The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.

Ecuador has repeatedly disregarded the rights of indigenous peoples by allowing oil extraction in lands ostensibly recognized as protected. (Flickr)

When planning conservation projects, governments, NGOs, and environmental activists often imagine pristine stretches of unpeopled wilderness. But, this dream of perfect environmentalism can have disastrous consequences for indigenous communities around the world who have spent millennia living in harmony with nature only to be ignored, disregarded, mistreated, and displaced by conservationists.

Indigenous peoples know how to live with nature, but conservation plans too often call for their removal from protected lands or outlaw the hunting and cultivation techniques that have allowed them to survive. Conservation needs to be people-centered and embrace the self-determination of indigenous groups to be truly sustainable. People can live with nature. They have for generations and generations. This editorial board calls on companies, governments, NGOs, and activists to involve indigenous communities in conservation efforts. Continuing to ignore and mistreat indigenous peoples continues human rights abuses.

Indonesia

Indonesia has a long history of displacing indigenous groups to establish national parks. Only after a 2013 court decision mandated the return of indigenous “customary” land to those communities did the government change course. In the past decade, the government has decentralized forest control to local governments, which work closely with customary communities to manage their shared resources. In the past few years, Indonesian President Joko Widodo has returned the ownership of many national forests back to local governments and customary communities.

The partnership, while of course better for the forests, also speeds up the legal recognition of tribal communities and their lands. In a process called customary mapping, the community-government partnership jointly surveys the forests to denote village and community boundaries, accelerating legal recognition of both customary communities and their land.

Traditional houses of the Toraja customary community. (Wikimedia Commons)

In theory, at least. Even after a decade of devolving forest control to localities, Indonesia’s slow national bureaucracy requires customary communities to fight, sometimes for years, for even a modicum of legal recognition. Only then can they request a local government decree that will title their land. Yet, local officials can hesitate to issue these decrees unless helping customary communities confers electoral advantages. And, even then, these decrees sometimes cost around $14,000, money these customary communities cannot easily obtain.

Furthermore, Human Rights Watch has criticized Widodo for returning land to only 18 recognized communities, a “far cry from the more than 2,332 indigenous communities that make up an estimated 50 to 70 million people.”

Things could easily be better for Indonesia’s customary communities. They deserve a streamlined bureaucracy, an end to the politicking around their rights, and accelerated government recognition, all of which would facilitate conservation of their lands and lifestyles.

That being said, things could certainly be much worse—and they once were. Indonesia’s work toward recognizing its indigenous communities is slow, but strategies such as customary mapping and devolution of powers could be models worth emulating around the world.

Cameroon

In May 2019, a BuzzFeed News investigation uncovered that the world’s largest conservation organization, WWF (World Wildlife Fund, called World Wide Fund for Nature outside of the U.S. and Canada) funds barbaric paramilitary forces in order to stop poaching. According to the first of eight installments in the investigation into six African and Asian national parks, WWF “funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people.”

One site of these abuses is southeast Cameroon in Boumba Bek, Nki, and Lobéké national parks. Indigenous Cameroonians described horrendous experiences at the hands of WWF-backed rangers, including bludgeonings, burn torture, and homes broken into in the middle of the night and burned to the ground. In 2017, rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents.

A mirador overlooks a field in Lobéké National Park in Cameroon. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Cameroonian government technically employs the rangers, but their relationship with WWF is an intimate one: the charity has helped train them, paid their salaries, and built them houses. Furthermore, a significant amount of the millions the WWF spends at Lobéké National Park goes to “enforcement” activities, which include patrols and raids.

Even worse, a 2018 WWF-commissioned report by a U.K.-based human rights lawyer obtained by BuzzFeed revealed that top WWF executives personally reviewed evidence of the abuses in Cameroon more than a year before the initial BuzzFeed investigation. The report found “very serious and widespread” allegations that rangers had abused locals, often “in connivance with and under the watchful eyes of WWF staff.” WWF had been aware of possible abuses long before 2018. For more than a decade, WWF has received numerous complaints from activists and NGOs claiming that guards were terrorizing indigenous communities in Cameroon, and despite the 2018 report, the organization continued to fund and support the guards.

The case of Cameroon is an example of the disastrous consequences of over-zealous conservation efforts and the perils of collaborating with autocratic governments, even in the pursuit of worthwhile goals. As huge conservation organizations like WWF continue to employ barbaric methods to protect flora and fauna, indigenous communities living in these areas suffer the consequences.

Australia

When lightning struck Gospers Mountain in New South Wales, Australia, in late October 2019, nobody anticipated that it would grow into one of the most disastrous fires on record in Australia. The fire developed into a “megablaze” and has burned more than 32,400 square miles of land. More than 2,500 homes have been destroyed, at least 29 people have died, and more than one billion animals are estimated dead.

The Gospers Mountain fire has a lesser-discussed human consequence as well: the loss of aboriginal land and cultural heritage sites. New South Wales houses the largest indigenous population in Australia. The fire primarily burned national parks and other forests, where thousands of indigenous cultural sites are located. Some of these sites date back to the last Ice Age and help tell the story of aboriginal movement across the land and the customs they kept to sustain life on the continent prior to British colonization.

Australia is the continent most prone to wildfires, combining incredibly dry land and high temperatures. The aboriginal people developed ways to manage fires through a process of “cool” burns, which use small fires to clear out dead leaves, and other debris that fuel wildfires. They also destroy invasive plant species. Cool burning practices rely on careful holistic considerations of the surrounding species, recent weather, and time of year that better maintain the local ecosystems but require intimate knowledge of the land to do so.

