Why we need to decolonize and un-whitewash "environmental conservation"

The importance of connecting cultural diversity and biodiversity in regenerative earth stewardship

I touched on this topic originally through an Instagram post, but I've got additional resources linked here, and this is a much deeper dive as I don't have character limits here. :)

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“Some of the earliest forest laws in the world were passed by kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries because they wanted to protect their supply of wild game meat in the forests of Europe.

They prevented people from cutting down the forests, and they had really harsh measures—people who 'poached' animals would have their eyes torn out, they were castrated, sometimes they'd be taken away from the country.

So from the beginning, conservation was wrapped up in privilege—there was this idea that certain people could have access to this resource over others. That's the western model of conservation: keeping people out of these landscapes.

If you look at Indigenous peoples, their presence in the landscape often created more biodiversity. Some of the North American Indigenous peoples' foodways and the ways they managed the land actually increased biodiversity. For instance, they built fish weirs on the East coast, and this actually created a habitat for a lot of different juvenile fish and created marshland.

In providing wild foods for themselves, they were actually increasing the abundance of these different wild animals."

–Gina Rae La Cerva, author of Feasting Wild, on Green Dreamer Podcast episode 245.

When you think of environmental conservation, what comes to mind? For many, it'd be national parks or wild spaces—set aside to, for the most part, be left untouched.

But where does that perception come from?

The reality is that the dominant Western approach of conservation equating with drawing arbitrary boundaries around an area of wilderness to prohibit human interference (or otherwise dictating who has access based on privilege and power) was rooted in white supremacy, economic injustice, and a sense of disassociation from nature—a view that regarded humans as separate (and superior) to nature, rather than one part of.

Yellowstone, Glacier, Badlands, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley... these are just some of America's most visited national parks. And it's great that they're protected against industrial extraction and land conversion today. But early on with their designation as national parks, these lands were actually taken away from the Native American communities that lived within them—intentionally, as a part of the U.S. government's plan to displace them, robbing them of their native food sources and medicines and removing them from their sacred and ancestral homelands.

“Scholars like geographer Carolyn Finney and environmental law scholar Jedidiah Purdy trace the origins of modern environmentalism to colonialism, to indigenous land grabs and to the racialized conceptualization of nature as dominated space — where humans control the valuation of species and humanity is defined as white. Social Darwinists and founders of conservationism Madison Grant, Gifford Pinchot and U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt maintained that whites were the most capable, civilized humans, whose duty was to conquer and manage inferior peoples in the larger quest for the New World and its resources.

The expulsion of indigenous peoples from the territories that became our national parks, as just one example, reinforced the premise that humans are simultaneously oppositional to ‘nature’ and that whites are the trusted human protectors of nature and its resources." –Danielle Purifoy via Inside Higher Ed.

When oftentimes, Indigenous peoples were able to enhance the biodiversity of their ecoregions through their embedded lifeways, justifying their displacement in the name of “conservation” warrants the question: Was the goal really to optimize the health of the environment or about gaining control over the lands (and the people that inhabited them)?

In much of the Western world, lands are largely either to be set aside to be kept as “pristine” wilderness or to be marked or privatized for utilitarian use—often extracted from until the lands have become desertified or otherwise stripped of its native biodiversity and converted into human-constructed urban landscapes.

Both are evidence of a lack of interrelation and reciprocity with the earth.

Today, Tribal Peoples, First Peoples, Native Peoples, and Indigenous Peoples, speaking 4,000+ different native languages, make up 6.2% of our global population while stewarding 80% of the earth's biodiversity.

It is not a coincidence that biodiversity loss is occurring alongside the erosion of native languages and cultural diversity—in some cases achieved through intentional, colonial ethnic cleansing.

Cultural diversity, local languages, and place-based knowledge—typically passed down through generations and maintained by Indigenous communities—are vital to protecting the earth's beautifully diverse bioregions.

The sort of in-depth knowledge we need to understand regenerative earth stewardship at a localized, bioregional level is what's endemic to Indigenous cultures and vocabulary that have developed with those places over millennia.

I'm going to dive deeper into this in a future post, but this is why I take issue with the dominant approaches in environmentalism that seek absolute answers to addressing nonabsolute, complex, and diverse ecoregional needs.

While Western environmentalists often seek to find one-size-fits-all answers for “the most sustainable diet” or “the most eco-friendly practices” through ecological impact assessments, these studies tend to dismiss the needed contextualization of those findings to each unique ecoregion and the cultural history tied to it.

And unfortunately, because of the institutionalized injustices within our society-at-large, it has been largely Western, White, male, and whitewashed-textbook-educated environmentalists who have had the most power in influencing the discourse in the field of sustainability, making such top-down approaches the standardized way to understand what constitutes as “environmentally friendly” practices and decisions.

“Diversity” is not for tokenizing.

But we actually need the substantive, place-based knowledge and the understanding of intersectionality that only traditionally marginalized and sidelined people can bring to the table.

As such, recognizing the ties between social injustice and ecological degradation, shifting the power structure within the environmental movement so that previously sidelined people can lead, and decentralizing decision-making are the only ways we can create community-based, inclusive, regenerative, and long-lasting solutions.

None of this is to diminish the important things we've learned through Western science and laboratory research, of course.

But now more than ever, environmentalists who hold the most power and scientists that receive the most funding from research institutions must recognize the links between culture and ecological science—specifically, the marginalization of Indigenous communities and our dominant, homogenized culture's inability to understand what it means to live as one part of our diverse bioregions in life-enhancing ways.

Otherwise, the future of environmentalism may end up looking like more lab-made, inaccessible, and patented plant-based “food” promoted as the way our diets can “save the planet” without agriculture; research institutions disproportionately funding genetic engineering that may enable some marine creatures to survive their acidifying oceans; governments disproportionately funding expensive, myopic solutions, such as carbon-sucking and sunray-deflecting technologies to address climate change; and more “wild spaces”, increasingly rare, sensitive, and vulnerable, turned into eco-tourism destinations with state-mandated limitations on how many people can enter in a season and as such, reserved for those with money and the time to travel.

To top it all of, the hugely influential mainstream media, 90% of which is controlled by just six corporations today in the U.S., may skew in their narratives to hype up and justify all of the above to the public because that's where the power and money lie.

Conservation as we know it today was built by colonial-minded settlers with no established reciprocity with the land they stole and who had already lost their identities as being one part of nature. Unfortunately, the same social injustice, lack of place-based relationships and knowledge, and sense of disassociation from nature continue to shape many of our “environmental solutions” today.

To truly unlearn and relearn the practice of regenerative earth stewardship, we must decolonize our perspectives on sustainability, amplify and honor Indigenous-led efforts, and see social justice and cultural diversity as crucial parts of this equation.

For additional learning on related matters, check out Green Dreamer's episodes 173 ft. Sean Sherman, 223 ft. Galina Angarova, and 245 ft. Gina Rae La Cerva.

xx Kamea