Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, has criticized big conservation groups, including some of the corporate "environmental groups" that I have challenged in many of my articles, for "routinely violating" tribal peoples' rights while they fail to achieve their conservation objectives.
In an article recently published by the U.S.-based journal Truthout and British magazine The Ecologist, Corry writes that governments, with the support of "conservation" organizations, are forcing indigenous peoples off their ancestral homelands in the name of “conservation”.
The illegal evictions of tribal peoples in India, the torture and abuse of indigenous Baka “Pygmies” in Cameroon, and the mistreatment of the Bushmen in Botswana are just a few examples evoked by Corry, which Survival’s "Parks Need Peoples" campaign has exposed, according to a news release from Survival International.
Corry further takes aim at big conservation players such the United for Wildlife consortium of conservation organizations, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), for contributing to the illegal treatment of tribal peoples.
A WWF ad from 1994 asks whether 'to send in the army or an anthropologist' to stop indigenous people destroying the Amazon rainforest.
The next United for Wildlife meeting will be hosted by Botswana, whose President is guilty of trying to eradicate Bushmen hunters.
WWF funds “ecoguards” in Cameroon who arrest and abuse Baka “Pygmies” for entering their ancestral forests which have been turned into protected areas.
Corry writes, “If the conservation conglomerates really are to start preventing the further industrialization of these vital ecosystems, they surely must first remove giant polluters like Monsanto and BP from their own boards. Conservation has to stop the illegal eviction of tribal peoples from their ancestral homelands. It has to stop claiming tribal lands are wildernesses when they've been managed and shaped by tribal communities for millennia.
It has to stop accusing tribespeople of poaching when they hunt to feed their families. It has to stop the hypocrisy in which tribal people face arrest and beatings, torture and death, while fee-paying big game hunters are actively encouraged."
Survival International believes that tribal peoples are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world.
"The real creators of the world's national parks are not the ideologues and evangelists of the environmental movement, but the tribal peoples who fashioned their landscapes with knowledge and understanding accumulated over countless generations," Corry concludes.
I completely agree with Corry. As an investigative journalist covering fish, water, the environment in the West, I have been disgusted many times how corporate "environmental" NGOs and neo-liberal governments have treated Indigenous Peoples. Many of these NGOs and neo-liberal governments are plagued by their embrace of white supremacy, racism and colonial attitudes.
In California, Brown administration officials and corporate environmental NGOs pushing the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels and the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative have routinely violated the rights of Indigenous Peoples, as I have documented in article after article.
Brown administration officials, in collaboration with corporate "environmental" NGOs such as the Natural Heritage Institute and Nature Conservancy, have pushed the construction of the tunnels, in spite of the enormous threat the project poses to Tribal water rights and the salmon, steelhead and other fish species that the Tribes consider sacred and depend on for sustenance. They have completely failed to heed the input of the Winnemem Wintu and other Tribes that successfully managed fish and wildlife populations for thousands of years before Europeans arrived in California.
The BDCP is part of a larger plan to privatize water and plunder the public trust in California. As Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe said.
“It does not make sense that people are separating the water puzzle into individual pieces, such as: the raising of Shasta Dam, Proposition 1, the Delta tunnels, BDCP, Sites Reservoir, Temperance Flat, CALFED, Delta Vision, BDCP, OCAP, the Bay Delta, Trinity/Klamath Rivers, the Sacramento River, the San Joaquin River, and water rights. It is all one BIG Project.”
You have to look at the whole picture and everything in between from Shasta Dam to the Delta estuary. We need to ask what is affected by our actions and who is benefitting from them? These are not separate projects; they are all the same thing that the State is asking us to fund – California water being manipulated for the enrichment of some and the devastation of cultures, environments, and species all in the name of higher profits.” (http://www.truth-out.org/...)
Likewise, Caifornia's Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, privately funded by the shadowy Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, not only failed to protect the ocean from fracking, offshore oil drilling, pollution, military testing, corporate aquaculture and all human impacts on the ocean other than fishing and gathering, but the process violated the traditional fishing and gathering rights of the Yurok Tribe and other Indian Nations. In spite of claims by the Brown regime that the process respects tribal gathering rights, the MLPA initiative bans tribal gathering in the "State Marine Reserves" that it created.
The "marine protected areas," created under this racist process, backed enthusiastically by corporate "environmental" NGOs, were based on terminally flawed and incomplete science - and MLPA officials failed to include any Tribal scientists on the Science Advisory Team.
To make matters worse Ron LeValley, the Co-Chair of the MLPA Initiative Science Advisory Team for the North Coast, repeatedly rejected requests by the Yurok Tribe Science Team to make presentations that challenged the Initiative's junk science. And to make matters even worse, the same LeValley is currently in federal prison for conspiracy to embezzle $852,000 from the Yurok Tribe.
For more information about the "inconvenient truths" of the MLPA Initiative, go to; https://intercontinentalcry.org/...
Read Stephen Corry’s full article in Truthout: http://www.truthout.org/...
For more information, go to; http://www.survivalinternational.org