Activists now fear that a continued failure by the government to listen to aboriginal experts will result in further disaster caused by preventable fire. Western fire prevention practices also set small fires, but these often burn the wrong types of plants and debris, ultimately leading to land that is at a higher risk to burn in a bushfire. While the aboriginal clean burning practice requires more manpower and a more informed understanding of the land’s needs, the indigenous people of Australia deserve the right to protect their cultural sites from preventable disaster.

Many aboriginal people feel that the Gospers Mountain fire exemplifies their continued conflict with the Australian government. “Without native ecology being preserved, we lose the very essence of our identity. Our totems, our songlines, our sacred ceremony sites that remain... our very existence is under threat. Nothing in the last 250 years has changed. White Australia is still trying to erase us. It’s never stopped,” Ruby Wharton, a Gamilaraay and Kooma Murdie student-activist said. While the Gospers Mountain fire devastated homes indiscriminately, the aboriginal people may face the most dire effects of the government’s inaction and inability to prevent bushfires.

Ecuador

Several ethnic groups in Ecuador have faced serious setbacks to their control over their own land and its environmental protection. In the Cayambe Coca National Park, the government has repeatedly failed to uphold protections of the area and the people living there despite designating it an officially protected park. The government lacks the will and resources to protect the park, leading to encroachment from poachers and miners, some directly encouraged by government concessions. In fact, government action in the region has not only failed to environmentally protect the national park but also directly undercut the authority and agency of the Cofán people, who live and depend on the land, while allowing the contamination of critical water sources that could push the Cofán off of their land entirely.

“The state claimed this land in 1970 and told us how to live in our own territory,” said Alex Lucitante, who is Cofán, “but it does nothing to protect it or enforce park rules.”

Members of the Cofán ethnic group effectively undertake environmental protection of the territory by arranging for community guards to patrol the park. They have also taken direct action against government actions, including the construction of a fishpond to protect their food chain from the contamination. Lucitante said, “If the government cared about protecting the land, it would be the other way around, and we would be in charge of conservation.”

Other ethnic groups in Ecuador have also succeeded in their struggles against government inaction or opposition. The Waorani ethnic group sued and won a court ruling preventing Ecuador from auctioning their land in the Waorani Reserve and Yasuní National Park for oil exploration. The decision upholds their right to self-determination and increases the chances of successful preservation. The Waorani achieved this in spite of the substantial danger facing indigenous environmental activists, documented in the Land of Resistants project.

A separate referendum advocated by Ecuador’s indigenous movement passed in 2018 with over 65 percent of the vote preventing the expansion of mining and drilling in environmentally protected areas and areas home to indigenous groups. Indigenous women leaders met that same year with President Lenin Moreno to discuss oil drilling in their lands as well as the sexual violence and threats they received from the oil and mining industries. “The threats against women are a consequence of extractivism,” said Nina Gualinga, a 24-year-old indigenous activist. “Women don’t want more oil and mining exploitation. It is women who care for the children, who care for the land so it should be women making these decisions.” The government largely disregarded their concerns and announced new oil auctions and mining concessions later that year.

The Arctic

The protection of indigenous lands is needed now more than ever. In Indonesia, palm oil cultivation has led to massive deforestation. Ecuador’s government would have exploited national parks and reserves for oil had they not been stopped. Australia’s failed government land management practices saw indigenous lands torched.

But, these losses do not end with indigenous peoples: when they lose, the climate loses. Oil extraction accelerates greenhouse gas emissions. Palm oil-driven deforestation similarly ruins productive forests, preventing the natural capture of greenhouse gases. And, when runaway climate change turns a bad bushfire season into Australia’s most destructive on record, it shocks the world into worrying about economies and livelihoods. When the climate loses, everyone loses.

If indigenous peoples lose around the world, climate change accelerates. Nowhere is this logic more evident than in the Arctic, where both indigenous rights and climate protections are sorely lacking. Temperatures in the Arctic have risen faster than those anywhere else on the planet. Indigenous people in the Arctic, the Inuit, may have it the worst: with the warmth comes invasive species, cruise ships, meager catches, unreliable drinking water, and, worst of all, conservationists and speculators.

The effects of climate change on temperatures worldwide are amplified in the Arctic. (NASA Climate)

Inuit communities are fighting for their existence against conservationists bent on banning commercial fishing, limiting narwhal hunting, and ending the trade in polar bear skins. They are fighting for their existence against governments and companies set on exploring Arctic waters for oil and gas and building new ports for submarines and warships. Caught between climate change and conservation, the Inuit are on thin ice. Neither future helps them.

Climate change cannot be blamed on indigenous peoples when their stewardship has sustained so many corners of the world for generations. Addressing humanity’s existential threat without the input of indigenous communities, without taking blame for what we have done to them as both exploiters and conservationists, would be hubris.

A Seat at the Table

That being said, protecting indigenous peoples and their lands is more than a means to an end. Their histories, practices, and identities are tied to their lands and waters, which governments and corporations have violated time and time again in the name of both resource extraction and conservation.

But, to conclude that we must more frequently listen to indigenous voices is not enough. Indigenous groups deserve the legal and social empowerment necessary to exercise agency in choosing how to live their lives.To dismiss them as merely squatters on land that could be used for “better purposes” is to deny their right to self-determination and their humanity.

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EDITORIAL: Hug People, Not (Just) Trees