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DecolonizE Conservation

Frontline voices from the worldwide movement to decolonize climate change and revitalize a dying planet.

With a deep anticolonial and antiracist critique of what “conservation” currently is, Decolonize Conservation presents an alternative vision—one already working—of the most effective and just way to fight against biodiversity loss and climate change. 

This powerful collection of voices takes us to the heart of the climate justice movement and the struggle for life and land across the globe. With Indigenous Peoples and their rights at its center, the book exposes the brutal and deadly realities of colonial and racist conservation for people around the world, while revealing the problems of current climate policy approaches that do nothing to tackle the real causes of environmental destruction.

Evidence proves Indigenous people understand and manage their environment better than anyone else. Eighty percent of the Earth’s biodiversity is in tribal territories and when Indigenous peoples have secure rights over their land, they achieve at least equal if not better conservation results at a fraction of the cost of conventional conservation programs. But in Africa and Asia, governments and NGOs are stealing vast areas of land from tribal peoples and local communities under the false claim that this is necessary for conservation.

As the editors write, “This is colonialism pure and simple: powerful global interests are shamelessly taking land and resources from vulnerable people while claiming they are doing it for the good of humanity.” Through the voices of largely silenced or invisibilized Indigenous Peoples and local communities, the devastating consequences of making 30 percent of the globe “Protected Areas,” and other so-called “Nature-Based Solutions” are made clear.

Edited by Ashley Dawson, Fiore Longo, and Survival International

PRODUCT DETAILS

Authors: Ashley Dawson, Fiore Longo, and Survival International, editors
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781942173762
Published: April 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 256
Subjects: Ecology / Politics / Indigenous Studies

About the EDITORS

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History.

Fiore Longo is a Research and Advocacy Officer at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples. She is also the director of Survival International France and Spain. She coordinates Survival’s conservation campaign and has visited many communities in Africa and Asia that face human rights abuses in the name of conservation. She has also visited Indigenous communities in Colombia and worked on Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign. 

Since 1969, Survival International has worked in partnership with tribal communities around the world, and together with supporters from over one hundred countries worldwide, to lead hundreds of successful campaigns for tribal peoples’ rights. The movement is helping to build a world where tribal peoples are respected as contemporary societies and their human rights protected.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Decolonize Conservation shares stories of how colonial conservation has become an instrument of dispossession of Indigenous people. Colonization is based on ecological apartheid, the separation of humans from nature and an illusion of superiority of the colonizer over nature and nature-centered ecological cultures. Colonial conservation defines ‘nature‘ and the ‘wild‘ as the absence of humans, and violently removes Indigenous communities from their homes in the name of ‘conservation’. The reality is that 80 percent of the biodiversity of the planet is conserved on 20 percent of the land which remain in the care of Indigenous people. As the editors and contributors of this book urgently remind us, it is time to decolonize conservation, to recognize the rights of Indigenous people and their sophisticated sciences of conservation and sustainable use, and to prevent the ongoing wave of colonizations of nature and biodiversity through financialisation.” —Vandana Shiva, author of Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace and Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements

“Decolonize Conservation reveals the hidden but rampant current of dispossession and displacement suffered by Indigenous communities across the world. Between the lines, we pick up the unspoken origins of colonial conservation as the consolidation of conquest and as a false mode of atonement by exploitative forces for rapacious colonial exploitation that now threatens the planet. We also see undercurrents of ecological racism. Decolonize Conservation is a great offering at a time of planetary distress and is a call for liberation as well as a demand to urgently abrogate the notion that humans can cordon off and own territories on this speck in the Milky Way.” —Nnimmo Bassey, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa

“Mainstream conservation, including its most recent ‘30x30’ incarnation, is part of the problem, not the solution. The diverse voices collected in this hard-hitting, important volume show the way in moving beyond ineffective, violent, and colonial forms of ‘protecting’ nature, towards new forms of conservation centered on care for biodiversity and respect for Indigenous wisdoms.”—Bram Büscher, coauthor of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene

"Decolonize Conservationis a groundbreaking book that foregrounds Indigenous voices, ideas, and practices in a searing critique of business-as-usual environmental conservation. Simultaneously it shows how the complex kinships, relations, and exchanges between peoples and their surroundings globally have historically created—and can create in the future—conditions for systems and species to flourish. Beautifully written, Decolonize Conservation is a must read for everyone who cares about our socioecological future." —Paige West, author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea and Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea

"If you've ever suspected that clever advertising has duped you into supporting dubious 'conservation' initiatives that ultimately lead to the eviction of Indigenous peoples—to the great detriment of the ecosystems they helped to sustain—then read this book! These essays by Indigenous activists and their allies provide a vitally important corrective to the false environmental 'solutions' that are being peddled by many Big Green organizations."—Amitav Gosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

“Decolonize Conservation functions as a spur to thought, a call to action, and a challenge to conservation strategies that are not only colonial in origin, but have failed to shed their neo-coloniality. The contributors—who represent Indigenous communities and allies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America—document how the urgency of combatting climate change is empowering some of the most pernicious, exclusionary features of large, global conservation organizations. If the original sin of mainline conservation was its essential coloniality, its current practice, including in pursuit of ‘30x30’ goals, utilizes the states of exception associated with structural and physical violence that have constructed fortress conservation models and the securitization and financialization of conservation endeavours. These models foreclose possibilities of coexistence, and short-circuit the deployment of the kinds of indigenous knowledge and practice articulated in this collection of essays, which is what makes these voices and the struggles they represent and document so urgent and necessary. This volume centers Indigeneity as a compelling thread to knot together stories of flawed conservation work and calls for the infusion of conservation practice with justice and alternative forms of knowledge and claims to belonging.” —Jeff Schauer, author of Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa