Transcript for Outside/In episode: Fortress Conservation
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In 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant created the world’s very first National Park, it was surprisingly easy to do.
Karl Jacoby: Noone in the world had created a national park, so they just basically draw a big square and say everything within the square is a national park.
But managing the world’s first national park… now that was new territory.
Karl Jacoby: Early on when people are going, they needed to eat and they would shoot elk in the park to feed themselves. And there is a question of can you shoot an elk in a park or not? Is that an appropriate use of a national park or not.
[mux]
This is Karl Jacoby, Co-director of Columbia University’s Center for the study of Ethnicity and Race.
As you may have expected, the big square to which he is referring was Yellowstone National Park. When it was created, it still hadn’t been entirely surveyed and explored by white men.
But, according to those that had been there, it was incredibly beautiful: one of the most active volcanic areas in the country, replete with waterfalls… geysers... and mountain peaks... and home to one of the last surviving herds of wild buffalo.
But it was also, at the time, incredibly remote. So we’re not talking about opening up Disneyland here.
Karl Jacoby: it's very far from a railroad is very distant. And so the only people who could really visit it, other than the native people who live there who obviously don't know, it's been turned into a park where very wealthy tourists who could do the equivalent of sort of what we would consider today, like a multi month long safari. You'd have to go to the closest railhead and then, you know, rent horses and so the first year, eighteen seventy two, I believe there's something like two hundred to 400 tourists who go to the park at all.
Two to four hundred tourists… in a park that spanned some 3 and half thousand square miles. With so few people, and so many natural riches, killing a few elk - or a few hundred - wasn’t really a problem.
And even if it was, there wasn’t really anybody to whom you could register a complaint.
Unlike the parks we know today, early tourists to Yellowstone were treated to an utterly unbureaucratic experience.
There were no cabins or restaurants, designated trails, permits, placards, or even park rangers.
Just a single, part-time, unpaid superintendent… A guy from Michigan who only entered the park twice in the five years he ran it.
That being said - Yellowstone didn’t stay remote for long.
Karl Jacoby: Eventually as the tide of white settlement expands, you start to see white settlers not just hunting an elk to feed themselves while they are there as tourists, but beginning to kill large numbers of elk for their hides or teeth, sort of for the trophy market.
It’s hard to calculate just how much poaching took place in the early years of Yellowstone, Jacoby writes - but the Park’s second superintendent estimated some 7,000 elk were killed for hides just between 1875 and 1877.
Karl Jacoby: And they realize quickly if they don’t do something, that they’re going to… uh… all the wildlife will be destroyed.
[Mux]
The other thing they eventually realize as more people start to come is that there is still a very ongoing native presence in the park.
White settlers weren’t the only ones taking elk and buffalo. Even as early park evangelists advertised virgin untouched wilderness, visitors saw near universal evidence of native life around Yellowstone. There were shelters, pole fences used to drive game towards open areas, fires - intentionally set to promote new growth for grazing and game. And, on occasion, visitors might even see hunting parties - in the hundreds. Yellowstone overlapped with the ancestral grounds of many tribes - Shoshone, Bannock, and Nez Perce, just to name a few.
And it’s not a coincidence that, around the time Yellowstone was created, these native tribes were being forced onto reservations. On many of these, rations were scarce - and so they entered the park, like they had always done, but relied more and more on the game that called Yellowstone home.
In 1877, about 750 Nez Perce who had resisted subjugation were fleeing, engaged in a moving war against the US army. They were traveling on a trail that had served as a de facto highway across the Rockies for generations of Native people.
A trail that just so happened to cross through the newly created Yellowstone Park, where a pack of friends and family members had set up camp.
Fearing that the tourists may give their position away to the US army, the Nez Perce kidnapped the group - and took them along to Montana as hostages.
Not exactly the image of an unspoiled American wilderness that the US government was trying to create.
