and a conservation NGO, as is so often the case with co-operative management plans. Throughout negotiations they insisted upon being an equal player at the table, with equal rights and land sovereignty. As a consequence, the Xingu National Park, the continent’s first Indian-owned park, was created to protect the lifeways of the Kayapo and other indigenous Amazonians who are determined to remain within the park’s boundaries.
In many locations, once a CCA is established and territorial rights are assured, the founding community invites a BINGO to send its ecologists and wildlife biologists to share in the task of protecting biodiversity by combining Western scientific methodology with indigenous ecological knowledge. And on occasion they will ask for help negotiating with reluctant governments. For example, the Guarani Izoceños people in Bolivia invited the Wildlife Conservation Society to mediate a comanagement agreement with their government, which today allows the tribe to manage and own part of the new Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park.
Nez Perce, Idaho, US
Photograph | Joel Sartore / National Geographic
And there are some respected and influential conservation biologists who still strongly support top-down, centralized “fortress” conservation. Duke University’s John Terborgh, for example, author of the classic Requiem for Nature, believes that co-management projects and CCAs are a huge mistake. “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says. He bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer. Then there’s paleontologist Richard Leakey, who at the 2003 World Parks Congress in South Africa set off a firestorm of protest by denying the very existence of indigenous peoples in Kenya, his homeland, and arguing that “the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people.”
Yet many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake—not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.
More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Defending the Rivers of the Amazon
Amazon Watch and International Rivers have teamed up to create a state-of-the-art 10-minute Google Earth 3-D tour and video narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver, with technical assistance from Google Earth Outreach. The video is in support of Brazil's Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (Xingu River Forever Alive Movement). The tour allows viewers to learn about the harmful impacts of, and alternatives to the massive Belo Monte Dam Complex on the Amazon's Xingu River.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)