CAN WE ISOLATE OUR LAND FROM OUR NATURE?

Sometime in October 2021, we woke up to the news that a combined team of village scouts and Zambia Wildlife Authority officers got into bitter combat with the villagers of Muwele, in which about 24 people got injured. The informer said ZAWA officers used live ammunition in the nasty exchange that erupted over the villagers’ protest against officers’ arresting one of them, who they allegedly found with game meat. Mpika Radio and other media later confirmed the sad news.

Bangweulu Black Lechwe- Source of conflicts

Such conflicts are common in Muwele, Lavushi Manda, part of the Bangweulu Swamps Game Management area. Lavushi Manda GMA is home to large herds of black Lechwe and other species. From time immemorial, people here have lived with and hunted animals for food. Since the introduction of Protected Area status, sporadic conflicts between the indigenous people and conservationists have become familiar occurrences in this highly volatile community.

 This incident reminded me of a similar one when I was young. A poacher named Chola, who lived in Ncheta islands then, fought fiercely, exchanged heavy gunfire with game scouts, overpowered them, and ‘confiscated’ government rifles before fleeing with them. Other villagers later attacked scouts for arresting a poacher, who they said had the right to eat meat found in his ancestors’ land.

 Sometimes, scouts and poachers brutally attack each other, while some lose lives instantly in such fracases.

Another day, I saw my uncle bundled into a Department of Wildlife’s Land Rover en-route to Mpika Prison for killing a sitatunga. The shame and indignity of a respectable man being criminalized for merely trying to feed his family overcame all of us. We quickly mobilized ourselves and blocked the road. Upon seeing swelling crowds, the officers recognized the danger, negotiated a deal that saw the old hunter freed, sacrificing his young nephew, an accomplice, who went to serve a six-month prison sentence. 

This circus has been going on for a very long time, despite government efforts and wildlife conservationist organizations trying to sensitize the people. This is partly because people do not enjoy any meaningful benefits from these conservation efforts. They feel cheated and exploited by those who purport to champion their interests.

 Is there a way out of this dilemma?

While the shooting was on in Muwele a few weeks ago, participants at the “Our Land, Our Nature" Conference in Marseille, the world’s first conference to decolonize conservation, released a people's Manifesto for the future of conservation branded the Marseille Manifesto.

The Manifesto calls for the “Complete halt in the creation of new Protected Areas which exclude Indigenous and local communities." 

It is interesting to read the Manifesto below:

OUR LAND! OUR NATURE

A PEOPLE’S MANIFESTO FOR THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATION

 Planet Earth, our home, is facing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity and an acceleration of climate change, which threatens the future of humanity and every other form of life.

The only sustainable, just and real solutions to these crises also lie with humanity – in particular, with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who are the best guardians of biodiversity, and with a model of conservation, that puts human rights and human diversity at its center. We need a conservation model that fights against the real causes of environmental destruction and is prepared to tackle those most responsible: overconsumption and exploitation of resources led by the Global North and its corporations.

On the contrary, many governments, together with business and the conservation industry in Western countries, refuse to address the real roots of the problem and pretend to provide a path forward by calling for more Protected Areas and vague ‘nature-based solutions’. These false solutions are being promoted as ‘real’ solutions to solving the climate crisis facing the world today.

Yet decades of research and experience have shown that the mainstream approach to biodiversity conservation has had a devastating impact on Indigenous and other local people’s lands, livelihoods, and rights. This has largely been based on the flawed thinking that believes in ‘nature’ devoid of human presence. This single-minded focus has led to a model of conservation that is often violent, colonialist, and racist in approach – seizing and militarizing the land, criminalizing and destroying the ways of life, of Indigenous and local communities, while ignoring their knowledge. This model, despite the pain it causes, has never prevented the destruction of the ecosystems that it claims to be protecting.

Even ‘reforms’ that claim to avoid the worst excesses of such ‘fortress conservation, are usually only cosmetic and only include Indigenous and local people as an afterthought, or as subsidiary to the principal goal, in ways that still violate international standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other local communities. These attempted reforms are routinely revealed to be nothing more than window dressing because they focus on the implementation of a single project while failing to acknowledge that the problem is structural. The underlying model of conservation is thus still far from being rights-based.

On the contrary, it increasingly relies on a neoliberal approach in which both nature and people are defined as forms of ‘capital’ whose value is decided by the market. It fails to address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss in the rampant expansion of a growth-oriented industrial economy and even encourages them.

While the conservation industry benefits from this model, using taxpayer and philanthropic money to fund more Protected Areas, this will continue to be catastrophic for both biodiversity and people. The demands we have listed below entail the dismantling of this model because we believe that only a new model can achieve positive change, not changes in the implementation of a flawed one.

1 See the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). By far the most effective and just way to fight against biodiversity loss and climate change is to respect the land rights of Indigenous Peoples, who already protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity, and other local communities. This fact is acknowledged in many policies and declarations, but action ‘on the ground’ continues to dispossess and mistreat them.

We hereby declare that:

» The international community must agree to a complete halt in the creation of new Protected Areas, which exclude Indigenous and local communities;

» Governments must fully respect, protect and uphold Indigenous Peoples’ land and forest rights, respect collective customary land and forest use by local communities, to ensure protection of that land in accordance with their wishes; this should be the primary means of protecting biodiversity throughout the world;

» Governments and conservation organizations must not embark on any conservation projects without the full Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of the communities concerned.

» Conservation organizations must be subject to regulations and adhere to prescribed codes of conduct like all other professional fields to ensure that conservation is not an ‘end’ which justifies any means employed to achieve it;

» Governments and conservation organizations must acknowledge the huge toll that strictly protected conservation areas have taken on the lands, livelihoods, and rights of many communities worldwide; they must make concrete plans for reparations of past wrongs, including through transferring control back to the historical and local guardians;

» High-income countries must provide financial resources to support these changes to take place, and must cease funding conservation programmes which destroy local people and livelihoods, including by failures of FPIC, irrespective of whether this is intentional or not;

» Industrialized nations must agree to reductions - and not merely shifts – in the extraction of resources for production and consumption, and enforce these on their corporations, in order to reduce their impact on the natural world;

» Governments and corporations must phase out fossil fuels, and abandon attempts to greenwash their emissions through false claims that ‘nature-based’ offsetting will mitigate climate change;

» Multinational corporations and conservation organizations must adhere to and be held to international standards when they operate outside their own countries or through suppliers, including on FPIC;

» Multinational corporations and conservation organizations must exercise human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address impacts on human rights. They must implement effective grievance and redress mechanisms for victims of human rights violations related to their activities;

» Environmental and climate policies - whether domestic or international - must be designed and assessed in terms of social justice as well as environmental sustainability. Our shared goal must be to achieve just, equitable, sustainable well-being for humans and other species on our shared planet. People and nature are inseparable and protecting nature should be part of the bigger issue: how we live and how we create a world in which a healthy life is possible for everyone.

 

This manifesto was made available courtesy of Dr. I.P.A. Manning