A challenge to conservationists.

• Author: Chapin, Mac
• Position: Conservation organizations

As corporate and government money flow into the three big international organizations that dominate the world's conservation agenda, their programs have been marked by growing conflicts of interest--and by a disturbing neglect of the indigenous peoples whose land they are in business to protect.

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A WAKE-UP CALL

In June 2003, representatives of major foundations concerned with the planet's threatened biodiversity (a) gathered in South Dakota for a meeting of the Consultative Group on Biodiversity. On the second evening, after dinner, several of the attendees met to discuss a problem about which they had become increasingly disturbed. In recent years, their foundations had given millions of dollars of support to nonprofit conservation organizations, and had even helped some of those groups get launched. Now, however, there were indications that three of the largest of these organizations--World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC)--were increasingly excluding, from full involvement in their programs, the indigenous and traditional peoples living in territories the conservationists were trying to protect. (b) In some cases, there were complaints that the conservationists were being abusive.

The meeting led to a series of soul-searching discussions, led by Jeff Campbell of the Ford Foundation, who initiated two studies--one to assess what was really happening between the indigenous communities and conservationists, and the other to look into the financial situation of each of these three big groups.

The work plan (or "terms of reference") given to the investigators contained two key observations about the three conservation giants: they had become extremely large and wealthy in a short period of time; and they were promoting global approaches to conservation "that have evoked a number of questions--and complaints--from local communities, national NGOs and human rights activists."

Because the two studies provided only a quick first foray into terrain that is undeniably complex, geographically extensive, and diverse (WWF, for example, works in more than 90 countries around the world), they were understood to be just rough sketches that could help orient discussions among the concerned foundations. The findings were not intended--initially, at least--for publication.

There were many people working either in the field (as I was) or in the foundations sponsoring field projects in biodiversity and cultural diversity, who wanted to see these findings aired. As an anthropologist who had been working with indigenous peoples for more than 35 years (most recently as director of the Center for Native Lands), I was acutely familiar--and increasingly uneasy--with the conditions that had precipitated the two Ford investigations.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Complaints had been building for more than a decade, and they paralleled the extraordinary growth of the major conservation organizations. WWF, for example, was founded in 1961 with a small office in Switzerland. Its program was limited to coordination and fundraising activities for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which implemented programs in the field. WWF grew slowly over the ensuing years, spawning country and regional offices in various countries of the industrial north. Third World countries weren't included until later. During the first two decades, despite its expansion, the WWF family remained small. In the late 1970s, for example, the U.S. branch of WWF fit on one floor of a relatively small building on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., staffed by 25 people. In the early 1980s, it began to grow rapidly--and today fills up four floors of a luxurious building nearby. Worldwide, the U.S. and international branches of WWF now employ close to 4,000 people.

The Nature Conservancy started up in the mid-1940s, when a small group of scientists joined forces to save natural areas in the United States. In 1965 TNC used a grant from the Ford Foundation to pay the salary of its first full-time president. In the 1970s, it grew to cover all 50 states and expanded into Latin America. Fueled by fresh injections of bilateral and multilateral money, as well as corporate support, it began a vertiginous growth spurt in the 1990s--and spread into new regions of the globe; yet the bulk of TNC's work is carried out domestically. It is now the largest conservation organization in the world, with assets in excess of $3 billion.

Conservation International began in dramatic fashion in 1986. During the previous several years, TNC's international program had grown rapidly, and tension with its other programs had mounted. When TNC's central management tried to rein it in, virtually the entire international staff bolted and transformed itself into CI. From the start, the new organization was well equipped with staff, contacts, and money it had assembled beforehand. In 1989, it brought in yet another group of defectors--this time from WWF--and began expanding with the help of an aggressive fundraising machine that has become the envy of all of its competitors. However, a substantial portion of its funding comes from just four organizations: the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the World Bank, and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). TNC and WWF, in contrast, have far more diverse funding bases.

Discussion of "natural" alliances between conservationists and indigenous peoples and the need to work closely with local communities, common just a few years ago, has largely disappeared. It has been displaced, in the biggest conservationist NGOs, by talk of changed priorities, with a new focus on large-scale conservation strategies and the importance of science, rather than social realities, in determining their agendas. At the same time, there has been an undercurrent of talk about how "difficult" indigenous peoples can be, how hard they are to work with, and, in places such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Chiapas region of Mexico, how some have moved in the direction of civil disruption and even violence. Then there have been cautions from various quarters of the conservation movement that indigenous peoples are not--contrary to what many of them have been advertising--suitable allies because they, like most other people, are not even good conservationists, sometimes choosing their economic wellbeing over preservation of natural resources. Examples of the Kayapo in Brazil logging their forests and Mayans slashing and burning the forests of the Peten of Guatemala are often trotted out as examples of the destructive tendencies of indigenous peoples.

Indigenous peoples, on whose land the three conservation groups have launched a plethora of programs, have for their part become increasingly hostile. One of their primary disagreements is over the establishment of protected natural areas, which, according to the human inhabitants of those areas, often infringe on their rights. Sometimes the indigenous people are evicted, and the conservationists frequently seem to be behind the evictions. On other occasions, traditional uses of the land have been declared "illegal," resulting in prosecution of the inhabitants by government authorities. Coupled to all of this has been the partnering of conservationist organizations with multinational corporations--particularly in the businesses of gas and oil, pharmaceuticals, and mining--that are directly involved in pillaging and destroying forest areas owned by indigenous peoples.

How did relations deteriorate so rapidly and so drastically? In the 1970s and through much of the 1980s, conservationists and indigenous peoples had little to do with each other. In Latin America, for example, the large conservation NGOs tended to work through urban-based local groups and there was little awareness of who the indigenous peoples in the various countries were. By the mid-1980s, however, the wall was breached within WWF by a program called Wildlands and Human Needs, a community-based conservation effort, with financing from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This was seen as something of a distraction by many within WWF, who were mainly biologists lacking experience working with communities. They viewed the new program as an unwanted diversion from strict conservation, which they saw as their mission. It was seen as an imposition by USAID, which was pushing for a more grassroots approach.

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In 1989, the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) made an appeal directly to "the community of concerned environmentalists" at the international level, proposing that they form an alliance "in defense of our Amazonian homeland." (1) COICA's call for collaborative action came at a time when the Amazonian ecosystem was being threatened as never before by heavily funded and ill-conceived development and colonization projects, cattle ranching, and unregulated logging and mining operations. The appeal noted that the conservationists "have left us, the Indigenous Peoples, out of your vision of the Amazonian Biosphere." That omission, they claimed, was the primary reason the conservationists' programs were ineffectual.

COICA's appeal presented Two Agendas--one for conservationists, the other for the multilateral banks. It included this declaration:

We, the Indigenous Peoples, have been an integral part of the Amazon Biosphere for millennia. We have used and cared for the resources of that biosphere with a great deal of respect, because it is our home, and because we know that our survival and that of our future generations depends on it. Our accumulated knowledge about the ecology of our home, our models for living with the peculiarities of the Amazon Biosphere, our reverence and respect for the tropical forest and its other inhabitants, both plant and animal, are the keys to guaranteeing the future of the...