Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples (review)

Mark Dowie has identified a gripping global story: across the world, indigenous peoples living within relatively intact ecosystems have been, and are continuing to be, displaced from their homes in the name of global biodiversity conservation. These displacements have resulted in severe personal suffering, as well as social dissolution and the loss of entire cultural forms. Even worse, Dowie argues, these "conservation refugees" need not have been removed from their homes in the first place, as they were more than capable of continued existence within these newly designated protected areas. Their suffering, and the moral travesty of their alienation from land which they had used for (sometimes) millennia, is ultimately unnecessary and even counter-productive in cases where displaced peoples have turned against protected species and forests with retaliatory poisonings, poaching, and arson.

Dowie explains this story as a conflict between "science-based and rights-based conservation" (pp. xix, 260), with conservation biologists and international conservation organizations arguing for large people-less protected areas in order to save biodiversity, and anthropologists and organizations of and for indigenous peoples advocating stronger land tenure and autonomy for indigenous populations in order to save cultural and biological diversity. Dowie attempts to avoid demonizing either side of this debate, and instead suggests that this is a "good guy vs. good guy story" (p. ix).

This characterization does not mean that Dowie presents both sides of this debate with equal fluidity or compassion, however. He has little sympathy for some of the conservation scientists, as illustrated when he writes of the most stubborn supporters of people-less protected areas that they "are fortunately dying off faster than the species they yearn to protect" (p. 265). In contrast, he has great admiration for indigenous peoples and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) arguing that "we have so much more to learn from them than we realize" (p. 269). Dowie ends his book by describing sources of hope rising from what has been a tragic global history for both indigenous peoples and endangered ecosystems. He finally suggests that a new model of cooperative conservation is emerging, with the potential to transform global conservation into a collaborative endeavor directed by local peoples and supported by developed world scientists, NGOs, and money.

This story is not a new one for followers of the long-running "parks versus people" debates, or (in its North American form) the "wilderness debate." There are now several shelves of books and articles that delve into different aspects of these debates. Dowie is aware of some of the most important of these works of scholarship, appearing to borrow strongly from a few, but as the book has no bibliography and only the most cursory of general endnotes (a handful per chapter), it is often difficult to trace the sources of his information or inspiration. The general readers for whom this book is intended will perhaps not share this frustration.

Conservation Refugees is structured in chapters that alternate between specific regional case studies, and topical chapters on subjects such as the meaning of "nature" or the science of mapping. Dowie has visited many of the places and peoples that he describes in his ten (relatively brief) case studies, from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. This scale is both a strength and weakness: it allows him to proffer a truly global overview of this topic that is often missing from more specialized academic monographs. But at the same time, some of the case studies are too diffuse and not sufficiently grounded in the careful details of human and natural history.

For example, his chapter on adivasis in India is particularly unsatisfying, both because it is less grounded in one place (instead, it focused on the whole subcontinent) and because his discussion misses important details. He speaks of relocations in the 1970s contravening the rules of biosphere reserves, but India did not have any biosphere reserves at that time; his analysis of the 2005 debates surrounding Sariska Tiger Reserve...