From wildlife "parks" in Botswana, Africa to the Bay-Delta Estuary and the marine waters of California, large conservation NGOs and neoliberal governments are collaborating to violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples under the guise of "conservation."
Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, has criticized big conservation groups, including some of the corporate "environmental groups" that I have challenged in many of my articles, for "routinely violating" tribal peoples' rights while they fail to achieve their conservation objectives.
In an article published on February 3, 2015 by the U.S.-based journal Truthout and British magazine The Ecologist, Corry writes that governments, with the support of "conservation" organizations, are forcing indigenous peoples off their ancestral homelands in the name of “conservation."
The illegal evictions of tribal peoples in India, the torture and abuse of indigenous Baka “Pygmies” in Cameroon, and the mistreatment of the Bushmen in Botswana are just a few examples given by Corry as part of Survival's "Parks Need People" campaign.
Corry further takes aim at big conservation players such the United for Wildlife consortium of conservation organizations, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), for contributing to the illegal treatment of tribal peoples.
A WWF ad from 1994 asks whether 'to send in the army or an anthropologist' to stop indigenous people destroying the Amazon rainforest.
The United for Wildlife meeting in March was hosted by Botswana, “whose President is guilty of trying to eradicate Bushmen hunters,” said Corry.
The United for Wildlife consortium includes Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy, recipients of many millions of dollars every year from the Walton Family Foundation, as well as the World Wildlife Fund, Fauna and Flora International, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN),The Wildlife Conservation Society and Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
"United for Wildlife was created by The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry. Led by the Duke of Cambridge our campaign unites the world’s leading wildlife charities under a common purpose; to create a global movement for change,” according to the consortium's website, (http://www.unitedforwildlife.org)
WWF funds “ecoguards” in Cameroon who arrest and abuse Baka “Pygmies” for entering their ancestral forests which have been turned into "protected areas, noted Corry.
Corry writes, “If the conservation conglomerates really are to start preventing the further industrialization of these vital ecosystems, they surely must first remove giant polluters like Monsanto and BP from their own boards. Conservation has to stop the illegal eviction of tribal peoples from their ancestral homelands. It has to stop claiming tribal lands are wildernesses when they've been managed and shaped by tribal communities for millennia.
It has to stop accusing tribespeople of poaching when they hunt to feed their families. It has to stop the hypocrisy in which tribal people face arrest and beatings, torture and death, while fee-paying big game hunters are actively encouraged."
Survival International believes that tribal peoples are the “best conservationists and guardians of the natural world.”
"The real creators of the world's national parks are not the ideologues and evangelists of the environmental movement, but the tribal peoples who fashioned their landscapes with knowledge and understanding accumulated over countless generations," Corry concludes.
I completely agree with Corry. As an investigative journalist covering fish, water, the environment in the West, I have witnessed how corporate "environmental" NGOs and the state and federal governments have collaborated to violate tribal rights under the name of "conservation." Many of these NGOs and government agencies are plagued by their embrace of institutional racism and neo-colonial attitudes.
In California, Brown administration officials and corporate environmental NGOs pushing the Bay Delta Conservation Plan to build the Delta Tunnels and the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative have routinely violated the rights of Indigenous Peoples, as I have documented in article after article.
Brown administration and Obama administration officials, in collaboration with corporate "environmental" NGOs such as the Natural Heritage Institute — and until recently the Nature Conservancy — have pushed the construction of the tunnels, in spite of the enormous threat the project poses to Tribal water rights and the salmon, steelhead and other fish species that the Tribes consider sacred and depend on for sustenance.
The state and federal governments released the revised version of the tunnels plan this summer, splitting the plan into the Californian Water Fix, the conveyance component, and California Eco Restore, the habitat “restoration” component. The “coalition” supporting the California Water Fix, “Californians for Water Security, does not list the Nature Conservancy as a backer of the revised plan. (watersecurityca.com)
Tunnels proponents have completely failed to heed the input of the Winnemem Wintu and other Tribes that successfully managed fish and wildlife populations for thousands of years before Europeans arrived in California.
The BDCP/California Water Fix is part of a larger plan to privatize water and plunder the public trust in California. As Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, said.
“It does not make sense that people are separating the water puzzle into individual pieces, such as: the raising of Shasta Dam, Proposition 1, the Delta tunnels, BDCP, Sites Reservoir, Temperance Flat, CALFED, Delta Vision, BDCP, OCAP, the Bay Delta, Trinity/Klamath Rivers, the Sacramento River, the San Joaquin River, and water rights. It is all one BIG Project.
You have to look at the whole picture and everything in between from Shasta Dam to the Delta estuary. We need to ask what is affected by our actions and who is benefitting from them? These are not separate projects; they are all the same thing that the State is asking us to fund – California water being manipulated for the enrichment of some and the devastation of cultures, environments, and species all in the name of higher profits.” (http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/27216-chief-caleen-sisk-it-s-all-one-big-project)
Likewise, California's Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, privately funded by the shadowy Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, not only failed to protect the ocean from fracking, offshore oil drilling, pollution, military testing, corporate aquaculture and all human impacts on the ocean other than fishing and gathering, but the process violated the traditional fishing and gathering rights of the Yurok Tribe and other Indian Nations. In spite of claims by the Brown regime that the process respects tribal gathering rights, the MLPA initiative bans tribal gathering in the "State Marine Reserves" that it created.
"The State of California is beginning to implement the so-called Marine Life Protection Act," said Yurok Tribe Vice Chairperson Susan Masten in the March 2014 election edition of the Yurok Today newsletter. "From the very start, the Tribe has not supported this initiative because it does not recognize the Tribe’s inherent hunting and gathering rights. Also, the Act lacked the sophistication required to properly steward the diverse ecosystems on the Yurok coastline."
"Since time immemorial, the Yurok Tribe has practiced a highly effective method of marine resource management, which has ensured an abundance of sea life to sustain our people. The Creator gave us the right to properly harvest marine resources in the coastal areas within Yurok Ancestral Territory. With this right, comes a great duty to protect and conserve these resources. To that end, we are developing our own marine life management program, based on our traditional knowledge of ocean ecosystems as well as western science," Masten concluded. (http://www.yuroktribe.org/documents/2014_March_ELECTION_.pdf)
The "marine protected areas" created under the MLPA Initiative process, backed by big environmental NGOs including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the League of Conservation Voters, the Ocean Conservancy and others, were based on terminally flawed and incomplete science - and MLPA officials failed to include any Tribal scientists on the Science Advisory Team.
To make matters worse Ron LeValley, the Co-Chair of the MLPA Initiative Science Advisory Team for the North Coast, repeatedly rejected requests by the Yurok Tribe Science Team to make presentations that challenged the Initiative's junk science. And to make matters even worse, the same LeValley in May 2014 was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for conspiracy to embezzle $852,000 from the Yurok Tribe.
For more information about the "inconvenient truths" of the MLPA Initiative, go to; intercontinentalcry.org/…
Read Stephen Corry’s full article in Truthout: www.truthout.org/...;
For more information, go to; www.survivalinternational.org;