Karl Jacoby : And so there's a sense that they're both the control white poachers. And to really get rid of the native presence, there's going to have to be a stronger enforcement presence of enforcement authority in the park than there ever has been before. And they experimented with a couple of things. But the short answer is eventually, in 1886, they decided to call in the US Army.
It was still a tourist destination, sure, for those with the means to see it. But for the next thirty years, it was also an occupied territory… Guarded by the unlikely ancestors of today’s National Park Service: guns, soldiers, and outposts. They called it Fort Yellowstone.
[Cue Theme]
Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Sam Evans-Brown. The creation of The National Parks is considered one of the most celebrated achievements in conservation. But the thinking behind the parks became a mainstream ideology that shaped conservation - for centuries.
Karl Jacoby: The typical rhetoric is that a national park is protecting wilderness. But what I really want to underscore as a historian is that this wilderness was not there from the beginning. It very much had to be created by the removal of indigenous peoples..
Sam Evans-Brown: Today, producer Taylor Quimby re-examines the very models that started American conservation as we know it... to better understand what happens when you try and separate the natural world from the people that inhabit it.
[mux]
Ken Burns National Parks: Two weeks after leaving Yellowstone, Roosevelt’s whirlwind tour brought him to Arizona’s Grand Canyon.
Taylor Quimby: President Teddy Roosevelt is often called America’s first Conservationist President, and his words and ideas — namely that some of nature’s wonders need to be protected from human interference — still influence environmental discourse today. Here he is in Ken Burn’s docusereies, The National Parks: America’s Greatest Idea, talking about The Grand Canyon
Teddy Roosevelt voice over: Keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. Leave it as it is, you can not improve it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
[mux]
This relatable sentiment is likely what makes conservation so attractive. But it’s also, well… sort of impossible.
Early conservationists, like Teddy Roosevelt, believed in responsible use of the natural world - meaning, don’t hunt or log until there’s nothing left to hunt or log…
Whereas modern environmentalism - - took a more hard-line approach… that wilderness should go truly untouched by human hands.
But in practice, neither approach can literally “leave it as it is.”
Whether you draw a border around something, call it a game preserve, or a wildlife refuge… The world is not static. And somebody is always getting through to the other side.
Prakash Kashwan : Because you allow all sort of tourist safaris and all kinds of middle class interventions in the natural landscape… so when one says it’s devoid of human disturbance, they basically mean poor people are not allowed in the park.
This is Prakash Kashwan. He’s Codirector of the economic and social rights research program at the human rights program at the University of Connecticut.
Throughout the 20th century, conservationists and environmentalists have looked to protect wildlife and biodiversity through the creation of parks and other forms of exclusionary wildlife zones. Zones that seek to preserve spaces devoid of human impact… Or to create them, by removing or disempowering the indiginous people who already live there. Today, some academics call this strategy by a pejorative name: Fortress conservation.
Prakash Kashwan: Any developed civilized society is all concrete and cement, and so you need to actually go out and find nature. And because that’s the only sphere in which nature exists, you protect it like a fortress.
But Fortress conservation, Prakash says, relies on the myth that you can separate humankind from the natural world.
When forests are turned into fortresses, they require guards, gatekeepers and administrators. People who decide how fortresses can be used… and by whom.
Prakash Kashwan 1- So on the one hand you don’t allow the poorest people to forage or hunt for small game, but you’re happy to allow the exploitation of mineral resources and fossil fuels.
Prakash is talking broadly here, about some parks and preserves here worldwide - but he says this is the case even here in the US.
While there aren’t oil and gas wells in Yellowstone or Yosemite, there are wells in Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio. As of 2017, there were also wells in 11 other monuments, historic sites, and forest reserves managed by the National Park Service, and companies technically still own mineral rights under dozens more..
It raises the question: when the ramparts of fortress conservation go up, what forces have the wealth and power to fight back? Or be made an exception?
Rosalyn LaPier: Historically the Blackfeet lived on the Northern Great Plains.
This is Rosalyn LaPier, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.
