30×30: “A bigger land grab than has ever been planned”

By Chris Lang

A target of putting 30% of the earth’s surface into protected areas by 2030 is a key part of the Conservation on Biological Diversity’s draft action plan for 2020 to 2030. The conservation industry is keen on pushing through this so-called 30×30 proposal, that would entail a massive increase in the area of the world’s protected areas. Understanding the environmental and social dangers that this proposal threatens requires understanding the history of protected areas and their impacts globally.

In February 2022 Sonny Decker of Talking Africa interviewed Kenyan carnivore ecologist, Mordecai Ogada, and Stephen Corry, former CEO of Survival International, about conservation and protected areas.

The whole interview is well worth listening to. Here are some of the highlights.

“Fatally, fundamentally flawed”

Decker starts by asking how important it is that ordinary people know about the highly controversial conservation practice of creating protected areas, particularly people in the countries where it is carried out.

“It’s absolutely necessary that ordinary people know about it,” Ogada replies, “because our lives and our livelihoods and our identity depends on this knowledge.”

“It is a mistake for us to have taken up the model that was created in the United States by an immigrant population. It is fatally, fundamentally flawed and cannot work for populations like ours and we really need to rethink it.”

Corry adds that, “It affects millions of ordinary people in Africa today. And I agree it’s absolutely vital that it’s known about and talked about. And the real history and the real background to these issues, rather than the sanitised version put out by the conservation organisations. People need to know the real history, and not only the history, but what’s happening today. People are still being evicted from protected areas, so-called protected areas.”

Ogada talks about the attempts to address the problems that conservation has created. “We’ve done very poorly in trying to modify what is a fundamentally flawed system, rather than face the fact that we need to dismantle it,” he says. “Some of the clichés you hear are ‘inclusion of local people’ , ‘engaging communities’. That’s just putting lipstick on a pig. The question we should ask is, ‘How and when did they get disengaged?’ ‘How, and when, and why did they get excluded?’ We should address those questions before we start getting into discussion around inclusion. We really need to re-think it. First of all, stop expanding it. That’s what we should do immediately. And then really think about a better way to go for it.”

Remove tourism from discussions about conservation

Ogada argues that discussions about tourism should be removed from any discussions about natural resources, forests, or wildlife conservation. He explains why:

“The reason for this is that the presence of tourism in that discussion sort of justifies all sorts of violations of human rights. It justifies the removal of local people from certain areas. Because tourism is about the sale of experiences. And some of the experiences being sold in tourism are false and contrived. That’s how it works.

“Disneyland is a false experience, it’s a manufactured experience. The same thing if you come to Kenya. You know the romance of Africa, beautiful landscapes, beautiful wildlife, and no black people. That’s what you see in movies, that’s what you read about in Tarzan, you see that in the movie Out of Africa, even what you see on National Geographic, Discovery Channel today. Wildlife movies about Africa do not include black people.

“And that has led to the thinking that people want to come to Africa, when he sees National Geographic TV and decides ‘I want to visit Kenya’ he does not expect to see black people in the areas where those wildlife are. And when he gets to the ground, the truth is quite different. This is what creates the relentless sale of advertising of a false product.

“I mean Kenya’s Ministry of Tourism is constantly advertising safari tourism in Kenya, with posters that do not have black people, other than the waiter or the driver.”

In 2018, I wrote about a presentation that Ogada gave at the Nature in Focus Photography Festival in Begaluru, India. During his presentation, Ogada put forward a challenge: “I challenge you to find any advertising brochure advertising safaris to Kenya that shows you black people as clients.”

Ogada makes clear that he’s not opposed to tourism as such. He’s opposed to tourism as it takes place in Kenya. “Tourism should be a by-product of our conservation efforts,” he says. “It should not be the reason for our conservation efforts.”

Later in the conversation Ogada describes the process that happens when conservation and tourism are linked. He uses the example of a small farmer with a herd of sheep. “It’s a self-fulfilling thing. Once you set aside the land for tourism, then there’ll be no place to graze that herd of sheep. And that herd of sheep will be called unsustainable. He will have a hard time keeping them healthy and keeping them alive, and maintaining their quality. Then that sort of fulfils the belief system that is being propagated here.”

And Ogada has a proposal. “The best thing that can be done, and what needs to be done is that people who live and share their habitats, their rangelands etc, with wildlife, they need to be left alone. This is what conservation interests are unable or unwilling to do. Because it’s not about conserving wildlife. This is business. This is about securing those lands and removing people from those lands and selling it for carbon credits, it’s about keeping those lands, putting it in your reports and getting grants for it. So it’s basically a business that actually makes heavy profits without producing or selling anything. No part of that business works as long as these people are occupying their lands which are their birthright. They must be removed for any part of this business to work. And that’s why they are being removed.”

The Big Conservation Lie

Corry talks about the information available, and the propaganda machine that generates information, about conservation in Africa.

