We’re losing species at shocking rates – so why is conservation failing?
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A new generation of conservationists with a fresh agenda is needed, argued Jon Hutton, director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute and former head of the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre. The world’s wealthy wildlife groups, which attract more than $10bn a year to protect nature are in danger of becoming disconnected from real-world politics and people, he said.
“We consistently overlook the highly political nature of issues such as land ownership and rights and access to natural resources. The result is our biodiversity maps and plans that sketch out sweeping agendas for land-use change may unwittingly contain the seeds of their own failure. We need to re-imagine everything – rethink and challenge everything we do, how we do it and who does it.”
“Conservation is dominated by elderly white guys. There is a strong perception that we have failed.”
Dissatisfaction with the “corporate nature” model of conservation practised by the big international non-government groups is growing, said Sarah Milne, a researcher at the Australian National University. “[They] now consume and channel a significant proportion of available conservation funding. This is corporate nature [where] branding is fundamental, market-based and technocratic. It risks being top-down, impervious and homogenous and calls for a rethink of how global conservation works.”
These groups count success by numbers and the money they attract, not by consideration of conservation, said Dominique Bikaba, director of Strong Roots, a group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “They do not understand local people. They come with big degrees and an idea from London or Washington. They don’t want to learn from local and indigenous peoples.”
“Conservation still thinks in terms of separating people from nature and of saving pristine places,” said South African anthropologist Anselmo Matusse, who has just spent a year in a remote, forested part of Mozambique where people have lived successfully and sustainably for years, but which governments and conservation groups now want to “protect”.
Matusse pointed to EO Wilson, the world’s foremost biologist, who has proposed that only by committing half of the planet’s surface area to nature can we hope to save the life forms that compose it.
“If we continue with the present path of nature conservation then biodiversity will soon be like art that is of value to only some – kept locked away in highly guarded museums where only the rich can visit. Is the current path of protecting biodiversity not another form of colonialism? Are the state and the market the only options to change the route of human civilisation and Earth, which [are] heading towards collapse?” asked Matusse.
Western science must now listen and learn from the world’s 350 million indigenous people, who currently conserve 80% of the world’s remaining diversity but who have been barely acknowledged by conservationists, argued Eli Enns, Canadian political scientist and co-chair of the Canadian Indigenous Circle for Experts.
“Indigenous knowledge of how to live with nature has been routinely dismissed or downplayed,” he said.
“Western scientists and indigenous peoples come with very different world views. [In general] western science is more utilitarian and sees the world in pieces, indigenous knowledge is more about understanding the interconnectedness of things,” he said.
The danger, said Jon Hutton, is that welcome action on climate change dwarfs and imperils biodiversity protection. “There is a real danger that radical climate action might, in reality, involve a rush to solutions that are anything but biodiversity-friendly: A renewed drive for biofuels, perhaps, or for more indiscriminate hydropower, or an escalation in forest restoration based on fast-growing, non-native species? In anticipation, we need to develop science, policy and advocacy responses right now.”
But conservation must also recover the passion and emotion that once informed it, said Cambridge lecturer Chris Sandbrook, who has invited Extinction Rebellion activists to help teach his students about the power of direct action to change perceptions and create the space for political action.
“Conservation may be more organised and professional, but has this come at the expense of the creativity and passion that enticed many to the conservation world in the first place? Conservationists have some choices to make. Should we continue down the path to professionalisation? Or should we lay down our laptops and lie down in the streets?
The world needs organised, skilled and professional conservationists, but it also needs them to stay in touch with the authenticity and the energy of protest groups and never to forget their raison ddêtre is change not conformity.
Courtesy the Guardian, UK