Rosalyn LaPier: As Americans moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, tribes were pushed further West. Including the Blackfeet.
So we still live on our own historic territory but it’s a much smaller version of what we used to live on. And instead of being out in the northern great plains we are pushed up against the mountains.
[mux]
Today, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation borders the Eastern side of Glacier National Park, at the Northern terminus of the American Rockies.
The area was first leased from the Blackfeet under negotiations led by an influential early conservationist named George Bird Grinell.
Rosalyn LaPier: And this is the so-called 1895 Agreement between the Blackfeet tribe and the United States.
But the agreement wasn’t for a park. In the 1895 lease, the Blackfeet explicitly retained rights to continue hunting, gathering, and fishing in the Rockies. What they did, was open up the mountains for exploration by miners.
Rosalyn LaPier: In search of gold, silver, copper. So the minerals that were building the United States as an empire.
Over fifteen years, thousands of miners pick-axed their way through peaks and valleys of the Rockies… They build towns, and abandoned them. The Northern Rockies weren’t so much a gold rush, as they were a gold flop.
So in 1910, George Bird Grinell led another negotiation - this time, with the United States congress… to make the area a National Park.
Rosalyn LaPier: The Northern half became Glacier National Park, the southern half became part of Louis and Clark National Forest.
So when it became a park in 1910 it was not an untouched wilderness.
One, it had been a place that indigenous people had used for thousands of years, and then for the previous 15 years, it had been a place that miners…. thousands of miners had come in...and no stone unturned, they looked and look and looked for natural resources to exploit. If they had found something, there would be no Glacier National Park today.
But under the management of a National Park - the rights that the Blackfeet had retained under the earlier agreement were effectively reversed, without permission.
Hunting, fishing, and gathering - rights negotiated between two nations - were suddenly criminalized under park rules as poaching and trespassing. The fortress, which had been placed here - did not include the architects who had originally shaped the land.
Rosalyn LaPier: Usually the harvesting and gathering of plants was done by women. So often times when there is a national park, that is created in an indigenous community's historic territory. Really a major impact on that society and on that culture is the relationship of women and girls to that landscape.
So people continued those practices, but they kind of did it now in stealth. Because they knew they could potentially get things confiscated, or get arrested. There was always kind of that threat.
The removal of indigenous people from Glacier National Park - or the erasure of their presence, from a public point of view - isn’t just the collateral damage of fortress conservation. It’s a founding error in the science upon which we’ve based so much of our understanding of the natural world.
National Parks, as well as being tourist attractions, are scientific laboratories…
Rosalyn LaPier: Every single year, I don’t know how many different scientific teams there are, but there’s a lot.
...where people study climate change, grizzly bears, invasive plants, and all sorts of other things.
Rosalyn LaPier: So we're going to start our conservation story, erase the people off the landscape, say that the only thing that's been here is plants and animals and glaciers and water. And that's how you start with bad science.
[mux fade]
Rosalyn told me the very phrase “bad science” makes her uncomfortable - I think she knows how easily claims of fake news and bad science are used today to dismiss ideas you don’t agree with it.
But it’s an idea worth exploring - and
One of the best examples of what she’s talking about from the very first National Park - and the beginning of this episode, when, in the late 19th century, the US government brought in the army and created Fort Yellowstone.
Karl Jacoby: Initially when the army is brought into Yellowstone in 1886 the idea is that this will be a temporary measure. No one really expected it would last as long as it did, and it lasted for thirty years.
Fifty men on horseback arrived in Yellowstone in August, 1886, and set to creating order in the so-called wilderness. If you’ve ever wondered why park rangers uniforms look the way they do,it’s because they evolved from the US military uniform that was in place when the National Park Service was finally created decades later.
The soldiers set to work improving roads, patrolling the wilderness and deterring native people from entering the park.
It wasn’t necessarily a violent ordeal.
