{"id":164144,"date":"2020-09-14T07:05:44","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T11:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=164144"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:15:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:15:02","slug":"op-ed-american-environmentalisms-racist-roots-shaped-global-thinking-conservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2020\/09\/op-ed-american-environmentalisms-racist-roots-shaped-global-thinking-conservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-Ed: American Environmentalism’s Racist Roots Have Shaped Global Thinking About Conservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States is having a long-overdue national reckoning with racism. From\u00a0criminal justice<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0pro sports<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0pop culture<\/a>, Americans increasingly are recognizing how racist ideas have influenced virtually every sphere of life in this country.<\/p>\n

This includes the environmental movement. Recently the Sierra Club \u2013 one of the oldest and largest U.S. conservation organizations \u2013 acknowledged racist views held by its founder, author and conservationist\u00a0John Muir<\/a>. In some of his writing, Muir described Native Americans and Black people as\u00a0dirty, lazy and uncivilized<\/a>. In an essay collection published in 1901 to promote national parks, he assured prospective tourists that \u201cAs to Indians,\u00a0most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acknowledging this record, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune\u00a0wrote in July 2020<\/a>: \u201cAs defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must\u2026reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a salutary gesture. However, I know from my\u00a0research on conservation policy<\/a>\u00a0in places like India, Tanzania and Mexico that the problem isn\u2019t just the Sierra Club.<\/p>\n

American environmentalism\u2019s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. This dominant narrative pays little thought to indigenous and other poor people who rely on these lands \u2013 even when they are its most effective stewards.<\/p>\n

Racist legacies of nature conservation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Muir was not the first or last American conservationist to hold racist views. Decades before Muir set foot in California\u2019s Sierra Nevada. John James Audubon published his \u201cBirds of America<\/a>\u201d engravings between 1827 and 1838. Audubon was a skilled naturalist and illustrator \u2013 and a slaveholder.<\/p>\n

Audubon\u2019s research benefited from information and specimens collected by enslaved Black men and Indigenous people. Instead of recognizing their contributions, Audubon referred to them as \u201chands\u201d traveling along with white men<\/a>. The National Audubon Society has removed Audubon\u2019s biography from its site,\u00a0referring<\/a>\u00a0to Audubon\u2019s involvement in the slave trade as \u201cthe challenging parts of his identity and actions.\u201d The group also condemned \u201cthe role John James Audubon played in enslaving Black people and perpetuating white supremacist culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theodore Roosevelt, who is widely revered as the\u00a0first environmental president<\/a>, was an enthusiastic hunter who led\u00a0the Smithsonian\u2013Roosevelt African Expedition<\/a>\u00a0to Kenya in 1909-1910. During this \u201cshooting trip<\/a>,\u201d Roosevelt and his party killed more than 11,000 animals, including\u00a0elephants, hippopotamuses and white rhinos<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The predominant view is that Roosevelt\u2019s love of hunting was good for nature because it\u00a0fueled his passion for conservation<\/a>. But this paradigm underpins what I see as a modern racist myth: the view that\u00a0trophy hunting<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 wealthy hunters buying government licenses to shoot big game and keep whatever animal parts they choose \u2013\u00a0pays for wildlife conservation in Africa<\/a>. In my assessment, there is\u00a0little evidence to support such claims<\/a>\u00a0about trophy hunting, which reinforce exploitative models of conservation by removing local communities from lands set aside as hunting reserves.<\/p>\n

Ecologist Aldo Leopold<\/a>, who is viewed as the father of wildlife management and the U.S. wilderness system, was an early proponent of the argument that\u00a0overpopulation is the root cause of environmental problems<\/a>. This view implies that economically less-developed nations with large populations are the biggest threats to conservation.<\/p>\n

Contemporary advocates of wildlife conservation, such as Britain\u2019s Prince William, continue to\u00a0rely on the trope<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cAfrica\u2019s rapidly growing human population\u201d threatens the continent\u2019s wildlife. Famed primatologist Jane Goodall also blamed our current environmental challenges in part on\u00a0overpopulation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0the argument that population growth alone is responsible for environmental damage is problematic<\/a>. Many studies have concluded that conspicuous consumption and the energy-intensive lifestyles of wealthy people in advanced economies have a\u00a0much larger impact on the environment<\/a>\u00a0than actions by poor people. For example, the richest 10% of the world\u2019s population produces\u00a0almost as much greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Local communities are often written out of popular narratives on nature conservation. Many documentaries, such as the 2020 film \u201cWild Karnataka<\/a>,\u201d narrated by David Attenborough,\u00a0entirely ignore local Indigenous people<\/a>, who have nurtured the natural heritages of the places where they live. Some of the most celebrated footage in wildlife documentaries made by filmmakers like Attenborough\u00a0is not even shot in the wild<\/a>. By relying on fictional visuals, they reproduce racialized structures that render local people invisible.<\/p>\n

Fortress Conservation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The wilderness movement founded by Anglo-American conservationists is institutionalized in the form of national parks. Writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously\u00a0called national parks<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

But many national parks and other lands set aside for wilderness conservation are also\u00a0the ancestral homelands of Native peoples<\/a>. These communities were\u00a0forced off their lands<\/a>\u00a0during European colonization of North America.<\/p>\n

Similar injustices continued to unfold even after independence in other parts of the world. When I analyzed a data set of 137 countries, I found that the largest areas of national parks were set aside in countries with\u00a0high levels of economic inequality and poor or nonexistent democratic institutions<\/a>. The poorest countries \u2013 including the Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Tanzania and Zambia \u2013 had each set aside more than 30% of national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity conservation.<\/p>\n

This happens because\u00a0corrupt government officials and commercial tourism and safari operators<\/a>\u00a0can benefit from it. So do hunters, researchers and documentary filmmakers from the Global North, even as local communities are forbidden from hunting bush meat for family consumption.<\/p>\n

Critics call this strategy \u201cfortress conservation<\/a>.\u201d According to some estimates, Indigenous and rural communities\u00a0protect up to 80% of global biodiversity<\/a>, but receive little benefit in return.<\/p>\n

Better Models<\/strong><\/p>\n

Correcting this legacy can happen only by radically transforming its exclusionary approach. Better and scientifically robust strategies recognize that low-intensity human interventions in nature practiced by Indigenous peoples can conserve landscapes more effectively than walling them off from use.<\/p>\n

For example, I have studied\u00a0forested regions of central India<\/a>\u00a0that are home to Indigenous Baiga communities. Baigas practice subsistence farming that involves few or no chemical fertilizers and controlled use of fire. This form of agriculture\u00a0creates open grasslands that support endangered native herbivores<\/a>\u00a0like deer and antelopes. These grasslands are the main habitat for India\u2019s world-renowned\u00a0Kanha National Park and Tiger Reserve<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ecologists have shown that natural landscapes interspersed with low-intensity subsistence agriculture can be\u00a0most effective for biodiversity conservation<\/a>. These multiple-use landscapes provide social, economic and cultural support for Indigenous and rural communities.<\/p>\n

My research shows that when governments enact socially just nature conservation policies, such as\u00a0community forestry in Mexico<\/a>, they are\u00a0better able to handle conflicts over use of these resources<\/a>. Socially just nature conservation is possible under two main conditions: Indigenous and rural communities have\u00a0concrete stakes in protecting those resources<\/a>\u00a0and can\u00a0participate in policy decisions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, conservation institutions and policies continue to exclude and discriminate against\u00a0Indigenous<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0rural communities<\/a>. In the long run, it is clear to me that conservation will succeed only if it can support the goal of a dignified life for all humans and nonhuman species.<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The racist assumptions underlying early US environmentalism have had far-reaching effects. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":164145,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2387,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1902],"class_list":["post-164144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-sustainability","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-22 05:41:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164146,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164144\/revisions\/164146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/164145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164144"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=164144"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=164144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}