The Invention of Green Colonialism. Guillaume BlancЧитать онлайн книгу.
story has revealed a world whose existence I did not even suspect. I thought that the African parks were harmonious natural spaces. Instead, I discovered whole areas undermined by violence.
I say ‘the African parks’ because the Simien is by no means an isolated case. There are around 350 national parks in Africa, and in most of them, local populations have been driven out in favour of either animals, forests or savannas. This is the case in 50% of parks in Benin, 40% of parks in Rwanda and 30% of parks in Tanzania and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the course of the twentieth century, at least a million people were driven out of protected zones in Africa.4 And in those parks which are still inhabited, agriculture, pastoralism and hunting are largely forbidden and punishable by fines or prison sentences. It is not therefore Ethiopia’s attitude to nature which constitutes an exception in the world, but rather the world’s attitude to nature in Africa. For over a century, under the influence of experts from the North, this coercive naturalization of specific areas has affected every single country within the continent.
These environmental policies were devised by Europeans during the period of colonization. And, since independence, they have been implemented by individual African states. The leaders of these states have sovereignty yet they systematically bow to any orders imposed by the international conservation institutions.5 Behind every incidence of social injustice imposed on those living in natural environments throughout Africa, the presence of UNESCO, the WWF, the IUCN or Flora & Fauna International (FFI) is never far away.
Such a claim is certainly surprising. Indeed, so powerfully does it go against what we have been led to believe that some people refuse even to contemplate it. It should therefore be made clear at once that this book does not set out to denigrate the environmental cause or to criticize the ecological battle. On the contrary, this work hopes to participate actively in these processes. If the worldwide destruction of biodiversity is to be avoided, it is imperative that we understand our mistakes.
As political scientist Luc Semal explains, African societies will be forced to face the collapse of their ecosystems just as is already the case in Europe, America and Asia. Specializing in environmental movements and a leading expert in animal extinctions,6 Semal highlights the weight of anxiety provoked by the now very real prospect of the ecological and human disasters which are threatening to erupt on a worldwide scale under the cumulative effects of global warming, dwindling resources and the disappearance of certain species of fauna and flora.7 Yet the expulsion of inhabitants from African national parks will in no circumstances provide a solution to any of these problems. Quite the contrary, any notion that confining nature within parks is a better way of protecting the planet is a delusion. And, by nourishing that delusion, international conservation policies constitute a kind of optical illusion which effectively hides the real problem: the massive and worldwide deterioration of ‘our’ everyday environment.
In order to save nature, international experts insist that African states must evict those living within the national parks. In concrete terms, they want them to prevent agro-pastoralists from eroding the strips of land they cultivate and from stripping bare the plateaux where they allow their cattle to graze. But the argument is a nonsense in the true sense of the word – it goes against reason. Accusing peasants, like those from Gich, of destroying nature fails to acknowledge that these people are in fact producing their own food. Like all those evicted from the African national parks, they move around essentially on foot. They eat very little meat and fish. They rarely buy new clothes. And, unlike two billion individuals, they own neither computers nor smartphones. In short, if we want to save the planet, we should live as they do. Yet UNESCO, the WWF and the IUCN nevertheless view their eviction as ethical and necessary, in other words just and justified. Why?
Green colonialism
As current events are beginning to demonstrate, the whole issue of worldwide ecology is influenced by the colonial past. In August 2019, for example, when French president Emmanuel Macron suggested that the fires burning in Amazonia should be placed under international control, Jair Bolsonaro was quick to condemn ‘a colonialist mentality’. ‘Macron […] wants to “save” Amazonia as though it were [still] a colony,’ wrote the Brazilian president on his Twitter account.8
At the same time, in the context of Africa, a controversy erupted in the United States after the release of the new film version of The Lion King. Millions of spectators flocked to rediscover the Disney characters, with voiceovers recorded by Afro-American artists – including the singer Beyoncé and the actor Donald Glover. The remake met with worldwide success but a number of intellectuals condemned what they saw as a ‘perfectly colonial’ film. According to them, The Lion King perpetuates the notion of an Africa which is more about nature than it is about human beings. In such a context, Africans would have no place in their own continent but would instead be intruders whose presence disturbed the equilibrium of a green planet.9
Nor did Asia escape such clichés. In October 2019, Le Monde devoted a special report to the rise of eco-fascism. The French daily turned its attention in particular to the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, carried out by an Australian extreme-right activist. A few minutes before killing fifty-one Muslims in two different mosques, Brenton Tarrant published a manifesto on social media networks: ‘[T]he environment is being destroyed by overpopulation, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not overpopulating the world.’ For all those who, like him, consider themselves eco-fascists, the message is clear: ‘Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.’10
Such extremists are not alone in believing they have been charged with a mission. According to other media sources, many international experts also suffer from a neo-Malthusian anxiety. They set themselves the task of saving nature in all the countries in the southern hemisphere before ecologically irresponsible local inhabitants end up destroying it.
In this respect, the written press in particular targets the WWF. In 2012, in PandaLeaks, the journalist Wilfried Huismann exposed the role played by the WWF in the forced expulsions of indigenous populations from national parks in Africa and Asia.11 In 2016, the association Survival International in turn launched an attack on the WWF, accusing it of financing the military campaigns of the Cameroon government against tribes living in the protected forests in the south of the country.12 Finally, both BuzzFeed News and Mediapart condemned what they refer to as ‘green colonialism’. In 2019, they claimed that the WWF was training and arming guards who then beat, raped and sometimes killed women and men accused of poaching. According to both these websites, such atrocities are the common lot of several national parks in India, Nepal, Gabon and the Congo – in short, in the former European colonies.13
The link between colonial geography and the current policies of an international institution like the WWF is glaringly obvious, even flagrant. But the situation is also more complex than it appears and the media struggle to furnish a clear explanation of what green colonialism really is. For that, we need to turn back to history.
The story began in North America, at the end of the nineteenth century. The United States and Canada created the first national parks in the world and, in each case, local people were evicted. The two countries (re)introduced supposedly authentic animal species, (re)planted supposedly original forests and (re)seeded supposedly natural plains. Then, once these tasks had been successfully accomplished, they turned their attention to making nature in its wild state – the wilderness – into a national symbol. In each national park, nature became the nation’s soul. It was described to the public as the authentic essence of the two societies, the original face of two countries which were shaped from the collective experience of a wild and uninhabited landscape, and not out of the violence of a colonial conquest.
At the beginning of the 1930s, this enthusiasm for national parks spread to Europe. European governments rarely expelled the inhabitants of their parks. Although they, too, were exploiting the concept of nature, their approach was different. Rather than creating a virgin and timeless wilderness, they chose to highlight the link between their nations and a nature which