The US was and had been warring with various tribes for years - In some cases, soldiers were actively rotated to Yellowstone from active fields of battle. Their mere presence in Yellowstone was a signal to keep away.
So mostly, the soldiers busied themselves fending off white hunters who had settled in newly built towns near the park, and were crossing the invisible borders to hunt game. .
Karl Jacoby: Because Yellowstone has one of the last buffalo herds, and you can kill a buffalo and get its head, it’s worth hundreds of dollars, so they're very much engaged in a sort of cat and mouse game against local poachers.
They did so in militaristic fashion - by building outposts in remote areas of the park. They sent spies to local towns to try and root out information.
And they started to centralize and smooth out the tangle of trails that had been formed, mainly by native people, hunters, and trappers prior to their arrival…
They created four main entrances, and took detailed information from visitors who passed through them… Even going as far as sealing red wax over the locks of their weapons to prevent them from hunting.
But the soldiers of Yellowstone weren’t just trying to separate tourists from the wilderness they were charged with protecting - they actively engaged in shaping the world around them.
Karl Jacoby: They’re the ones that lead to the extermination of the wolf in Yellowstone.
Karl Jacoby: they're thinking that what we want to do is have as many game animals as possible. And so the way to do that is to kill all the predators that we can so kill all the coyotes, kill the mountain lions and kill all the wolves.
Karl Jacoby 29 - The other thing that they're involved with as they and I I can't think of it, except outside of these militaristic metaphors, is they're really engaged almost in a war on fire in Yellowstone.
This is the problem of Teddy Roosevelt’s “leave it as it is” ideology. Since the end of the ice-age, people had managed the land.
Indigenous tribes used fires for all sorts of reasons - clearing land for grazing, or driving game into the open.
So by enacting a policy of 100% fire suppression, the soldiers of Yellowstone weren’t keeping things the way they were. They were changing them for the worse.
The fire suppression policy of the 20th century has led to years and years of piled up fuel in forests out West - and increased the size and danger of wildfires that spark.
Similarly, their instinct to preserve big game populations by eradicating the park’s predators created a cascade of problems.
Karl Jacoby: Exterminating the wolf, for instance, the elk population gets way too large. This leads to overgrazing. This leads to actually pushing out of the beaver population. This leads to a decrease in wetlands in Yellowstone. I mean, it's negative and all sorts of ways.
In these ways, the very advocates for quote unquote science-based approaches to conservation - and the soldiers that carried out that vision - were corroding the places they sought to protect.
Rosalyn LaPier: So what happens when a national park is created… and indigenous people are pushed off that landscape, they’re being pushed off a landscape that they have managed for thousands of years.
The Park Service has since acknowledged the harm early park policies caused. They’re experimenting with managing wildfires, instead of just putting them all out. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, and their presence have had all sorts of positive domino effects throughout the ecosystem.
But as Karl Jacoby told me, there are no real efforts under way to re-introduce the other primary predator of Yellowstone National Park back into the landscape.
People.
Rosalyn LaPier:There is an erasure that occurs. Part of the NPS story is erasing indiginous people from that landscape. And again, I don't want to use this terminology, that’s how you get ‘bad science’ when you’re not including humans as part of that story, of how did these ecosystems evolve and why are they the way they are now. They’re that way because humans have been there.
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: While America is often seen as the birthplace of fortress conservation… few ideas are born in a vacuum. So what came before Yellowstone? And how has the model spread across the world? That’s after a break.
Sam Evans Brown: Welcome back to Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown.
Hadrian Cook: ‘Twas brillig in the slimy toves, did gile and gimble in the wabe…Hahah!
Sam Evans Brown: And this man - reciting the intensely British poem Jabberwocky - is Hadrian Cook.
Hadrian Cook: Well my name is Hadrian Cook. I’m by original discipline I’m an Earth scientist.
Sam Evans Brown: Nowadays, Hadrian is a retired lecturer and author of a book about The New Forest… a National Park in Southern England that once upon a time… was very much not open to the public.
