Hello! So one of my blog writers (a masters Zoology student in the UK) has written this piece - 'Don't for get Ingigenous Peoples in Conservation'. Don't Forget Indigenous Peoples in Conservation! - Japa - A Mindful Life This is a hugely important topic that often, and wrongly, gets swept under the carpet. I would love to hear some people's thoughts on this. It is a topic that I am hoping to gain some traction and create more awareness about. I'm sure it is something that many of you are aware about - being such a forward thinking forum.
Are you familiar with the book Conservation refugees by Mark Dowie? It is a book showing how important it is to recognise the needs of indigenous people for conservation and giving examples on how it went wrong in the past.
From what I know many newer projects that involve eco-tourism often try to match the tourist industry with the native populations of an area. By tapping into the resource that is the people living within the environment and making wildlife valuable to them in a financial way. Conservation has to consider people as people are often the root cause of; or at least a major contributing factor in the decline of populations and/or habitat. It's the same reason why projects in places like the UK can fail if land users (farmers - estate owners - game keepers) are not brought into the system and encouraged and enabled to at least allow the reintroduction if not take part in it. Failure to do so simply means that you're running a battle of people VS wildlife - you might win that for a while whilst the conservation project has money, but projects are often only short term and will eventually end or key motivators will move on. As a result if there's no support structure properly in place things will fall back to what they were before.
Without the approval of indigenous communities conservation is simply not possible. It is important that this be understood. Sadly many very destructive large projects of development in Latin America are funded by US and Canadian companies, and in particular for mining. Various native leaders are killed or imprisioned for defending their lands. It is rarely reported in the international press. It is happening right now in Chile and Argentina where the mapuche indians are being attacked for defending their communal lands.
As an anthropology major, I'm extremely interested in this subject. Thanks for the link, it was a good read! I agree with overread and carlos55 that conservation can't work if the locals aren't involved. I'm glad to see that more conservation groups are taking this into consideration, but there are still so many that don't.
Orca- in my view conservations bigger hurdle is education and awareness of disinterested groups. Part of the problem of having a "natural vs manmade" way of thinking in many societies is that natural studies become optional and even those working the land often only learn as much as they need to turn a profit from the soil and plants. So there's a lot of people who are disinterested who have to, in some way, have the natural world become interesting to them and its got to happen before they hit retirement age. That's why eco-tourism works because its not just providing an avenue of interest and eduction, but also earning, profit, social gain and direct involvement. It works really well in an otherwise poorer economy where you can really beef up interest in the local area because it brings in so much income. In contrast in many more developed areas you've got the land already producing income and you've got users like gamekeepers and estate owners who are easier to educate (in theory starting from a roughly higher level of education and awareness) but whom have to agree with the moral and ethical angle more so. Indeed often we expect them to take a loss of income or to spend more work hours in order to support the natural world. That's a hard ask for many people in any point in time. So the only way is to get them interested and to get them aware - which is a sad point for me because I feel the natural world is not pushed/inspired enough at schools as the "human" world is.
Oh, totally. It's easy for a middle/upper class American (or other first worlder) in the cities/suburbs to talk about the importance of conservation for conservation's sake and how we shouldn't care about money or profit... But there are people who live in these places, and they'd like to have a good quality of living too. I wonder how many "screw the natives!" conservationists would be happy about mountain lions or wolves getting reintroduced in their neighborhoods? Have you seen "Milking the Rhino"? It's a good documentary about this subject, and how eco-tourism can be a good (though not perfect) solution.
I've not seen it, but I've heard a good few stories including some from India (I think it was india or another asian county) where poachers are kept in check by the local tour guides to an extent that when a selection of the guides were taken to another site to introduce how to run similar schemes in a new area; there was a huge impact from the poachers trying to get what they could before the locals returned. It's that kind of continued pressure that is required to keep up with conservation. Something that can function on its own without international help and aid. It gets around the fact that many different cultures think differently and that a resource (The wild and wildlife) which is prized and important to those in a, say, developed middle class western society - is not considered as important by those in another culture. Of course the biggest risk with tourism is that it does require international support. You need to have your country stable and attractive to tourists (thus riots and election disasters in the urban areas can easily impact these rural communities); you also need to have people affluent enough to be able to and to want to travel internationally.
Not to mention that from a practical standpoint, I'm not sure how many places can rely a lot on tourism. But admittedly, I don't know how many people travel internationally on a regular basis.
Some great points here and some interesting ones on eco-tourism. It is positive that some progressions are happening but there is much to be done. It is hard to get that international collaboration and much of the time local collaboration!
