George Carlin & the roots of environmental colonialism
Let's begin with a little George Carlin apéritif. A moral palate cleanser to start thinking about the plethora of motives behind the environmental conservation movement.
In this long term macro sense Carlin is right. The earth doesn't need saving; it's fine, it is we who are fucked. The earth has another billion years or so of retaining a habitable environment and about 4.4 years until it is swallowed up by our sun. Following every other species that has ever lived, humans will inevitably become extinct and another apex 'survival machine' holding a different set of genes will go on. He also stabs deeply into the motives of environmental conservation, that conservation isn't an altruistic act, that it is a prescriptive territorial expression of power.
The end of the earth.
After swallowing Carlin's bitter pill, cleansing us of a moralistic argument, can we see more clearly the reality of what conservation is. Conservation at its core is the demarcation of territory for a particular use, a cultural act. If this is the case who are the groups that are interested in this act?
Conservation nascently began in the colonies of Britain, namely British India, as a form of resource protection. The Imperial Forest Service established in 1864 was the first of its kind to claim territories specifically for the preservation of plants and animals. What is downplayed these days is that this was a colonial initiative to protect the forest as a resource for British India. The conservation of biotica was an unintended consequence of this anthropocentric act. Looking at the modern lineage of the organisation, the Indian Forest Service, it is interesting to see that amongst surveying and wildlife management the training of forestry officers includes handling of weapons and knowledge of Scheduled Tribes (officially recognised tribes of India). The officers even look like military personnel.Who are the winners (the inheritors of post colonial British India) and who are the losers (the non Scheduled Tribes) in protecting this territory? Guns are needed to protect this resource and it shows that it is advantageous to control this area and there is a clear demarcation between the haves and have nots.
Soldiers or Conservationists? Indian Forest Service Foresters
At this point there needs to be a clarification between top down and bottom up conservation. Bottom up conservation is reactionary, localised and NIMBY oriented. This conservation is small scale, anti global and does not have the same reach as top down conservation. Morals aside, it is still the top down conservation that has the greatest influence. It is also this conservation that is most susceptible to reusing colonial patriarchal techniques of cultural eugenics, theft of resources and prescribing unwanted western ideologies etc. A great article worth reading is Betsy Hartmann's Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad. She outlines, amongst other examples, of the militarized conservation in the Lacandon Forest. There are a multitude of interested parties in the jungle, from development agencies, multinational mining companies to REDD carbon credit trading Californians. All have have different interest in the jungle and most claim to have conservation behind their motives. The most relevant to this topic is Conservation International (CI), an environmental conservation group that supports the militarized protection and the systematic eviction of 'illegal' Zapatista communities for the 'protection' of the Lacandon communities. The categorisation and separation of these two groups by the Mexican Government, supported by CI, has more than a few parallels with Belgian colonialism that exacerbated the divide between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. On top of this, the most worrying thing, Hartmann outlines, is that "CI's close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for?"
EZLN Zapatista Socialist Guerrillas fighting the Mexican Government for their jungle
The Mexican supported Lacandon people
This new environmental colonialism is also outlined in Robert H. Nelsons text "Saving" Africa from Africans where western Christian ideologies of the Garden of Eden are fueling neocolonialism in Tanzania. Nelson notes that the eviction and killing of native people in the early 20th century by the Germans and British and the subsequent rinderpest plague drastically changed the landscape from a human influenced landscape to a 'natural' landscape. One of these landscapes is now know as the Selous Reserve, a UNESCO world heritage site, revered for its natural beauty. What is not acknowledge is that to retain this landscape the colonial mentality of preventing Africans reoccupying their land must be perpetuated. Local people are kept out, forced to live on the edge of the reserve. The people that benefit most from this territory are usually white paying customers there to either shoot or photograph game. Few acknowledge that this "'true Africa' seen by tourists visiting the parks was the product of the decimation of traditional African life in the aftermath of the arrival of European settlement".
Melissa Bachman, TV presenter, expressing colonial privilege 'wild Africa'.
A little closer to home, once I met someone at a party and through small talk I found out that he worked in South Africa. As the chat progressed he told me he worked for Richard Branson on his private property Ulusaba Reserve working together with the local community. The talk stopped there. How they are working together and the role of this guy I might never know I will start by saying that at least Branson acknowledges the claims of the Nxumalo community's claim on his land which is miles better than his colonial forefathers, but what can at least be understood that this tension between the British and local communities over territory is still febrile. The landscape appearance that Branson's Reserve maintains, of 'wild Africa', is a symptom of neocolonialism where companies rather than nation states now carry the baton of exploitation. There is a reason why in Jurassic Park John Hammond is a old British billionaire and the game keeper is South African.
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