Hadrian Cook: When the Normons established themselves they did what was sort of a fashionable thing for tyrants to do in the 11th century, and that was to set aside large areas of the countryside for their own pleasure: which was a hunting forest.
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: Yellowstone National Park is sometimes thought of as the birth of fortress conservation… but like so many things American, the roots of this ideology didn’t spring into existence in 1776. They go back a long, long way.
So before we talk about the present and future of fortress conservation - Producer Taylor Quimby picks up the story, in the forests of medieval England.
Taylor Quimby: The very word forest actually comes from the early middle ages - but foresta, as it was originally called, had less to do with trees, and more to do with hunting. It wasn’t a landscape. It was a legal definition.
Hadrian Cook: So it’s outside the English common law, it’s dominated by the pleasure of kings and the nobles, and the word ‘royal’, as in forest, denotes that it’s ultimately under the monarch and his huntsman and nobody else.
These swaths of royal forest tended to be remote locations with relatively poor soil. Places that hadn’t been converted wholesale into farmland.
But they weren’t exactly isolated pockets of land, either. Hadrian says that, at its peak in the 12th century, it’s likely that as much as a quarter of England was under Forest Law.
And that means we aren’t talking about unoccupied land.
Hadrian Cook: The other thing which is debated by archaeologists is the extent to which they depopulated the areas of the farmers and peasants that were already there. And there is some evidence that happened in The New Forest.
[Mux]
Over the next few hundred years, across generations of kings and queens, these areas became home to one of the first documented examples of a full forest bureaucracy. The crown could sell licenses to hunt deer in the King’s wood, cheaper ones for taking rabbits, or wood .. allowances for grazing pigs. The Royal Forests were playgrounds for the nobles, and managed resources for the state.
Hadrian Cook: They had chief foresters, and a whole range of officials under them. People called regarders…obviously from the French regard to look, ju regard, and things like that. The verterers, who were actually judicial people. You had the agisters, who were doing much more practical things, being concerned with animals, who had the right to graze, managing that. … and there were woodworths…
All of this would have been a shock to the people who lived there before. Their use of the forest for subsistence would have been a matter of survival - now, it was criminal.
Hadrian Cook: Popular history tells us you can be killed for killing a deer, and there are records that saying you could be blinded for this that and the other…
[Mux]
One of the tenets of modern conservation, in America anyway, is that proponents will argue it benefits the public at large…
But when benefit isn’t spread as evenly - and when resource use is tied to subsistence living - sympathies don’t always lie with the conservationists.
[Robin Hood Song]
Take the story of one Robin Hood, who lived in the Sherwood Forest with his band of Merry Men. Robin Hood took from the rich, and gave to the poor - which is to say, he was a poacher - illegally taking game and wood in a royal forest.
Robin Hood: What do we need that the forest cannot provide? We have food, wood for weapons. We’ll find safety and solace in our trees.
Angry man: But what about kin? Sherrif’s taken all they got too!
Robin Hood: Then by god we take it back.
[mux swell]
Today, Sherwood and the New Forest that Hadrian studied, have both been converted into preserved lands and public parks. And if you were to stroll in them today, it would be nice to imagine that this land had somehow been saved from development through the thoughtful planning of environmental activists.
But that’s not the case. It was were forcibly taken by the King and his men guarded, and managed.
Hadrian Cook: The idea that out there was something green nice, where there were nymphs and shepherds and people rolling in the hay with milkmaids… English social history 101 will tell you that’s rather a bad distortion because of course there’s a lot of poverty in rural areas, and a lot of the history of the New Forest is about poor people making a living, often against the interest of the crown, or against the history of the state itself.
[Mux]
So why are we talking about medieval England?
I think that most people take it for granted that Robin Hood is the hero, and the King’s stooge, the Sheriff of Nottingham - is the villain.
But when we’re talking about fortress conservation, a lot of folks fail to see the parallel.