“I think it’s important to remember that to achieve this measure of propaganda that’s been pumped out by the conservationists and people like BBC Wildlife and so forth, for generations now, does not need any kind of conspiracy in the sense that you don’t need people meeting in a dark room with clouds of smoke and working out how they are going to fool the public, because what you have is a concordance of ideology. You have a lot of people who believe exactly the same thing. They believe that Africans cannot look after their environment. They believe that you need the old colonial nations and their people to take proper care of it. They believe that what they are doing is ultimately good because it supposedly helps conserve some of these bigger animals, the key animals that people want to see, and that the same people actually want to work with and do studies on, and so forth.

“So this propaganda machine is a natural product of a certain kind of ideology which views nature, particularly so-called exotic nature, what’s exotic to an American or a European, African nature, or South American, or Asian, which views it as something which is the heritage of the world, by which they primarily mean themselves. Rather than something which is actually a product of local people’s good environmental management and conservation practices going back, in many cases, thousands of years.

“So undoing this ideology is a really steep hill to climb because we’re dealing with people who are totally convinced not only that they are right and that their ideology is the right one, but that they are actually doing the world an enormous service and that if some Africans have to suffer, not being able to graze their animals or hunt for their own food in a particular area, that’s just a price which has to be paid and we all have to realise that. So it’s a very dangerous, essentially colonial supremacist ideologist which has become so widespread that people challenging it, like Dr. Ogada, finds an enormous pushback from the propaganda machine.”
[ . . . ]
This kind of thinking has to be changed. The question is how do we go about changing it, when it is so prevalent and so monstrous. The lie is so big that to challenge it appears to most people to be completely crazy. That’s the scale of the problem we face. On the other hand, it is beginning to be challenged, successfully. Dr. Ogada has a very good book out on it. We should be constantly pushing that alternative narrative.

Ogada’s 2017 book, “The Big Conservation Lie”, was co-written with John Mbaria. I reviewed it on Conservation Watch:

Corry notes that there are similarities with conservation approaches in Africa and in Asia with people being evicted to make way for protected areas. He also talks about some of the earliest so-called protected areas, the English royal hunting forests, where only the elite was allowed to hunt. “If the people who had actually lived there for generations were caught hunting they would be severely punished.”

The fallacy of “pristine nature”

Ogada talks about the fallacy of “pristine nature” that does not include human beings. “That is the strange thing that is being sought through protected areas. It’s a place that has no human footprint. And that is a mythical, non-existent place. It doesn’t exist. I mean science itself says the rangelands of Kenya are the cradle of mankind. And suddenly in 2022, humans are a problem in Kenya. Suddenly we are not part of nature, and we’ve been here for maybe 1.2 million years.”

Decker points out that creating protected areas alters landscapes. Corry responds by saying that, “These are as you say managed landscapes and have been for a very, very long time. And that fact isn’t recognised. And by far and away the best protectors, the best policemen, are the people who are already there. They know what’s going on. They understand the landscape in a way which outsiders don’t and they can far better judge what threats it faces that anybody else. And it is a total inversion, the attempt to remove them and ignore their expertise is a complete inversion of what should be happening if people really wanted these areas protected. That’s the scale of this lie, it is such a monumental lie, it’s almost unbelievable how this has been pushed around and taken such a hold because it is from top to bottom almost exactly the reverse of what should be happening. A disaster is in the process of being created and the idea that this is actually going to get worse and that the number of protected areas is going to be doubled and their size increased will be the most monumental environmental disaster and has to be stopped.”

Decker asks what justification the international conservation organisations give for continuing fortress conservation. “Surely they must know that they are committing crimes?” he asks.

“I think, from having come across some of these people,” Corry replies, “and have had private conversations and public conversations, one has to realise they don’t actually believe a lot of what they say.”

“When they talk about inclusive conservation and community conservation, they themselves don’t believe it. These are things they’ve been forced into saying by people like Mordecai who’ve been exposing the problems.

“I think that broadly speaking they do believe that that is a necessary price to pay. They believe that there is somehow a greater good and that they are the people representing it.

“If you look at it in the wider historical context, the history of colonialism, and the history of white supremacism, it’s not that surprising any of this. It comes from the same pattern. It’s a denigration of people, not only people’s expertise, but the people themselves because they are seen as being poor and backward, or formerly savage, and non-Christian, or whatever they liked to call them. In order to maintain this lie, there has to be the idea that there’s an elite group of people who know and a very large group of generally local people who don’t know, and can’t be trusted, and should be pushed off and pushed into some other way of life.”

30×30: “A bigger land grab than has ever been planned”

They discuss the IUCN Africa Protect Areas Congress which was to be held in Rwanda in March, but has been postponed to 18-23 July 2022.

While the official reason for the postponement is COVID-19, Ogada speculates whether the delay is because registration numbers were low and the organisers are “backing off from a number of debates they were not ready to have”.

Corry adds that, “Their plan is to double, literally double, the area of land throughout the world which is protected to increase it to one-third of the total surface of the globe. That is a monumental ambition. I think they thought they were getting the message out, but a battle for one-third of the globe’s surface is a bigger land grab than has ever previously been planned. So it’s a huge amount, we’re talking trillions of dollars at stake here. They do want to push this forward. Local push-back from the millions of people who will be deprived of their lands and resources will assure that this can never happen. Which is a very good thing, frankly. So I would like to think that Mordecai is right there, that doubt is being sown.”