Upstream - Decolonizing Conservation with Prakash Kashwan

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

What if what we thought we knew about environmental conservation is wrong and it’s not the ethical and regenerative movement we thought it was? Turns out the philosophy and practices of conservation — pioneered by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir — are intimately intertwined with colonialism, imperialism, and racialized capitalism. And, unfortunately, this isn’t just a historical analysis — it’s a legacy that has continued well into the movement’s modern day configurations. In fact, things may have even gotten worse. This is according to a recent paper in the journal Environment titled "From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation." In the paper, the authors outline the problems with mainstream conservation methods and policies — policies that impose artificial binaries between Indigenous communities and the lands they have stewarded, perpetuating patterns of extractivism and greenwashing and leading to countless harms inflicted onto these communities all in the name of 'wildlife preservation.' In this Conversation we’ve brought on the paper’s lead author, Prakash Kashwan, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights at the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. Prakash is the author of the widely reviewed and acclaimed book "Democracy in the Woods" and a Co-Editor of the journal Environmental Politics. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of Earth Systems Governance, Progress in Development Studies, Sage Open, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. How is much of the modern conservation movement still steeped in its racist, colonial, imperial past? And what might an inclusive and regenerative conservation look like? Join us to explore these questions and more. You can request a full-text version of the paper From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation at Research Gate. You can also write to Prakash to request a pdf copy of the paper at [e-mail].  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. The first part of the alternative has to start from rejecting this notion that society and civilization exist in concrete blocks and nature exist in those safe boxes of nature Separate in national parks and so forth. Once we reject these binaries We know that fossil fuel extraction that is happening right now inside the boundaries of our national parks need to be stopped and small-scale Gardening and agriculture and resource harvesting and fire intervention and

grazing all of those kinds of interventions need to be brought back. So what we are doing there is that just by replacing those fossil fuel extractive projects with small scale agriculture and animal has been re-rebalancing our engagement with national parks in a way so that the fossil fuel economy is gone. And it's then replaced by activities that would support local economies, will create local jobs, and will create human nature interactions that are good for consumers. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. What if what we know about environmental conservation is wrong? And it's not the ethical and regenerative movement we thought it was. Turns out the philosophy and practices of conservation, pioneered by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry David Thoreau,

and John Meir, are intimately intertwined with colonialism, imperialism, and racialized capitalism. And unfortunately, this isn't just a historical analysis. It's a legacy that has continued well into the movement's modern-day configurations. In fact, things may have even gotten worse. This is according to a recent paper in the journal Environment, titled, From Racialize Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation. In the paper, the authors outline the problems

with mainstream conservation methods and policies, policies that impose artificial binaries between the indigenous communities and the lands they have stewarded, perpetuating patterns of extractivism and greenwashing and leading to countless harms inflicted onto these communities, all in the name of wildlife preservation.

In this conversation, we've brought on the paper's lead author, Prakash Koshwan, an associate professor of political science and co-director of the research program on economic and social rights at the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. Prakash is the author of the widely reviewed and acclaimed book Democracy in the Woods and a co-editor of the journal Environmental Politics. How is the modern conservation movement still steeped in its racist colonial imperialist past and what might an inclusive and regenerative conservation look like? Here's Robert with Prakash Kushwan.

I'm Robert. Hi Prakash. It's great to have you on upstream. Thank you, Robbie, for having me. Look forward to the conversation. Yeah, me too. And I guess just a start, could you maybe introduce yourself for our listeners?

And yeah, just tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Right, so, I'm Prakash Khashwa. I'm an associate professor at the University of Connecticut. I also co-direct the Economic and Social Rights Research Program at the University's Human Rights Institute. and social rights research program at the University's Human Rights Institute. And additionally, I'm involved with a number of international research and advocacy networks focused mostly on climate governance, climate justice. I also am one of the editors at the general environmental politics. And yeah, my research and writing focus is mostly on environmental and climate justice, global conservation, sustainable development, and likewise. And my most recent focus is to try and bridge the global north, global south divisions, in how we look at these kinds of questions,

because there's always this kind of un-stated tacit, sort of almost like a historical consensus that research in global north works very differently from the way you ask questions, the way you conduct. And so there's almost like a watertight separation between global north and global south, even in terms of the kind of questions that people ask. And I'm breaking through that, I'm arguing that actually, you know, you can learn a lot from global south in terms of what we need to look at here and vice versa. So I want to just jump right into this essay. You recently wrote co-authored

an excellent essay titled From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an inclusive and regenerative conservation. And of course, I think we're going to spend a good chunk of this conversation getting into this essay much more deeply. But just to begin, maybe to set the table, can you unpack the first part of that title for us? What exactly is racialized neocolonial global conservation? And how are colonialism and racism, as you write, quote, etched in the dominant philosophy models and institutional apparatus of global conservation. Sure. So first let me say that in September of 2020, I wrote an article in the on the academic blog called the conversation and that was following up on the debates that started on racial reckoning here in the US in the summer of 2020.