Over the past two hundred years, many people have viewed conservationists not as a band of merry men - but more like Royal game wardens, and spoiled nobles… dictating who can use the natural world, and how. Or in some cases, actively forcing them from the land.
During the Civil War, Congress passed - and Abraham Lincoln signed - The Homestead Act. Which would allow settlers to easily claim land in the new American West... easy for white settlers, that is.
Karl Jacoby: Take the land in North America, to seize it from indigenous people and as quickly as possible, put it in the hands of the yeoman farmers of white yeoman farmers and turn it into farmland. That was the land policy. And if you want to call it that was the environmental policy of the United States during this time period.
Again, this is Karl Jacoby - history professor, and author of Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the hidden history of american conservation.
The 19th century had seen unprecedented booms in migration - the industrial revolution was transforming urban life. And extensive logging in places like the midwest was devastating landscapes.
White wealthy men had a growing nostalgia for pioneer life… and these changes were threatening their sense of manliness, and manifest destiny.
So, they called up on the US government to protect areas they associated with their vision of America - and began to flock to green spaces for pleasure, recreation, and tests of character. -- green spaces like Yellowstone, the Adirondacks, or the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Karl Jacoby: They’re places of pure Americanness that aren’t tainted by immigration, they’re places that are rural, that aren’t tainted by industrialization, and they’re places where one can reconnect with this early frontier masculinity. It's very much a playground for white American men, particularly elite white American men, to go out and to sort of recapture the masculinity that has been threatened by all these changes that are happening in American culture at this particular time.
Few organizations straddle this duality - between calls for conservation, and the desire to show mastery over nature - as the Boone & Crockett Club.
Boone & Crockett video: In hunting, as in life, it is up to each individual about what is appropriate.
Formed in 1887 by cattle rancher - and future president - Theodore Roosevelt, the Boone & Crockett Club still exists today - it’s stated mission is to promote the conservation and management of wildlife, especially big game, and its habitat… and to maintain the highest ethical standards of fair chase and sportsmanship in North America.
Boone & Crockett video: Ask yourself - is it safe? Is it legal? Is it sporting? Is it ethical? And will it project a positive image of yourself...
When it was founded, it hosted some of the most notable conservationists of the period.
George Bird Grinell - one of the first editors of Field & Stream, and the one who pushed for the creation of Glacier National Park.
Gifford Pinchot - who would go on to become the first Chief of the US Forest Service.
Frederick Burnham, sometimes called “King of Scouts”.
Also in the club - noted eugenicist Madison Grant.
Prakash Kashwan: There’s not much to it, this was a racist colonial-imperial project of trying to control the landscape and keep the local populations away from these landscapes.
This again is Prakash Kashwan. The Boone & Crockett club set about creating the image of the noble and sporting hunter… and lobbied for the protection of less developed landscapes across America.
But this form of conservation had a tendency to be self-serving.
In the newly formed Adirondack Park, for example, hunting season coincided with the tourist season. The rest of the year, subsistence hunters who had relied on game for food became poachers and trespassers by default.
Sound familiar?
Guard: This boy killed one of the Sheriff of Nottingham's deer!
Boy: We’re starving! We need the meat!
Examples like this are why Prakash Kashwan largely sees this era of conservation as being hypocritical.
Prakash: So it was essentially a blatant attempt to justify their own hunting practices while keeping these quote unquote primitive backward people out of natural landscapes.
In some cases, conservationists expressed respect for the knowledge and methods of indigeinous hunters - but only under specific conditions, and when populations were too small to threaten their own hunting.
Prakash Kashwan: You know these people can also be part of the landscape as long as they’re as wild as the wild animals.
And even as the Boone & Crockett Club rallied against unsportsmanlike and unnecessary killing - Teddy Roosevelt had no qualms taking an absolutely absurd number of animals in the name of conservation.
On his famous 1909 African expedition collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Natural History museum, Roosevelt and his son killed no less than 512 animals. Teddy bagged himself 9 lions and 21 storks.
