Environmental imperialism

United Nations agencies, non-government organizations (NGOS) and environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs) can’t be faulted for wanting to preserve rapidly disappearing wilderness. After all, few things are more awe-inspiring than elephant herds moving across the African savanna, or grizzlies catching salmon in the wild rivers of northern Canada. Unfortunately, many of these groups are insensitive to the needs and aspirations of human communities that live in or around the habits they seek to “preserve for posterity.” As a result, clashes are commonplace, particularly in developing nations, where impoverished citizens have accused “wilderness lovers from the North” of laying excessive claim to their lands, and of valuing wildlife more than people.

A recent clash in southern Malawi was triggered when district chiefs tried to do something about their most pressing problem: daily deaths of people from crocodile attacks. Malawi’s environment minister wouldn’t allow hunters to kill the crocodiles because the country was bound by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The angry chiefs accused the government and ENGOs of giving better treatment to crocodiles than to their people, which is understandable. After all, Westerners wouldn’t allow hungry animals to eat their children, wilderness or no wilderness.

Clashes in Tanzania are increasing as government authorities strive to keep a variety of nomadic, pastoral and hunter-gatherer peoples away from traditional lands that were turned into parks and game reserves. The confrontations began in the late 1950s with efforts to create what is now Serengeti National Park. The Sierra Club had little sympathy for the displaced Masai. As one prominent official sniffed, “Their herds of economically worthless cattle have already overgrazed and laid waste to much of the 23,000 square miles of Tanganyika, and as they move into the Serengeti, they bring the desert with them, and the wilderness and wildlife must bow before their herds.”

Serengeti was the first park, but the number had risen to 13 by 1995, plus 69 game conservation areas. At present, about 26% of Tanzania is under private or public conservation. In a series that ran in The Observer, Prof. Seithy Chacage documented decades of human rights abuses (including imprisonment, torture and murder) tied to the land withdrawals, including mass hunger caused by cultivation bans. The real story, he suggests, is one of “luxury for tourists, penury for natives.” Bad governance didn’t help either.

In 1993, Ray Bonner triggered shock waves in environmental circles with his book on African conservation, titled At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife. According to one review, the book “laid bare the imperialism, unconscious and explicit, of northern wilderness lovers and biologists working on that luckless continent.”

Bonner wrote that Africans had been “ignored, overwhelmed, manipulated and outmanoeuvred” by a conservation crusade led, orchestrated and dominated by white Westerners. “As many Africans see it, white people are making rules to protect animals that white people want to see in parks that white people visit.” He noted that Africans receive little benefit from the parks, and that there are direct costs tied to the bans on hunting and fuel collecting, or through physical displacement.

Clashes such as these are likely to escalate as the world’s population grows, unless something is done to reduce the poverty that is at the root of environmental degradation. Parks are wonderful treasures, but surely they can be created using progressive, democratic methods, rather than the guns-and-guards approach that seems to prevail in much of Africa.

African nations need to develop their economies too, a fact sometimes forgotten by Western ENGOs, who, for the most part, are opposed to the free trade and open markets that made their nations prosperous. It is somewhat ironic that this very prosperity allows them to become avid “consumers” of African wilderness, but without worrying about what happens outside the park boundaries, or about the price paid by those displaced by the exercise.