Introduction
After learning about and experiencing western-led conservation efforts for the past three weeks, I now have mixed feelings about the conservation efforts being done globally— especially efforts imposed by Global North entities upon Global South countries. It can be argued that modern conservation efforts are flawed because they dehumanize local communities and they do not address the root causes of environmental deterioration. In this week’s blog post, I’ll reflect on my day-to-day experiences of the week. I’ll tie my experiences together by critically evaluating my experiences of modern conservation.
Wednesday, June 8, 2022, and Thursday, June 9, 2022
On Wednesday, the class visited the Piro biological research station in the Osa peninsula on the pacific coast. We attended a lecture on sea turtles and helped construct a sea turtle hatchery.
The lecture on sea turtles was eye opening. The rhetoric the lecturer used exposed the shortcomings of modern conservation, namely the dehumanization of locals and the exclusion of locals in conservation decision making. The locals were dehumanized specifically in discussions about poaching and land use. Turtles and their eggs are threatened by poaching, and Osa hopes to monitor and police poaching behavior. The lecturer began describing the motivations of poaching as irrational. However, poaching is mostly motivated by poverty and economic insecurity. This is supported by how covid-19 saw a decrease in ecotourism and increases in rates of poaching (Lucas, 2022). A classmate inquired about this, and the lecturer responded by saying that poverty is not always the prime motivator. They described that sometimes locals are motivated to poach by “laziness” and “drugs” and implied the existence of organized crime. What is missing from this outlook is that crime is not inherent to any individual. Instead, crime is born out of material conditions, most often economic and social dispossession (Thotakura, 2011). The lecturer’s criminalization of the locals did not address the full social context of locals’ living situations. To more effectively combat poaching, locals should be given fair and stable economic opportunities rather than the economic insecurity that comes with an economy dependent on ecotourism. It could be said that by privately owning massive swathes of land and not contributing wealth to local communities, conservation organizations may play a role in propagating economic insecurity.
Saturday, June 11, 2022
In the morning, the class moved south from the Piro biological research station to the Las Cruces biological research station. We were fortunate enough to have a discussion with members of the Ngöbe indigenous community. The Ngöbe once lived all throughout Costa Rica and Panama. After Spanish colonization and the spread of export intensive agriculture, the Ngöbe are now limited to southern Costa Rica along the Panamanian border and northern Panama. When asked about conservation, one Ngöbe representative gave a harsh criticism of modern conservation practices. They described that modern conservation is organized by white people who buy land and tell local people what to do with the land, effectively disregarding centuries of indigenous knowledge regarding the cultivation of the land. This leads to further erasure of indigenous culture and people. This discussion emphasized the importance of including local indigenous communities in the decision making process of conservation. In the current status quo, indigenous people and other local communities are excluded while white and western voices dominate.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
On this day, the class had a discussion on the book 6 Degrees: Our Life In A Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas. We were assigned this book with the intention of discussing the impacts of different degrees of warming respective to 1880.
Our group was assigned the chapter forecasting two degrees of warming. This chapter, and the book as a whole, was filled with racist and imperialist rhetoric. The author characterized the people of the Global South as not caring about the environment and dangerous to conservation efforts. For instance, when describing India, the author exclaims that “it is safe to say at present that few people in today’s India give much of a damn about global warming… as the booming middle class buys cars, fridges, and air conditioners in the millions, India’s C02 emissions are rising by 3 percent a year” (Lynas, 2007). When describing China, the author espouses that “Because of its sheer size and population, China is on a collision course with the planet… China’s get-rich-quick dream would quickly become a global nightmare” (Lynas, 2007). These excerpts criticize Indian and Chinese people for attempting to pull themselves out of the poverty that the West forcefully imposed through centuries of colonization, conquest, and ongoing imperialism. When constrained by historically poor living conditions, including poor housing, economic instability, and food insecurity, people of impoverished nations do not have much room to select sustainable lifestyles. These people are concerned with survival. Even as they scramble for better living conditions, the people of the Global South contribute comparatively little to the climate crisis— an analysis using historical data from 2015 shows that the Global South, including India and China, contributed only 8% to excess global C02 emissions while the Global North, including the US, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, are responsible for 92% of excess global C02 emissions (Hickel, 2020).
