With the recent centennial of the National Park Service, we’ve seen much publicity in favor of national parks within the United States. The idea of natural protected areas is viewed as a general good among popular opinion. Who could be opposed to the conservation of nature?
In reality, there’s a very disturbing history behind the creation of the U.S. national parks, which went hand-in-hand with “manifest destiny” and genocidal policies against the indigenous peoples for whom those “pristine” areas were actually their ancestral territories. That tendency has been, and continues to be, replicated around the world.
To wit: the just-released report by the UN expert on indigenous peoples states that, “For over a century, conservation was carried out with the aim of vacating protected areas of all human presence, leading to cultural destruction and large-scale displacements of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands in the name of conservation. Past conservation measures caused complex and multiple violations of the collective and individual human rights of indigenous peoples.”
It’s clear this isn’t just a problem of the past. A devastating Guardian article details “the tribes paying the brutal price of conservation.” According to journalist John Vidal, “An increasingly vocal group of campaigners, academics and environmentalists…claim that indigenous peoples are being appallingly treated and abused, all in the name of a conservation philosophy that carries a heavy human cost. In order to make room for wildlife, tourism and industry, governments are using conservation as a pretext to drive the world’s most endangered peoples away from the lands and animals they have lived with for generations.”
This issue will be front and center starting later this week at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress, to be carried out in Honolulu, Hawaii. For the first time, Amazon Watch will be in attendance alongside long-time indigenous partners who have been advocating for the new paradigm of indigenous-led conservation including: Patricia Gualinga, international relations coordinator for the Kichwa community of Sarayaku; Nina Gualinga, youth spokeswoman from Sarayaku; and Aura Tegría, U’wa lawyer.
Through multiple presentations, Patricia and Nina will share Sarayaku’s visionary Living Forest proposal, which calls for legal protection of the “Living Forest” with recognition as a Sacred Territory, Biological and Cultural Patrimony of the Kichwa People in Ecuador, and “No Go Zone” for oil, mineral and lumber extraction.
Colombia’s U’wa indigenous people have been campaigning to defend their sacred Mt. Zizuma (El Cocuy) from “eco-tourism.” For months this year, they exercised territorial control, stopping mountaineers and tourists from climbing the mountain’s snow-covered peak. U’wa lawyer Aura Tegría will travel to the Congress, outlining the U’wa case alongside UN Special Rapporteur Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, as she launches her report on conservation and indigenous rights. The U’wa have been global leaders in the effort to #KeepItInTheGround, decades before that was an international call to action.
Beyond accompanying our colleagues from Sarayaku and the U’wa as they highlight their specific conflicts and solutions, we will advocate for Motion 26. Titled “Protected areas and environmentally damaging industrial scale activities“, this hotly debated proposal before the Congress would promote the concept of “No Go” policies that prohibit mineral and other resource extraction in World Heritage Sites, sacred natural sites, territories and primary forests. Please review Motion 26 here and vote for it at the Congress!
As always, our support for indigenous colleagues will be in close collaboration with other organizations, such as the Sacred Land Film Project, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network International (WECAN), the Borneo Project, and GAIA Foundation. Thank you to WECAN and Global Greengrants Fund for providing support for travel expenses.
