"Conservationists who are enemies o

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Subject: "Conservationists who are enemies of the earth"

THE GUARDIAN, WEDNESDAY AUGUST 6 1997
Comment and Analysis Page

"Conservationists who are enemies of the earth"

by George Monbiot

To the oil and mining companies, repressive governments and banks we list
among the world's exploiters, we must add another sector - conservationists.
Unaccountable, opaque and pursuing a model of protection that is both
repressive and outmoded, some of the world's biggest conservation
organisations are becoming indistinguishable from other neo-colonial
corsairs. Unwilling to contemplate the wider consequences of their actions,
they have ensured that conservation is now one of the greatest threats to
the global environment.

This month, the World Bank will decide whether or not to support the
construction of the Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos. One of the most destructive
hydroelectric schemes on earth, it will drown 470 square kilometres of the
remarkable forests and grasslands of the Nakai Plateau. Several rare animal
species will disappear. The fisheries which help feed the catchment's
thousands of indigenous people will be wiped out: mysteriously, this doesn't
feature in the dam's environmental assessment.

On the face of it there is nothing astonishing about this project: the World
Bank, institutionally corrupt and apparently incapable of genuine reform,
has been funding devastating dams for years. What is surprising is that two
of the most active supporters of the dam, who have done more than any others
to lend it credibility, are major conservation groups.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) recognise the destructive potential of
Nam Theun 2. But it is, they argue, the only means by which sufficient money
will be released by international donors to finance their plans for the
remainder of the Nakai Plateau.

Both organisations claim that the forests and wildlife of the plateau are
being gradually degraded by the shifting cultivation and hunting and
gathering of the region's indigenous people. The WCS appears to want local
people to leave the Nakai-Nam Theun Conservation Area altogether. The IUCN
will let them stay, but wants them to stop their traditional farming and
adopt the "alternative livelihoods" it prescribes. The dam project will give
these organisations the money they need for "proper management" - the IUCN
has asked the Bank for $65 million. Moreover, by increasing state
involvement in the region the dam will ensure that local people's activities
are properly policed.

Moreover, neither the IUCN nor the WCS has demonstrated satisfactorily that
local people are a substantial threat to the ecosystem. Indeed it is
arguable that conservation groups are only interested in the area because
indigenous people have looked after it so well. Experience elsewhere in the
world suggests that a strengthening, rather than a reduction, of local
people's land rights is the only sustainable means of managing an ecosystem:
they are the ones with a long-term interest in the health of their environment.

Excluding people from their own resources while forcing them - as the IUCN
advocates - to grow cash crops, could scarcely do more to set them against
wildlife.

But neither human rights nor wider environmental impacts seem to matter much
to organisations like the Wildlife Conservation Society. Alongside the
equally prestigious Smithsonian Institute, the WCS is also working with the
Burmese regime. Earlier this year, the government forcibly relocated 30,000
people from an area it wanted for a nature reserve. Two thousand of them
were murdered. Survival International has shown how the Worldwide Fund for
Nature's intervention in the Philippines has helped reduce indigenous people
to dependency and destitution. In East Africa, tens of thousands of nomads
who have been excluded by conservationists from their best grazing lands now
find themselves forced to over-exploit the rest of the savannah.

The problem is as old as the conservation movement itself. Professor
Grzimek, Hitler's curator of Frankfurt Zoo and the champion of the Serengeti
National Park, claimed: "A National Park must remain a primordial wilderness
to be effective. No men, not even native ones, should live inside its
borders." Yet, beyond Antarctica, wilderness does not exist on earth: all
land is affected by and reflective of human activities. Grzimek's
preservationist model was never either a humane or realistic means of
conservation. Yet the policy has become both too lucrative and too
politically convenient to be changed. Big conservation groups, like anyone
else attempting the sequestration of resources, align themselves with power
against the powerless.

Conservation organisations like the IUCN and the WCS are not the friends but
the enemies of the environment. We must fight them as we fight the
governments and corporations with which they so gleefully collaborate.


Kate Geary    (kategeary@xxxxxxxxxx)