UGA Media Contacts: Laura German, Lizzie King

Science—the process of asking and testing questions to better understand the world around us—has long been a guiding force of Western Civilization. It has guided everything from the development of the world’s largest cities to the ways that natural spaces are handled outside those cities.

The institution of science remains crucial for making wise management decisions, particularly in the field of conservation, which has gained importance as rapid development and degradation shrink natural spaces and species numbers around the world. However, science as we know it is borne of the Western colonization of the rest of the world.  As such, even as scientists and practitioners work hard to make the world a better place, science wields authority to dominate what happens in colonized places, which can displace, erase, and oppress the colonized.

A new paper, Conservation and environmental management reimagined: Toward anti-oppressive futures, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) by University of Georgia researchers and their colleagues, unpacks the ways in which common conservation practices may oppress Indigenous Peoples and others with intimate ties to these places, and disrupt the ecological relations they are a part of.

“This is part of the legacy of conservation–that it reifies the same types of authority and dominance that were occurring in landscapes and politics, where it was assumed that those who were arriving knew best,” explained Dr. Lizzie King, Associate Professor at Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Odum School of Ecology. “As a result, society has given full reign to science to be the basis of a lot of decisions. And these decisions are influenced by past beliefs about who deserves to be on pieces of land, and whose ways of using land represent progress or backwardness.”

In what started as a series of round table conversations at the Center for Integrative Conservation Research (CICR) about the topic, the authors constructed a framework for understanding how the authority of conservation and environmental agendas may contribute to forms of oppression of people with longstanding ties to place, while disrupting the ecological relationships they have long nurtured. 

Common themes emerged into four dimensions, some more visible than others, but all equally problematic in terms of justice. Their framework also emphasizes the complex ways these forms of oppression are linked to each other, which often go unrecognized and therefore un-addressed as sources of injustice.  The purpose of the paper is to help environmental scientists and practitioners recognize their tacit forms of authority and the negative unintended consequences they may have for people and the very ecosystems they seek to conserve.

We unpack these dimensions below with the help of co-authors King and Dr. Laura German, the Director of CICR. 

Physical dimension: The physical or material manifestations of conservation and environmental management, and how that displaces existing people, practices and ecosystems

This dimension refers to the physical removal of Indigenous and local people or termination of their land use practices from the land to conserve or manage it, and the physical changes to ecosystems that result. This form of oppression may also include loss of resource access due to shifting regimes of legality, and changes in the ecosystems themselves as people’s tending and stewardship practices are removed. 

In German’s words: “I’ll give an example from wildland fire: when you remove Indigenous people from the landscape, you remove cultural burning from fire-dependent ecosystems, which has a profound effect not just on people who depend on those ecosystems, but on fire-adapted flora and fauna as well. So in the name of conserving something and protecting it, you may also be eroding these keystone ecological processes. That’s a dimension that’s often forgotten when we think about these physical manifestations.”

“A final element of the physical dimension is the creation of disposable people and places. For example, in the Indus Delta there’s been harnessing of upstream flows for irrigation, which has led to reductions not just of flow, but of sedimentation and the loss of deltaic lands to people who have long lived there. And so the whole Delta has been rendered a disposable place in the process of damming and harnessing water upstream.”

Knowledge dimension: The knowledge practices and assumptions that inform and underpin conservation and environmental visions and decision-making, and how that displaces existing knowledges

This dimension includes both who is included at the table—and which voices are listened to as decisions are made—but also the deeper current of how cultural and class differences are used to elevate some forms of knowledge over others.

German’s example: “Sometimes, in the name of conservation, racial tropes are used to talk about people as environmentally damaging because they use what is thought of as so-called ‘backwards’ or ‘unproductive’ tools or methods. The flip side of this is the elevation of outside expertise—so that only Western scientists or managers have the authority to decide.”

Governance dimension: The modes of governance associated with conservation and environmental practice, and how that displaces existing governance forms

Societies have authority structures, rules and norms, or ways to govern places deemed to have conservation value. Oppression occurs when local, Indigenous, or customary governance systems are replaced with external forms that serve external priorities and seats of authority. The new system is imposed on everyone so that land, resources and control are wrested out of local people’s hands. One recurring form of this seen around protected areas is the criminalization of activities that local families and communities depend on for their livelihoods. 

German’s example: “Some of the literature talks about how cultural burning became arson overnight or hunting became poaching overnight as new authority systems were imposed. This has also included increasing militarization to keep people out of protected areas or to control illegal hunting. Perhaps more subtly, this might include the imposition of singular or narrow management goals. This might include, for example, maximizing tourist dollars or yields of sustainable timber, or managing deltas purely for climate finance–rather than for the multiple values that come from these intimate multispecies interactions.”

Human-environmental relations dimension: The ways people envision and practice their  relationships to the environment, including forms of relationship implicitly and explicitly endorsed and/or imposed in conservation and other environmental arenas

While this dimension seems abstract, the dynamic behind it is simple: it is the process of replacing a group’s sense of relationship to their environment with that of a Western perspective–which tends to view humans as outside or separate from the natural world and to view nature as something to appropriate for human use, to protect, to own, or a threat. Other ways of relating to place might be through kinship, belonging, responsibility and humility–ideas prevalent across non-Western societies.