And so we're going to talk about that a bit more, but I wanted to mention that the editorial board of the Environment magazine reached out to me to expand that short piece that I wrote for the conversation into a full sort of a research article. And so that one I was very thankful to them. It's a very influential global magazine. And so I really appreciated them doing a cover story on this. And once I got that invitation, I also thought that I needed many more heads and many more voices. So I requested Rosalind Duffy,

who's a professor at Sheffield University, and three other relatively younger scholars, all of who are focused much more on the questions of conservation and militarization of conservation in Africa. And because I haven't directly worked in Africa, I wanted to make sure that we have people who have real expertise in writing this kind of a global essay. So I just wanted to give that background

because it's really important to underline the fact that it was a collective effort, both on the part of the magazine and the co-authors who joined in this endeavor. I'm very thankful to each of them. And so now to come to your question, if we sort of trace back the genealogy of global conservation, it really actually started at the height of European colonization of African Asia.

And the underlying assumption, not just assumption, the underlying working philosophy and working principle was that that these black people are too poor and too ignorant to know about the importance of wildlife. And so the white men needed to come in and protect wildlife, not just from within the natural habitat, but also protect it from the local people. And this was the same story as it unfolded in the US national parks, you know, before the US national parks were founded. national parks, you know, before the US national parks were founded. There was this thing about the ignorant Indians who didn't appreciate the importance of nature. And, you know, it sounds ridiculous now, but this was the operating principle then. And so these processes unfolded simultaneously

in the US and in countries in the African, colonized by the Europeans. And so it was literally the origin story of global conservation is colonial and racist in those very fundamental terms. And so you brought up Africa and then you brought up sort of a parallel of in the United States with indigenous communities that we're living here,

are still living here, of course. Can you tell us a little bit about this idea of green grabs and sort of in the context of the United States National Parks project and like the historical parallels with the enclosures in England and the Imperial slash colonial environmentalism in the British colonies. So like what role did the national parks play in early colonialism and racism specifically here in America and sort of related to this American brand of environmentalism?

Right. mentalism. Right, so the territories of indigenous peoples and indigenous nations here in the US were conquered literally, right, and taking off the lands that were deemed to be pristine natural habitats was part of that conquest. So there are two different things going on here which, you know, often sort of somewhat confounded. One is this sort of the standard settler colonial model where you come in and you take land away from people who you label as primitive and unable to make good use of the land. I mean, that was literally the theory of John Lockies'

labor value of property rights. And it's ironical because John Lockie actually used to be working for British colonial government. So it was a very convenient argument for him to make that the Indians don't make productive use of land. And so we Europeans who have the capacity to sort of make good use of the land should take it over. So there was this standard settler colonial model of taking land away. And you know, this is just suggesting the natives, whether it is here in the US or in Africa or Asia.

But the second story is about national parks and protection of nature being used as an excuse to take more land in subsequent rounds of dispositions. And this was done here in the US at the time when the national parks were designated. In many cases, this was a military operation. So I'm sure you may have heard about this and many of your listeners may have heard about this, but for those who have not, it's worth mentioning that eosemite in the native language actually means the killers are here. So when you know the military came in, the indigenous elders and people were

alerting one another saying, the killers are here, protect yourself. And that's how Yosemite got its name. It means killers are on our doorstep. And so there are two things. First, all of the land was taken over as part of the settler-colonial project. And second, that designation of national parks was used as an excuse to land, take more land away. And of course, this is not to say that creation of national park is worthless. Of course, it's valuable. And when you and I go and visit national parks, we appreciate the beauty and the wildlife and the nature and the nurturing effect that nature protected inside protected areas has. That's undoubted, right?

But that does not diminish the fact that these lands were taken away violently. And that people whose lives and livelihoods were intertwined with rhythms of nature. And I want to talk about that a bit later, a bit more, because it's often confused as a simplistic romanticization of indigenous lifestyle. There is not that. There are very specific reasons why indigenous business people's lives and livelihoods are intertwined with nature and natural landscapes. But so that's the story.

And then we created this fiction that European enlightenment or American enlightenment is responsible for the protection of nature. And there's no evidence to sort of make that argument because in national parks here in the US, more than 40 national parks as of today, 42 national parks has oil and gas explorations within them. So it's not that we, those areas are even now,

they're not like paradise of nature protection. There's a lot of devastation that we are causing within the national parks, despite the fact that we call them the best idea that America has ever produced. Yeah, thanks for sort of unpacking that a little bit. And so you also spend a considerable amount of time sort of critically examining a recent Sierra Club statement by the club's executive director, Michael Brune, I believe that's how you pronounce the last name. And in that statement, Michael Brune acknowledged the role that the Sierra Club played in perpetuating white supremacy.