Many other factors make criticisms of impoverished nations unfair. First, the legacy of imperialism violently enforced by Western nations makes Global South countries all the more vulnerable to ecological collapse. Countries that suffer the most immediate and severe effects of climate change are the ones that were formerly colonized, partly because colonization results in the gross extraction of wealth from the global South to the global North, reducing resources and infrastructure needed to be resilient to climate change’s effects and to combat climate change (Hartnett, 2021). Second, expansionist capitalism has accelerated ecological catastrophe. 100 companies, many of them US based, are responsible for 71% of global emissions (CDP, 2017). Furthermore, 20 companies are responsible for 55% of plastic waste (Rylander and Gardner, 2021). To deflect the blame away from imperialism and capitalism and onto people of the Global South who are simply trying to survive is nothing short of hypocritical and counterproductive in fighting climate change.
The problem with this rhetoric is compounded by the fact that people of the Global South indeed care about the environment— the Global South is disproportionately affected by climate change due to their lack of resources in mitigating damage and adapting to change and due to their vulnerable locations near coastal areas (Hartnett, 2021). Ask people from a village in my native Indonesia whether they care about the environment, and you would not be able to find anybody who would say no. The people of the Global South, my people, care because we are currently suffering and will continue to suffer from this crisis. To say that people of the Global South don’t care about climate change while western governments and corporations are complicit in supporting systems that destroy the environment is once again hypocritical and counterproductive. This book was incredibly disheartening for me to read.
A few classmates of color and I criticized the rhetoric in our discussion. I feel that it’s important to criticize these implicit yet salient tendencies in modern conservation and environmentalist circles. I don’t want environmentalism to be just another institution benefitting white supremacy and capitalism at the cost of the well-being of people of color, indigenous people, the poor, the disabled, and other oppressed peoples. The harmful rhetoric in these educational materials should not be entertained.
Discussion and conclusion
In summary, the modern western-led conservation movement has many problematic tendencies. First, it dehumanizes the people of the Global South. I saw this throughout my week— when the sea turtle lecturer described poaching, when the Ngöbe tribe representatives discussed the exclusion of indigenous people from conservation, when the 6 degrees book unjustly criticized people of the global South without criticizing the material conditions these people faced. In all of these instances, indigenous people and people of the global south are treated unfairly as threats to sustainability. Second, it does not attack the root of environmental collapse: imperialism and capitalism. I also saw this throughout my week, but especially when the 6 degrees book focused on the choices of people in the global South. Without critically evaluating the systems that perpetuate climate catastrophe, global societies will not effectively ensure a livable future for the planet and its people.
I truly hope that one day conservation lets go of these oppressive tendencies. Just like everybody else, I want a livable future. I just don’t want the oppressed people of the world to be excluded from it.
Works cited
CDP (2017). The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017. https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1501833772
Hartnett, R. (2021). Climate Imperialism: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, and Global Climate Change. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 138–155. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3809
Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9), e399 – e404. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30196-0
Lucas, B. (2022). Impact of COVID-19 on poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking trends in Southern Africa. K4D Helpdesk Report 1094. Institute of Development Studies. https://doi.org/10.19088/K4D.2022.017
Rylander, Y. and Garder, T. (2021). 20 companies responsible for most single-use plastic waste. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/featured/20-companies-responsible-for-most-single-use-plastic-waste/
Thotakura, Dr. (2011). Crime: A Conceptual Understanding. Indian Journal of Applied Research. 4. 196-198. https://doi.org/10.15373/2249555X/MAR2014/58
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