The dirty little secret of environmentalists is that they think their favorite places, for some the world, are be better off without people.
Although it took some years to complete the task of creating a fictional wilderness in Yosemite, all the valley's residents were eventually evicted, and in 1914 their land became a national park - no natives welcome.
This tactic became known as "the Yosemite model" and was replicated around the country, and eventually around the world
No natives allowed by Mark Dowie
Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they're not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement's founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.
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I have traveled all five inhabited continents, visiting hundreds of indigenous communities, some in conflict with western conservation and others in harmony. While tension persists, I have found an encouraging dialogue growing between formally educated wildlife biologists, who once saw humanity as inimical to nature, and ancient aboriginal societies that have passed their remarkable ecological knowledge from generation to generation without a page of text or the benefit of PowerPoint. And I have been heartened to find, mostly in the field, a new generation of conservationists who have come to realize that the landscapes they seek to protect contain high biodiversity in part because people who have been living there, some for thousands of years, are living right.
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As cultural ecologist Gene Anderson observed, many of the world's traditional societies long ago came to "some kind of terms with their environment, or they would not have lasted long enough to become 'traditional.' " They are, in the language of ecology, living sustainably. And it seems self-evident now that the only way global conservation is going to succeed in its mission of preserving wild places and biodiversity is to end the counterproductive practice of evicting these proven land stewards from their homelands, and instead work together with them in developing sustainable ways of living