Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples

by Mark Dowie

How native people—from the Miwoks of Yosemite to the Maasai of eastern Africa—have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation. Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In Conservation Refugees , Mark Dowie tells this story. This is a “good guy vs. good guy” story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples' movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve biological diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or “assimilated” but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the money economy. Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters between native peoples and conservation. He then describes the experiences of other groups, ranging from the Ogiek and Maasai of eastern Africa and the Pygmies of Central Africa to the Karen of Thailand and the Adevasis of India. He also discusses such issues as differing definitions of “nature” and “wilderness,” the influence of the “BINGOs” (Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy), the need for Western scientists to respect and honor traditional lifeways, and the need for native peoples to blend their traditional knowledge with the knowledge of modern ecology. When conservationists and native peoples acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival, Dowie writes, they can together create a new and much more effective paradigm for conservation.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction, Conservation, Nature, Anthropology, History, Ecology

372 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2009

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to other books I've read on Rewilding and "sustainable development" this is a much more realistic analysis. As he points out several times, if indigenous peoples didn't protect the biodiversity of their homelands then conservationists wouldn't be interested in those areas. So rather than drag them into the global money economy as servants for tourists, why not help protect their traditional cultures? Even better, he doesn't advocate profiting off them by treating them like zoo animals for foreigners to gawk at. It's amazing that so few other environmentalist writers can accept that concept, people and other living creatures existing without contributing to "the economy." I really hope this becomes a trend.

I can't say I agree with everything in here. When condemning "enforced primitivism" he says even though shifting traditional cultures to more modern cultures has caused severe problems he also says it doesn't have to. Therefore he's still missing how inherently destructive high-tech lifestyles are. Sure, these people shouldn't be forced to stay exactly how they are but that doesn't mean encouraging them to follow our footsteps. Frankly, not even we should be allowed to keep doing this stuff.

He also makes kind of a big deal about the word "wilderness" and how indigenous people supposedly had no concept of separation between human society and untouched nature. Based on my own research I consider that to be at least exaggerated. There seemed to always be areas that groups decided to leave off-limits and they clearly recognized a difference between human-influenced landscapes and areas left alone. I like what he was going for though. I just think he should have chosen his words a little more carefully to avoid overcompensating for our culture's stupidity. My only other complaints really are his use of "civilization" as a synonym for society at times, there's a couple lines that seem to misrepresent what the Deep Ecology crowd is about and there's also a pretty good amount of distracting typos. That's not too big a deal though. I would have liked to see more in here explicitly labeling our economic system, particularly the concept of infinite growth, as a problem too. Despite those petty flaws this is still one of the best things I've read in a while.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for a class, in which we spent every class going over a chapter and intensely analyzing it. By the last few weeks I was very ready for this book to be over and to be done with Dowie. As the book progressed, the author just became more and more obnoxious with his arguments. He was extraordinarily one-sided, he didn't cite his work properly and pulled most things out of his ass, and what he did cite was from biased sources.

I'm a science person. I definitely believe in conservation and the need to protect the world's ecosystems, but I'm with Dowie that the way we're going about protecting the Earth is not the best for the native peoples who happen to live in these areas that need protecting. We kick them out of their homes, take away their livelihoods, and basically take away all of their possibilities to live independent, productive lives. Which is horrible of us.

But this book is not the place to read about it. I would not recommend it. If you're interested in the topic I might recommend the introduction, because that gives a great overview to the topic and was pretty interesting, but I was let down was I got to the rest of the book.

[Stephen Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book foregrounds issues that typical conservationist and environmentalist texts sometimes neglect, and it handles the issues in a nonpolemical and evenhanded way (in the intro, he refers to the situation as a "good guys vs. good guys debate"). The concerns he raises about the voices and practices of indigenous peoples being ignored during policymaking decisions about the conservation of land they've often inhabited and protected for thousands of years are very important, and some of the history he covers is quite interesting, but by a certain point things start to run thin and he seems to begin repeating himself quite a bit. It doesn't help that this book has more typographical errors than any other I've read. I know it's not a fair critique, but it's difficult to be fully moved by the scholarship of someone who regularly omits multiple words from his direct quotations by accident. Just sayin'.

[Rohan Arthur · Rating 2 out of 5]

A flawed and shallow treatment of a controversial and important issue. Dowie, in his earnest zeal to make an strong argument against the over-eager efforts of conservationists at the cost of social equity and traditional community rights, abandons a clear-headed objectivity for a more directed and unapologetic positional stance. The result is a patchy book that comes across more as strident ideological propoganda than a piece of clean journalism. Which is a pity, because Dowie's principal arguments have value and are worthy of a clearer treatment than Dowie was able to provide in this book.

