Do people need to be evicted for animals to survive?
It’s good to see that we are growing up where conservation and the environment are concerned. During the 80′s, 90′s and 00′s we tended to take what was given us by the big NGO’s and other organisations as gospel and without question. Over the last 4 or 5 years things are changing and people are now asking questions and the media are also catching up and raising concerns.
Last nights Dispatches programme finally saw the mass media taking a closer look at some of the antics of the big conservation organisations World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Conservation International (CI). But we should not assume that it’s just the big international conservation organisations at fault.
Programme tried to cover too much in too short a time.
The biggest problem with the Channel 4 documentary last night was that it tried to cover too big a subject area in too short a time. The result is when you read the discussions about the programme on the Internet many people are saying that the programme was sensationalist. They are saying that the reporter picked out just one or two exceptional examples and that most conservation projects are not like those portrayed. This is the problem when you try and cover too broad a range in just 1 hour.
Take for example the forcible evictions of people from their homes to make way for nature conservation. Anyone who has even a fleeting knowledge of nature conservation will tell you this is a widespread occurrence. It’s not just people in Africa being forced out of their homes or even murdered to make way for animals. Today, all across the world, people are being forced out of their homes and off their land to make way for nature reserves.
Forced evictions for nature conservation is not restricted to Africa.
Across India forest dwellers are being evicted from their homes to make way for tiger reserves. Other forest dwellers in the country are fighting to stay on their land while the government seek to evict them to make way for a nature reserve that needs to be established to mitigate land losses from a dam project.
In Thailand a number of forest families are being evicted in order to make way for a nature reserve and in Indonesia indigenous forest dwellers are not just fighting the loggers to save their homes they are also having to fight the conservationists who want to turn their forests into a nature reserve which will stop them from being able to live in or get food and supplies from the forest.
For many forest dwellers the conservationists are no better than the loggers or farmers or ranchers. The end result is that they invariably lose their homes and livelihoods. They get evicted and relocated to internment camps and promised compensation that does not arrive.
We can expect evictions of forest people to soar over the coming years as conservation organisations – both charitable and privately owned – start to tap into the massive amounts of cash becoming available under the REDD schemes. Already people around the world have been evicted from their ancestral land and homes in order for us in the West to be able to offset our carbon emissions.
Had the programme spent the entire hour just on the forceful evictions of communities to make way for nature reserves then it would have been a much more powerful documentary. But because it only glanced over different subjects without going into any real depth the programme is open to the charges of being superficial and just picking on exceptional cases. Evictions of people from their homes for nature conservation reasons are not exceptional – they are pretty much standard practice for conservationists.
Conservationists have lost touch with humanity.
While the documentary focused on two large multinational conservation organisations we must realise that this lack of empathy with people is actually endemic within the entire conservation and environmental movement. These organisations, both large and small, have lost all sense of priorities in their quest to keep animals alive. The people involved no longer have the ability to emphasise with young people looking for a home to start their own independent lives and provide security for their young families. For the conservationist providing a home for a bat or a mouse is much more important than providing a home for a person. Conservationists have appeared to have lost all sense of the importance of humanity.
Conservation is restricting homes in the UK too.
Surely it’s only in other countries where people are at risk of being forcibly evicted and losing their homes for conservation. Sadly no, in the UK a frivolous application under the Village Greens scam means that there are at least 10 families who could lose their affordable housing association homes if the application is successful. If the application is successful then the houses will have to be demolished and the land returned to a muddy sugar beet field that it used to be.
While conservation and wildlife organisations are not the only driving force behind the increasing homelessness in the UK they are one of the major reasons. You can be sure that whether a housing development application is being submitted to be built in an urban or rural area one of the wildlife organisations will object. Whether it’s a bat or a mouse or a frog they will find some reason to stop the application, delay the application or add so much cost to the development to make the houses unaffordable for the majority of people.
We have a housing shortage in the UK of about 1.5 million homes. each year the households in the UK is growing by an estimated 245,000 but we are only building 130,000 – 160,000 units a year. That a shortfall of 100,000 new households each year having no where of their own – either rented or bought – to live.
Conservation and environmental organisations continue to object ot new homes being built because their policies are driven by the fundraising department. To these organisations the people who already have homes are much more important financially to them than those who have no where to live. So it’s good financial and marketing sense for them to object to developments even when there is no scientific or real conservation basis for the objection.
Conservation and environment are at an important crossroads.
Fortunately things are changing. The under 40′s in particular are waking up to the realities of unchallenged environmental and conservation policies of these vested interest groups. They are asking questions and are not taking things at face value.
The under 40′s are a different generation to the cohort that fueled the growth and power of the conservation NGO’s. The new generation have a much better understanding of sustainability than the current baby-boomer generation. This younger generation have a better sense of community responsibility and a much better empathy of the needs of other humans.
We’re moving into a pivotal moment for conservation and environment. As these big and small NGO’s come under a more searching spotlight the cracks are beginning to appear. From climate change to renewable energy to conservation to sustainability things are changing. If the environmental and conservation organisations don’t start to empathise with people and get a much more balanced outlook they’ll have a diminishing future and a reducing supporter base as the baby-boomers die off.