And I think that a lot of people would not really make that connection between the Sierra Club and the White supremacy. I mean, I think maybe some people can kind of see where we're going here, but I'm wondering if you could talk about the context of that and sort of, you also think that the acknowledgement missed the mark. So I'm wondering if you could of just like paint a picture there of what's going on So I would put that slightly differently so share a club Icnollis the role that it's founding fathers and you know the old people Basically dead white men

John Moore and you know others played in perpetuating racism and others played in perpetuating racism. It did not acknowledge its own contemporary role in perpetuating these models. And I wanna talk about that separately. And that is a mistake, I mean, mistake or shortcoming in those statements in the sense, because it sort of puts it away in history

and saying that we are sorry for the history, but now we're doing this novel cause. We have taken up this novel cause of protecting nature. And that's the story that's related to the racial reckoning that happened here in the US in the summer of 2020 as a result of Black Lives Matter movement. And it's important to underline how these social movements have much wide ranging implications for different spheres of society, economy, and science, and so forth.

And so as the statues were being dismantled, Sierra Club realized that one of those statues is of President Roosevelt literally flanked by an African and Indian reminding of his own history of lyricism and large-scale massacre of wild animals in Africa. He went on these safaris and the story goes that when he returned from that expedition, he brought in so much of wild animals and their heads and trophies that they had to dramatically expand the storage space that they needed to stock those trophies. And so all of those dots got connected in the summer of 2020 and you know in September I wrote that article in the conversation that received quite a significant attention. What I pointed out in that article was that it's not just about what happens in the US. And it's not just about history, that the racism that is

conjoined with the birth of global conservation, it has actually produced very significant contemporary consequences in terms of the kind of institutions, the systems of conservation and grant making, and some of these things we will talk a little more about. So one I argued that this is not just a historical issue, it has a contemporary relevance. And we need to talk about those issues, because just talking about history and apologizing for history is not going to fix those systems and institutions.

So that was the goal of my article. And I got quite a bit of hate mail as with people being very upset that I was calling these giant environmentalists, the giant figures, calling them racist and undermining their legacy of environmentalism. But the second thing that I did not have space in that article to make, but it's really important to think about within the context of the US, is that the environmental justice movement here in the US, they have been talking with and they've

been writing letters to these big conservation NGOs, WWF, nature,ancy, there are five of these big mega conservation corporations in a sense. And the environmental justice movement have been telling them since the 1990s, early 1990s actually, 1992 was one of their first meetings and they invited all of these leaders of conservation to their meetings and then said, look your notion of environmental conservation is exclusionary, it's very white in terms of, you know, who's saying articulating concerns of conservation and how it is framed as this idea of conserving the pristine nature without actually thinking about the environment within which a majority of

racial minorities live play and work. You know, that's the environmental justice definition of the environment is the surrounding environment. And so Shira Club's statement was almost like that never happened. All of those conversations since early 1990s and all of that hard work, that environmental justice group and scholars and scholar activists have been putting in, almost as if that never happened. And the last thing to note here is that despite these quarter-century long conversations on these topics, The racial diversity within conservation NGOs in their leadership, in their staff, in the environmental-oriented foundations, that has in some cases it has actually gotten worse. It has not improved. And Dorisita Taylor, who used to be at University of Michigan,

and now is a professor at Yale University here in my neighborhood. She has systematically documented the lack of racial diversity within the environmental sector for years now. And so all of that long history and these repeated documentation of lack of diversity and this is in making power within the environmental movement, which is not resulted in any significant changes. And so that reinforces the argument I was making in the broader international context, that making these statements is not enough.

We need to do more and we need to take systemic reforms and transformative changes in the way we work and we think about global conservation. So yes, it's abundantly clear to many that pay attention that the global conservation movement has a racist past, but yes, as you say, its present iteration is nothing to be celebrated in that regard either. And so I want to maybe sort of like go through some of the points that you made in your essay and unpack them piece by piece, really looking at some of the major issues with current conservation. So I'm thinking it might be easier to break it up into the categories that you use in the essay. And I'm thinking let's sort of start with the fundamental flaws in the systems of grant making and the centralized control.