Prakash Kashwan 9: They brought back so much that they had to sweep all the museums and spaces they could find in order to stock all those trophies. It was crazy.
So this is the context In which so many of our ideas about conservation were born.
And even though there are many forms of environmental activism today, many of which bear little resemblance to 19th century conservation, many have continued to downpay or outright ignore the racism and violence at the root of the movement’s history.
Karl says that when his book, Crimes Against Nature, first came out in 2002, some environmentals saw it as a betrayal - Bush had recently taken office, and they worried the book could be used against the movement.
A more positive portrayal of the Parks - and the problematic people who championed them - came a few years later, and was probably much more to their liking.
National Parks clip: “John Muir was there, mounted on the horse that he rode now and then - when no woman would accept the loan of it. He was rapt. Entranced. He threw up in his arms in a grand gesture. “This is the morning of creation!” he cried. “The whole thing is beginning now! The mountains are singing together.”
Karl Jacoby: A few years after my book came out, Ken Burns did a documentary on the national parks. And he actually cites a lot of my research from my book in his companion volume, so clearly he encountered my book. But he was so invested in creating a heroic narrative of the Park Service that he was unwilling to consider any of the. Positive, possible negative readings of what the Park Service had done
Histories that are erased, or go unacknowledged, have a way of being repeated. And in recent decades,fortress-style conservation has been exported all over the world.
Again, here’s Prakash Kashwan, at the University of Connecticut.
Prakash Kashwan: So this model has been implanted right at the center of global agreements on biodiversity conservation, and there are global targets. So in 1990 we started with a humble target of getting 10% of the landscape under protected areas. And that target was met way before the anticipated deadline for that target. And that should raise red flags.
NGOs, like the World Wildlife Fund, international groups like the World Bank… and local and national leaders across the globe have all embraced fortress conservation.
And like every time before - the places that have been set aside for protection are not unoccupied. Prakash’s research shows that forested regions under environmental protection are home to somewhere between 750 million and 1 billion people.
[mux fade]
Vicky Tauli-Corpuz: I am Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, I am an Igorot, a Kankana-ey Igorot, who is from the Cordillera region here of the Philippines, we are one of the indigenous peoples recognized in the Philippines.
Vicky Tauli-Corpuz is an advocate, and worked for the UN leading a special report on the rights of Indigenous peoples. I spoke with on a iffy line over WhatsApp.
Vicky Tauli-Corpuz: Here are the Indigenous peoples who have been protecting their forests since time immemorial, and suddenly even before their was the Philippine government, and suddenly when the government and the colonizers came into the country they started carving out these spaces to be spaces that will be managed by the state.
In 2018, Vicky Tauli-Corpuz made her special report to the UN, titled “Cornered by Protected Areas”
The report notes that since 1990, more than a quarter million people have been pushed from their homes… and that despite initiatives by the UN and major environmental NGOs to recognize the rights of indigeinous people, there has been little action to stop the harms of fortress style conservation.
Vicky Tauli-Corpuz: Their general plan of action has not been implemented. No? It makes me, it makes me wonder - are these people serious?
Told from the perspective of her community, conservation sounds less like a global good and more like an invasion.
If parks and preserves were truly a way to protect the planet, they should be created in places at the greatest risk… or with the most biodiversity.
But Prakash Kashwan says conservation models pushed by big environmental NGOs - or BINGOs, to their detractors - incentivize corruption and fundraising over strategic and efficient wildlife protection. And that’s why:
Prakash Kashwan: Setting up of the exclusionary wildlife zones and national parks will be determined not by the consideration of environmental factors. But will be driven by the existence of domestic inequality.
Prakash analyzed data from 137 countries… and found that democratic countries with low economic inequality are likely to devote less land towards conservation… and countries with the most protected areas...
Prakash Kashwan: One, these countries have very high levels of economic inequalities… and second, these are countries with very poor to non-existent democratic institutions. So they’re mostly autocratic countries.
Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania - these are all the countries that have nearly or more than 40% of National land territories set aside as wildlife conservation areas.
So think about it: How can these poorest countries actually afford to set aside such large proportions of their land territories?
In exporting fortress conservation around the world, the details have changed but the pattern, as modeled by the history of the US national parks, has remained largely the same.
Indigenous people, and other people who live in or near parklands, particularly in the global south, pay a steep price. In many countries, like India, parks are policed by heavily armed military forces.
Prakash Kashwan: They have orders to shoot at sight, or sometimes to shoot to kill. Anyone who is suspected of being a poacher.
There was an investigative report by the BBC in one of the parks in India, and they found that nearly 50 people were killed in these kinds of operations in 3 - 5 years. While there was like 5 cases of poaching.
So local subsistence hunting, Prakash says, is criminalized… while the true culprits of worldwide environmental degradation are able to continue enjoying parklands as tourists.
Prakash Kashwan: If we actually look at the most serious causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss, it’s cattle ranching and soy farming….And 75% of soy farming actually goes back to feed cattle and poultry and so on. So in that sense, meat-eating is really the root cause of environmental degradation globally.
Inside the US National Parks, Rosalyn LaPier says relationships have improved. She says, educational outreach from the Park Service to the Blackfeet tribe is much better than it used to be.
Rosalyn LaPier: I think they’ve gotten much better over the years, in working with tribes, and in recognizing that they have to work with tribes.
But the fundamental relationship - about who has control and agency - is still there. .
Rosalyn LaPier: I think it was in 2016, the National Park Service decided to create a process by which indigenous women primarily, could gather plants. Not just Glacier, but any National Park. So the tribe creates a system in collaboration with the NPS, but the NPS would have to agree to it. The tribe would provide a list of all the plants, why they were using, what quantity. Provide a list of all of the women, primarily women, who would be harvesting.
One of the efforts at regulation is that they say people are only allowed to gather plants as long as they only use handheld tools. And the NPS could say no.
I don’t think it’s the National Park’s business to know what we’re gathering.
If you've ever visited a National Park, and enjoyed the beautiful landscape there, the point of the story isn't to make you feel guilty about that, but rather help you to more fully see the historical geography under your feet.
Here in the US, tourism and time have softened the park service - the military has been replaced by rangers, who for years made an effort to minimize the appearance of law enforcement within the parks. But elsewhere, that’s not the case - and our early history of displacement and disenfranchisement is still active and under way.
This doesn't have to be the way that land is conserved... protected from becoming strip malls and parking lots... there are other models of conservation that we can look to. Some which are just starting to gain steam.
In Vicky’s special report,“Cornered by Protected Areas”, she recommends a new paradigm in conservation.
One that offers grievance mechanisms for indigenous people whose livelihoods are impacted by conservation - and one that recognizes and gives agency to the expertise of indigenous communities.
In the report she points out that research shows that Indigenous Peoples are in themselves effective conservationists, she writes - and that stronger rights to land and forests is positively correlated with biodiversity and lower carbon emissions.
Prakash Kashwan: So let’s not romanticize rural and indiginous populations. Because there practices contribute to environmental conservation because those practices are innate to their social, cultural and economic lifeworth. Let’s support that.
[Cue Robin Hood song]
If one model is erecting a fortress and filling it with outsiders… another would be to let the people in the forest - do the protecting themselves.
CREDITS
Outside/In was produced this week by Taylor Quimby, with help from me Sam Evans-Brown, and Justine Paradis.
Erika Janik is our Executive producer. Maureen McMurray is director of Is It Sporting?
Special thanks to David Bachrach, Luke Allen, and Mohammad Saidul Islam
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE BY Blue Dot Sessions.
OUR THEME MUSIC WAS MADE BY BREAKMASTER CYLINDER.
OUTSIDE IN IS A PRODUCTION OF NEW HAMPSHIRE PUBLIC RADIO.