[Luis Jaquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dowie, Mark. Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009.
Topic: Mark Dowie’s Conservation Refugees addresses the intent, development, and application of environmental conservation practices throughout the world. It deliberates on the schools of thought in the global conservation movement and their social, economic, cultural, and environmental impacts (xxi). This creates a good-guy/bad-guy narrative that details how organizations and individuals with the common goal of preserving a healthy and diverse planet can dynamically oppose each other due to varying definitions of nature and differing perspectives on how it should be utilized and preserved (16). The displacement of indigenous peoples is also touched on as preservation efforts are observed through the governments, scientists, conversationalists, and NGOs that molded their implementation and oversight (46).
Scope: Conservation Refugees observes the history and practice of conservation, analyzing the actions of the following: international governments (251), transnational conversationalists, indigenous peoples, the big five non-governmental organizations (52), multinational corporations (47-56), and supranational institutions to detail their influences on conservation policy and their various methods of manipulating it toward their agendas. He makes note of the American origins of conservation strategies like the exclusionary model through the Yosemite and Yellow Stone examples, detailing how these models have been adapted and softened in areas of Latin America, Australia, and Africa (11-12). A comprehensive examination of the resistance of indigenous peoples towards conservation policy and its infringement on self-determination and regional, economic, and cultural processes is also had to illustrate the detrimental aspects of centralized conservation policy and its partnership with resource exploiting, extractive industries (153-181).
Historical Question(s): Dowie scrutinizes the global relationship between transnational conservation efforts and indigenous peoples. This scrutiny proposes the following questions: in the conflict between transitional conversationalists and indigenous conservation who holds the key for widespread conservation (x), how does one balance preservation cultural diversity and humanity’s relationship with nature, and how should conservation efforts overcome American and Eurocentric perspectives to preserve vulnerable areas not typically considered aesthetically suitable for conservation? He also asks if the United States’ paternalistic view of conservation really works, and is it an appropriate model to follow for the rest of the world (259).
Thesis(es): Conservation Refugees’ main thesis contends that conservation best occurs by allowing indigenous peoples to directly participate in the stewardship and management of protected environments, instead of displacing their self-determination and sovereignty (250). It also argues the following: that the socioeconomic and cultural impacts of conservation on indigenous peoples go overlooked in mainstream preservation efforts (xxi), that conservation refuges exist in large numbers on every continent because of the displacement conservation entails (xxii), and that conservation creates implicitly racist outcomes as utilization and oversight of protected lands by indigenous peoples are often deemed incompatible with preservation (3). It also argues that the impoverishment of indigenous peoples by current conservation efforts is intolerable and counterproductive in that the socioeconomic and governmental instability is causes harm both the biodiversity and cultural diversity (265).
Sources: Dowie utilizes a combination of primary, secondary and reference sources to illustrate the humanistic, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of conservation. He takes accounts from books, articles, journals, oral recollections, and diaries to build and gauge the perspectives of soldiers, governments, indigenous peoples, and conversationalist institutions in how they observe efforts of protection and preservation in theoretical and real world applications (2-3).

[Cathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening and well-researched history of the Conservation Movement from the creation of Yellowstone & Yosemite National Parks to the present day, specifically as it details the displacement and eviction of indigenous peoples from land that their ancestors have been stewards of for generations. In nearly every instance that land is set aside for “protection,” the people who live there are removed (often forcibly), and their knowledge of the area is dismissed and lost. This book should be read by anyone who supports conservation, the establishment of national parks, and / or wants to preserve “wilderness” or “nature,” two terms foreign to many peoples worldwide who question the motives, intentions, and abilities of Westerners to protect anything, given our track records. Truly a perspective shifting book for me, I am grateful for the recommendation from the Dopoi Center for Maasai Education, Research and Conservation on the Maasai Mara near Talek, Kenya.

[Vanessa Ricci-Thode · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should probably be required reading for anyone who gives a shit about the future of the planet.

[Christina McGrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book back in 2018 and found it eye opening. I might reread it to see if my feelings still hold up.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need to finish reading all of it but skimmed what I needed for my dissertation on a very similar topic and it’s quite insightful!

[Aaron Riensche · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was fascinating. For someone who has enjoyed a few national parks, and thinks highly of people like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, it was a bit of a punch in the gut. This tells the story that they gloss over in glorified accounts - the exclusion of natives from the places to be conserved. It's all the more difficult to swallow when you consider that in many cases the excluded people are from cultures that lived in harmony with nature in those places for centuries. But the book ends with a positive message, that we can learn from our mistakes and that there are ways to harmonize the equally important goals of preserving nature and respecting human rights. A must-read if you have any interest in these topics.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dowie makes a persuasive argument that conservation can only succeed in partnership with indigenous people as opposed to the old model of forcibly removing people from their land. He's scathing of the Big International NGOs (BINGOS) which too often partner with extractive industries and bio-prospectors at the expense of their declared mission. Having said this the book barely touches on the implications of this model - conservation can succeed if the natives remain primitive, but what if they don't? Is it conservation at the expense of development?

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening account in the consequences of conservation and the decisions that the large organisations make around the planet. Insensitivity for local people and land rights should not be part of a conservation ethic, but the challenges of coupling rural development and wildlife conservation are not simple to address. The book is a treasure of lessons to be learnt and mistakes never to be repeated again, otherwise the mission of conservation may be doomed.

[Olive · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly interesting look into the history of environmental conservation and its implications for indigenous communities. dowie's examination of what "wilderness" means around the world is compelling, informative, and poignant.

[Andy Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting topic. As an expose on conservation BINGOs, the book is pretty effective. Arguments could have been buttressed by more thorough research (how can you allude to common property systems and never mention Elinor Ostrom or her work?).

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is more important? The trees and mountains, or the people who live there? Conservationists often take actions that result in great damage, even genocide, when the people who live in beautiful areas lack political power. Yosemite is an example, and this book explains why.

[Lila Afifi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed that he took a more anthropocentric view on conservation, but not in the traditional sense. Dowie very much focuses on the mistreatment of indigenous groups rather than the superiority of Western societies.

[Gillian Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book looking into the often opposing goals of preserving biodiversity vs cultural diversity.