So that's one series of points that you bring up as being highly problematic. And so can you talk a little bit about how the design of many conservation programs perpetuates the continued marginalization of indigenous peoples and the silencing of local voices. That's correct. So, and you know, I quickly want to reconnect our listeners to the birthing story of global conservation, which was that brown and black people are too poor and too ignorant to care about wildlife and nature conservation. What that model means is that, you know, you don't want to see people and wildlife together. Despite a very long history of coexistence of people and wildlife in large parts of the world, including here on the Indigenous Nation territories, the global conservation movement, and in fact, even the science of conservation is founded on this assumption

that people and wildlife do not coexist. And so all of the wildlife conservation programs are a majority and the most powerful and most well-resourced wildlife conservation programs are founded on this myth of nature society separation. Now, this comes in a way from this legacy that, you know, settler colonialism has of destroying nature wherever it calls home, right? So we have these urban areas or, you know, towns where there's literally no nature and then because we don't have nature in our day to derives, we need these parks so that we can drive over the weekend or in during vacations to enjoy nature. And so this assumption of nature, society, separation based on a very specific European

cultural experience and European cultural philosophy is implanted via a conservation program and conservation science, which is faulty. And you know, just to give you a particular example that is more recent in many people will understand that the evidence we have about these large scale catastrophic fires that have happened in the US West, in the Amazon, and in Australia tells us that when you create these secluded places presumed safe boxes for nature, it doesn't create healthy landscapes because there's the overgrowth of under-story vegetation and there are no fire breaks, there's no regulars of watch of the landscape and no interaction with human beings, which makes it more vulnerable to large-scale fires when there is a small

fire, whether natural or human-induced. Similarly, there's a lot of research which shows that small-scale subsistence agriculture as opposed to chemical-intensive, energy-intensive, industrial agriculture, which destroys nature. Small scale, subsistence agriculture is actually good for landscape conservation because it introduces limited amount of controlled fire and fire breaks and little bit of grazing and browsing by domestic animals and again not industrial ranching which is bad for the environment but small scale grazing and browsing all of that is good for the environment and this historical evidence from

the Amazon and in Africa this thing called black soils or dark soils which shows us that many areas that used to be like rocky lands, they were made organically rich and more productive because of human animal habitation. And you see how, you know, keeping small scale animal has been, actually adds nutrients and these kinds of interventions that are good for conservation. And this is what I meant when I said it's not, this kind of romanticization that certain cultures are worship nature and that's why they can coexist,

but we cannot. They worship that is true and these landscape and these species are culturally important, which is a really good part of it, but that's not all. The agricultural practices, the day-to-day routine engagements between nature and humans are such that they work as an adaptive feedback loop of sorts. And so that actually maintains the natural landscape balance to some extent. maintains the natural landscape balance to some extent. And again, of course, there are limits to that kind of coexistence as well.

But none of that is recognized in the kind of conservation that these big conservation NGOs promote. They want to fence up areas and create these large, massive zoos in a sense to protect wildlife. And that's not sustainable. Because one, you are literally, you know, there's evidence, again, data that shows that anywhere between 10 to 20 million people have at least been displaced and dispossessed because of global conservation. And in recent times, you have had this massive militarization of conservation so that there are guards with these very advanced weaponry who are stationed

at these parks, and they have these shoot at sight and shoot to kill orders. And there have been actual investigations showing that these kinds of violations of human rights and violations of basic principles of justice take place on a very routine basis in parts of Africa and parts of Asia. So in many ways, this is actually worse than colonialism because at least colonialism at that time, they didn't have shoot at sight orders.

They took the land away for sure. colonialism at that time, they didn't have shoot at site orders. They took the land away for sure. There was massive dispossession and there were all kinds of exploitations. But even during colonial times, except for some very grigis incidences, you didn't hear about people being shot dead in the name of protecting animals. So in many ways it's actually much worse than the colonial history. Okay, so we're talking about this idea of what you're calling fortress conservation. And I'm wondering, can you provide any like examples that might sort of

help listeners get an idea of like under what context this shoot to kill conservation policy might actually play out. So this is happening unfortunately at increasing frequency in many different places in parts of Africa and Asia. One example that I've written about separately is this that I've written about separately is this Khaji Ranga National Park in Eastern India, Indian State of Assam, which is known for one-horned rhinos, which is an endangered species. And the BBC did an investigative reporting where some of these park rangers were sort of bragging about shooting people down. And this report came out in 2018-2019. At that time, they collected data for past five years. So I guess from 2014-2015-2019, 25 people had been shot dead in that particular part, and five rhinos were killed during that time.

Of course, no rhinos should be killed, no wildlife should be killed, but 25 human beings, and there's pretty solid circumstantial evidence that all of these people were innocent people. Because if you happen to earn your living by collecting firewood, additional plants, small game, these kinds of activities in the park that you call your home for generations, of course you will be there, right? You know, you're there because you're there, right? Because that's your home.