As King describes it: “The fourth dimension, which I think is key, especially for conservation, is replacing people’s sense of relationship to their environment. A driver behind a lot of the physical displacement is the idea that nature is outside of the human sphere and it should be utilized. Extracted. This idea displaces relationships that are built on reciprocity with the environment and long-term stewardship, where maximizing extraction is not seen as good, but is actually seen as violating sacred trusts.

Those points of view get pushed out. Then, in order to operate in a conservation space or environmental space, people have to adopt the same instrumental or utilitarian view of their relationship with nature.

Most people when you do an economic study, their attachment to place and what place means to them has a disproportionate value that can’t be accounted for by what people extract from it monetarily. We see that all over the world. Yet our environmental economics don’t represent that. So things like separating people’s relationship with their environment and with place have huge impacts on well-being that can be overlooked.” Failure to see and understand those relationships can also block future paths toward reconciling human and ecological well-being.

Co-author Dr. Suneel Kumar, who recently earned his PhD through the University of Georgia’s Department of Anthropology and the Integrative Conservation program hosted by CICR, contributed a case study that illustrated each of these dimensions from his dissertation, which dealt with the ways in which upstream water infrastructures and Western conservation have reshaped the Indus Delta in Pakistan.   

“The treatment of the Delta is colonial in the sense that when the British colonial administration constructed riverine infrastructure upstream for their own economic and irrigation benefits, they completely ignored the impacts that that infrastructure would have on the Delta,” Kumar said.

“In the same way, even today, when thinking about improving the Delta, they are mostly ignoring the area’s multi-species histories. Their modern vision of the Deltaic landscape is another form of colonizing, in that they are shaping the physical landscape to fit how the administration wants it to be, rather than how the local and Indigenous people think about or see the Delta.”

These multi-species histories can be complex and sometimes may appear counter to Western conservation efforts, which may take the stance that humans and human activities should be kept entirely separate from “natural” spaces. “To give you one example, there is a breed of camels that swims in the water. And they are special to the Indus Delta,” Kumar explained. “These camels used to live in the mangrove forest, and they used to eat the mangroves—it was their fodder for centuries. But today, as the government is trying to conserve the mangroves and capture carbon finance, they have decided these camels are adverse to their conservation practices—as if the camels are degrading the mangroves. And they have implemented laws and policies to remove the camels from the mangrove forest. Where there were once hundreds of thousands of camels, now very few camels remain because camel herders have had to sell their herds.”

These changes can have deep-rooted impacts on those local to the area, degrading intricate ecological and social systems. As Kumar put it: “They are imposing their own vision of how the local and Indigenous people should relate to the Delta and have restricted this very important human-non-human relationship.”

Co-author Dr. Sherry Pictou, Associate Professor of Law and Management and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Governance at Dalhousie University, also spoke to how the Western perspective on conservation creates a dichotomy that can hinder the human relationship with the natural world and ultimately hamper conservation efforts.

She described her experiences with this dichotomy as a member of the Mi’kmaq tribe: “We were assimilated into the fishing industry, which was becoming highly privatized. Since then, development projects presented to Indigenous People in terms of Indigenous rights have been extractive in nature and usually unsustainable. So that was one end of the spectrum.”

“But on the other end of the spectrum, humans were being excluded from the land. There is a national park here in Nova Scotia called Kejimkujik that I have spiritual and family ties to, with the upbringing of my grandmother. I heard her stories of how we were displaced from this very sacred area. And so my experience has always been this dilemma between on one end of the spectrum, an over-extraction of resources and exploitation of nature. And then on the other side of the spectrum, this fortress approach of conserving nature with no human footprint. It seems like Indigenous rights and worldviews are stuck in the middle, with no place to exist.”

So what does a relationship with the natural world look like that isn’t based on extraction or complete protection?

It looks like just that: a relationship—with reciprocal caretaking—between humans and the non-human world.

“With a lot of teachings and a lot of help from elders, you soon start realizing that Indigenous practices—whether food harvesting, gathering or so forth—were very much in relationship with the land and the water,” Pictou explained. “Fundamental to those lifeways is ensuring that there are gifts—using the term of an elder—gifts from the earth for future generations. It’s not a total concerted conservation effort. It’s not total exploitation.”

This paper is one step in many toward helping those embedded in Western conservation views and practices to see their actions from an outside perspective.  The authors hope that by providing a framework for understanding oppression in the world of conservation and allied fields, those trying to conserve and manage so-called “natural” spaces have meaningful tools for expanding their own worldview and limiting the harm they may inadvertently do to human and non-human others.  

They also hope that it will provide a guide for how to meaningfully engage with other perspectives. 

As Dr. Pictou put it: “To look through that framework provides a lens for other people to realize. In recent years, particularly at the international level, there has been an emphasis on Indigenous knowledge and aspirations toward including Indigenous people—but people don’t know how to actually do that, and in some cases it becomes tokenistic. In terms of the way knowledge is produced, for instance, it’s not transformative. Instead, Indigenous peoples are subdued or absorbed by this dominant framework, particularly in the sciences. That doesn’t change anything, but instead just reinforces that hierarchy of knowledges. This paper provides a framework for saying, okay, maybe we should take a look at this, and then offers some recommendations to come out of that. I think it’s vitally important, and I cannot wait to share it on the international level with agencies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.”

Find the full paper here.