From American and Bolivian colleagues in the field.

• Author: Alcorn, J.
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

We are writing a response to the provocative article "A Challenge to Conservationists," by Mac Chapin. We have each been involved in the field for over 30 years; one of us is an American currently working for The Garfield Foundation and Field Museum, previously with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and USAID, and expert consultant to the Global Environmental Facility, with experience in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The other is a Bolivian who has worked on projects bridging indigenous and nonindigenous peoples, consulted for various international organizations, and founded several NGOs. We are writing this letter as concerned professionals, and are not representing the views of any organization. We believe the article raises global issues that merit careful, public discussion. We hope that the discussion of the key issues in the article will not be lost in the controversy over the details about particular individuals or institutions. There are many examples of conservation organizations working well with indigenous communities, but it is good practice to reflect on serious issues and failures in honest and constructive ways.

Why are these issues so important? Indigenous peoples' territories overlap with the remaining high biodiversity areas of the world. Indigenous communities and their remote territories are under tremendous threats from many quarters--including, at times, from those promoting conservation. Mac Chapin sketches some of the serious conflicts, raising issues from human rights violations to failures to conserve biodiversity. These are not new issues; since the 1970s a handful of concerned conservationists has written and talked about these failures from insiders' perspectives, and offered solutions. Global forums have brought donors, conservation organizations, and indigenous organizational representatives together to seek solutions to this problem, and analyses have documented the problem. But the pattern has continued, probably due to inertia against major organizational changes and internal organizational politics. In different regions of the world, the specifics and scale of the violations vary according to the ways that international conservation organizations have engaged with, and/or tacitly supported, national governments and international corporations to ignore or run roughshod over indigenous rights. Organizations' development departments use photographs of indigenous people to sell "success" and raise funds, yet they are...