And if you actually issue a shoot at site and shoot to kill order for you being in your home, of course more innocent people are going to be killed. And of course, the poachers, they come with advanced weaponry. So they're not going to be, you know, waiting for you to kill them. So that's one particular example and the whole militarized conservation project that was led by Professor Rosalind Duffy of Sheffield University. That has been done all over Africa. So there are many cases in Africa that they've documented and they've done a very systematic documentation and research on that. In addition to these extreme events of

shoot to kill, there have also been numerous other well-documented cases of massive human rights violations which include torture, rape, and illegal detentions and abductions of people from these areas. In many cases where WWF officials knew about these things, but they sort of turned a blind eye. In most cases, the actual violations were conducted by government agents who were funded and supported by these big conservation NGOs.

I think for people in US and Europe, it's difficult to imagine the kind of power that government officials hold, because here we have very different notions of Uncle Sam and the state interfering in lives, our lives if they ask us to mask. But these realities are very different in the global South, where government officials hold real life and death power over other people, over normal poor people.

And so that's what we mean by militarized and fortress conservation. I'll quickly mention that fortress conservation model, this is a phrase that was coined by Daniel Brakington, who's also at Sheffield University. But since then, this model has been expanded to include a couple of other Fs, you know, and it's sort of fitting that they're all Fs. It's a fortress conservation, you know, building a fortress or sort of building a fence around an area and then putting firearms and penalizing or putting fines. So it's fence, firearms and fines. These are the three large-scale Fs that are wielded against poorest people on earth in the name of environment. And I

say in the name of the environment because there's evidence that this doesn't necessarily even mean effective conservation. That's another part of the discussion that we should have because it's not about human rights violations versus effective conservation. It's not a trade off in that sense, right? Good conservation is actually happening in places where there aren't as many human rights violations.

And the one more F that is a relative recent addition to this list of F's is finance. And so now you have all kinds of global corporations who want to sort of pay for their sins of emissions by protecting these lands and arguing that the emissions that we are doing because of our business a fossil fuel industry or these utilities and so forth they are being offset by the carbon that is stopped in these forest areas and so this big finance billions and billions of dollars

which are being routed through these big conservation NGOs and That is now added a great deal of complexity to this issue, because big finance was already a problem in global conservation in the sense that five largest global conservation NGOs they get hundreds of millions of funding, thousands of other smaller NGOs who do meaningful work on the grassroots level without actually contributing to these kinds of human rights violations. They literally don't even get peanuts out of these

programs. And so this is global conservation funding was already cornered by these massive global conservation corporations. And now that problem has become even worse because there's all of this net zero offset money which is coming in and producing these green washing projects coupled with human rights violations which have increased massively because remember even the government officials in global south are poor people compared to us here in global north. And so in many ways, they are compelled to accept this funding and to do bribing and all of those. There's a whole set of discussion about understanding their own circumstances and the difficult

circumstances under which they work, which makes these finances very, very attractive and which makes it very difficult for government agencies and global south to say no to these kinds of funding proposals from global north. Your listening to an upstream conversation with Prakash Kushwan will be right back. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I know I saw and now I'm dead Oh, the treats Sound on the wall, Motherhood meets mental freeze Freeze it, now alone I love, I still, but now we're done ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo ndo That was No Aloha by the breeders. Now back to our conversation with Prakash Kushwan.

Okay, so there is so much that you went over in your response just before the break. One thing that really stood out to me was the description of sort of physical torture that was inflicted on, you know, local folks who were subjected to these sort of shoot-to-kill policies or fortress conservation policies. And it made me think about, so I studied anthropology and specifically primatologies and undergrad, and I remember hearing about the famed primatologist Diane Fossi who of course she studied gorillas in Rwanda in Africa and I know more recently It's been uncovered that she partook in some controversial methods of

Conservation and what this article that I'm looking at right now by lady science describes is that I'm looking at right now by Lady Science describes as active conservation, which included physical torture, psychological torture, and kidnapping of local people near her field site in Rwanda, as she enacted a neo-colonialist conservation program rooted in white supremacy. So just bringing that up to even our, some of us, like when I was an an undergrad Diane Fossi and Jane Goodall those were heroes to me but even for a lot of those high-profile folks it just buried this darker history around what they were doing and if you want to comment on that of course I feel free and also yeah just like I do want to unpack a little bit more this idea that you just outlined at the end there

about greenwashing and I love it if you could sort of unpack a little bit more of this idea that you just outlined at the end there about greenwashing. I love it if you could unpack a little bit more of this idea of, you write how the present day conservation movement is extractive. One of the major issues with it is that it's extractive development and greenwashing. You write, quote, market-based conservation approaches have both intensified and transformed fortress conservation. The intensification of fortress conservation, partly through recent militarization

and securitization of conservation, is tightly connected to attempts to render expanded areas of nature legible and available for capital accumulation via carbon and diversity offsetting, ecotourism, and the continuation of extractivism. So, I'd love it if you could sort of just for someone who's not really familiar, like, what is the problem with carbon offsetting? What's the problem with ecotourism?

What's the problem with making some money off of this? Like, can you sort of describe your problems with that? This does require a lot of unpacking. We can talk about a couple of things that I wanted to say about Fasi, Jane Goodall, Spectrum of heroic environmentalism, but let's come back to that later. This requires actually talking about the fact that now there are a bunch of these steps that we need to go through and I'll again sort of actually some of the things I'll repeat

because I think when you can try and connect different things, it's helpful to have all of these things together. So one is, as I said earlier, this model of global conservation, the five apps or four apps that we are talking about, we could call it F-rays to the power and in a sense. So this model is a failure in the sense that the amount of resources and misery that is invested in this model.

And again, as I'm speaking, I'm thinking about how Meziri is part of the investment in a sense. And so you can already see how it is extractive because at its root, it's the model is premised on the expendability of black and brown people and throwing them out of those landscapes.

So the creation of pristine landscapes that are fenced is based on this model of dispossession and that's where the extraction starts. Now many well-meaning wildlife conservation people and wildlife scientists often say, you know what, we can actually share the benefits of wildlife conservation by creating, you know, livelihood and other kinds of income activities for the poor people. And this discussion of, you know, sort of trickle down, right? We will create a park that will be valuable, there will be European and American tourists coming in bringing a lot of money and we will share part of that revenue with poor people who have been thrown out of the land.

This story has been repeated for quarter a century now and I can tell you there are a handful of case studies throughout the world where there's been some amount of sharing that has actually happened. Just a handful of stories and case studies, while about a reasonable amount estimate about the number of people who have been actually thrown out of these lands is 20 million people. And I would say not even 20,000 people have actually very seriously benefited from global conservation. So that's one part of the story and it's extractive in that sense that even where there's been proposals.

So, for example, in the Indian law, there's, you know, local governance laws actually make it mandatory for government agencies to share the benefits of local resource management with and business communities. And it has not happened in any place that I know of. And then in the piece we actually review the evidence on, you know, there's a number of studies that have actually systematically collected data about these kinds of benefit sharing mechanisms. And in most places, these benefit sharing mechanisms have either not worked, or when some people have benefited, those people are not necessarily the same people who have actually lost land

in the conservation projects. So it's pretty arbitrary in random in a sense. So we have two layers of one, the establishment story of dispossession and then the failure of benefit sharing approaches. The third way in which these models are extractive is because when you think about what's happening in offsets. So, we are driving our SUVs and we are driving our air conditioners and all of the luxury consumption in a sense. You can think about charted flights

and this super wealthy people emit nearly a quarter of all of the global emissions. And so that emission is creating climate crisis and the effect of climate crisis are worn by the same poor people who are being thrown out of their lands. And because of the emissions that is happening here, you cannot have people in Africa and Asia putting up hospitals and schools because now that is being budgeted as part of the carbon budget. Because even a construction of a hospital actually makes carbon emissions right, you need steel and those kinds of things.

So there's this kind of weird extraction happening here where the promise of basic human development and basic human amenities is being now questioned because there are too many poor people who have been kept poor because of the global extractive development models. And those extractive emissions are then being offset by paying for keeping those lands as green, pristine, wildlife, biodiversity, global conservation lands, which is the fifth layer of extraction happening because even the livelihood activities such as subsistence agriculture, that is actually good for conservation, cannot be done because those lands are now being set aside as these carbon reservoirs. So it's a bit complicated, but right're right here. We have unpacked five different layers of

extractions that are all intertwined together and that are creating this massive reinforcement of an extractive economy that in the name of climate change and wildlife conservation and biodiversity is contributing to the continuation of business as usual here in Global North, and continuation of repressive, oppressive dispossessing models of conservation and carbon sequestration in the Global South. I want to uplift another quote from the essay, transformative, environmental, and climate action requires changing the culture of profligate consumption, restructuring the current economic system that rewards extractive development, and ameliorating political inequalities that produce

the vacuum of public accountability and policy making and programming implementation. So again, yeah, just sort of reinforcing what you were just sort of outlining for us. So I wanted to give you some space to go back. Did you want to expand? You had mentioned that you saw a continuum between sort of these environmental conservation heroes. Was there more that you wanted to touch on on that? Right. So I'm working on a book manuscript on decolonizing environmentalism with a colleague, Asim Hasnen, you know, in that manuscript we are sort of tackling this question of heroic environmentalism, which basically takes on this idea that the culture here in the West is very celebrity oriented in many many ways.

And without going half into a long tangent here, these American or European heroes who go out in the wild, God-for-Second places in Africa and do the God's work of conservation, there's a certain cultural cacé to that, right? So even before these heroes do anything that is out of ordinary in those landscapes, this culture of hero worship is also actually partly responsible for creating those conditions. And Diane Fosse and you rightly pointed out she was, you know, this documentation of all kinds of human rights

violations that she contributed. Two things that I want to mention is that in one instance, she was being accompanied by these guards, and they found a herd of cattle grazing in the gorilla territory as Dian Fossian, colleague saw it, and she instructed the guards to shoot the cattle at point blank. So these cattle were shot, you know, a bunch of them, were shot in that point blank in their head, and this was sort of meant as an example so that nobody brings their cattle to this land. Even more sort of disturbing story was that she instructed her staff to not let any of the

Rwandan black people get close to Gorillas because Gorillas were used to mingling with white people. And she didn't want the black Rwandan people to be mingling with Gorillas in the same way. And she didn't want the Gorillas to get used to black people. When I read that, you know, just yeah, there's no words to sort of describe all of that. So that's an extreme. On the other side, you know, so we don't hear these kinds of violations attached to Jane Goudal and again, Jane Goudal is an icon and she's done such a tremendous work for global conservation and we are to recognize that. But she still carries the same philosophy that poor people cannot protect wildlife. And so in a couple of years back, I refer to that in the conversation piece. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Daos, she talked about how population expansion has actually created this environmental destruction.

And so blaming environmental destruction on population, when all the evidence suggests that it is our profligate consumption, whether it is through beef consumption, which is destroying the Amazon, or consumption of trophy and wildlife trade and all those things. We are responsible for environmental destruction and poor people live lives that are thousand times more environmentally friendly. So bringing up the population question is a sure sign that you still have that old philosophy in your mind, even when sometimes you pay armies to indigenous people. So you'll see Jane Gudal talking about indigenous people and their philosophy, but all of that is sort of superficial and it actually doesn't understand and appreciate the depth

of these practices of indigenous people and other rural communities. Yeah, thank you so much for bringing up that issue. The question of population, we have, if for any listeners who really want to dive a little bit more deep into that, we did interview Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore on their book, a history of the world in Seven Cheap Things, where we do talk about the myth of overpopulation. And I know more recently, David Attenborough has gotten quite a bit of pushback because of he also adopts that philosophy and just has really been debunked and proven to be quite racist. But again, yeah, that's a whole other conversation.

So yeah, I mean, you ended speaking about indigenous communities and a couple months ago we released our quarterly audio documentary for the spring season exploring indigenous resistance and regeneration movements. And of course in doing so we explored the land back movement quite a bit. And there are many calls to return land back to indigenous peoples and not just as a form of justice but also in terms of sort of for stewardship reasons. So for example here in California, the Amamutzen band of the Alone, Costa Nguyen, who are historically and still live in sort of the southern Bay area here, where I'm at. They've been working with the National State and County Parks and the Bureau of Land Management,

Land Trusts, and Open Space Districts to restore landscapes back to conditions that they were before first contact. We also spoke with an Inuit activist, Sheila Wat Cloutier. She argued that indigenous people should be actually hired to help conserve the Arctic and saying, you know, quote, what better way to reclaim what was taken from us are pride, our dignity, our resourcefulness and our wisdom. So it's kind of just sort of as a justice movement, but also sort of land back as a conservation policy or a climate policy, even. And so, you know, here in California, Governor Newsom came out with a recent proposal to give Native

American tribes here in California $100 million to purchase and preserve their ancestral lands. All part of a larger program intended to ensure that around one third of California's land and coastal waters are preserved by 2030. And just with the quick note that $ million is not much at all. But I'm just curious, yeah, what are your thoughts on all of that? That's a great question. And the examples that you mentioned, I've been studying them, and I actually visited Santa Cruz recently last year to actually try and understand some of this. And it's super insightful and inspiring in many ways. And they, you know, if you actually engage very closely,

this whole notion of romanticization actually goes away because you know that the people who are running these programs of land back and control cultural burn, you know, the control fire interventions that are part of in business culture. They are doing this in with such nuance that you actually marvel at the kind of thought that goes into these kinds of projects. But what sometimes does end up happening is that people who probably don't get to spend too much of time sort of thinking about the details of these programs, they sort of translate this into a sort of romantic pre-modial kind of situation where there's these cultural and spiritual values that in

business people carry, they are sort of, you know, are the main reason for the success of these programs. And as I said previously, the cultural and spiritual values are extremely important. This is like spinal cord in our body, which holds everything together. But you couldn't just carry the spinal cord around. You have to have all of the body parts. And so what in business culture and lifestyle tells us is that the practices of, so you know,

I've been reading about Iraq people, Iraq nations work with salmon fishery and fire. And I mean, it'll take me a long time, but there's a lot of scientific research which shows how introduction of controlled fire in the landscape is related to the survival and thriving of salmon during the summer months, peak summer months. And so, you know, the way these things are intricately connected to one another, this distinction between economy and spiritual and cultural is our distinction. It's a false distinction when it comes to the indigenous lifestyles and so forth. So, I want to always, the every time we talk about this, I want to make sure that I communicate, this intricate linkages within these different elements of indigenous life and philosophy,

and it's very important to carefully understand them. The other important thing is that, and I'm glad you mentioned California setting aside these resources, which I think is a really great way, because another route would be to think about these areas as stocks of carbon and then getting some of these offset money to support the same kinds of preservation and conservation, which is happening. But I think the question that the offset raises is that what all the offset is contributing in addition to that part of conservation. And some of that other offset business can be actually problematic.

Even though it's extremely valuable to gain resources for getting land back to indisnecinations and supporting the preservation and conservation of those lands. So I'm actually really happy to learn about the California Governor and state actually supporting these kinds of initiatives. So I guess yeah, just to close out, you write that, quote, neo-liberal conservation or environmentalism of the rich is not a harmless distraction. It can actually frustrate global efforts towards transformative change.

And I'm wondering what would a decolonized and regenerative conservation movement actually look like to you? Right, thank you. And this is really important because oftentimes, it's been a bit difficult to engage with some people who are quick to take some of this discussion and make it into binaries.

And so they would label me as a romanticizing in business culture and people and they would put themselves as being environmentalist, right. And I dislike to use a polite term, I really dislike these binaries. And as if that's the only form of environmentalism. And so I think it's really important to talk about what is the alternative. The first part of alternative has to start from sort of rejecting this notion that society and civilization exist in concrete blocks and nature exists in those safe boxes of nature, separate in national parks and so forth.

Once we reject these binaries, we know that fossil fuel extraction that is happening right now, inside the boundaries of our national parks, need to be stopped. And small scale gardening and agriculture and resource harvesting and fire intervention and grazing, all of those kinds of interventions need to be brought back. So what we are doing there is that just by replacing those fossil fuel extractive projects with small scale agriculture and animal husbandry, we are rebalancing our engagement with national parks in a way so that the fossil fuel economy is gone.

And it's then replaced by activities that would support local economies, will create local jobs, and will create human nature interactions that are good for conservation. So organic substance farming is good for nature and it should be brought back into national parks. That will give us more food, more healthy food, locally grown food and so forth. So that's the first major sort of transformation that is needed in our thinking about conservation where we think of conservation in a comprehensive way and stop thinking about conservation as in wildlife conservation. We need to be thinking ecologically about conservation which includes introducing animals and

fires in the landscape. And that is not to say that all protected areas should be opened up to small scale agriculture. But what can certainly happen is that you have big conservation NGOs that are funding being redirected to small scale community based interventions that are actually contributing to localized conservation programs. And so you have these big global conservation corporations being replaced by literally tens of thousands of smaller local community-based programs that give local communities a stake in conservation for real as opposed to that kind of failed trickle-down model of conservation.

So I would say redirecting our resources to local communities and then allowing local communities to engage with the landscape in a way that promotes local economies and also supports local environment. And the third, you know, which sort of goes beyond the areas under national parks, is to when we are thinking about conservation and restoration, instead of thinking about trillion trees programs and these tree plantation programs, we should be thinking about agroecology, we should be thinking about small scale, you know, kitchen gardens and, you know, those kinds of transformations that will again do the same kinds of changes in the landscape.

You know, for example, in many, in many, maybe tens of thousands of towns throughout US, there are these town ordinances that make it illegal to not move your lawn, and it make it illegal to grow vegetables in your own backyard. So these are the kinds of things that we should be doing to mass popularize small scale conservation, which can then replace our reliance on the satellites of conservation, the safe boxes of conservation, which are not anyway not safe because as we see, they're

very vulnerable to large scale fires and other kinds of natural catastrophes. Well, thank you so much. This has been such an informative and interesting conversation. I meant to say conversation. Yeah, so thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Ravi. It was wonderful to have all of this time to talk about these issues with nuance

because oftentimes it's really difficult to tackle these questions within 10 or 15 minutes. That's the standard timeline or in a short piece. So I really appreciate it this. Thank you. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Prokash Kashwan. You can request a full text version of the paper from racialized neo-colonial global conservation to an inclusive and regenerative conservation at Research Gate.

Visit the link in the show notes. You can also write Prokash to request a PDF copy of the paper. His email address is cashwan at gmail.com. Thank you to the breeders for the intermission music and to Bethan Muir for the cover art. Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit UpstreamPodcast.org forward slash support to donate, and because we're fiscally sponsored by the non-profit independent arts and media, any donations that you make to Upstream are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with ongoing support from the incredible folks at Gorilla Foundation.

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