From The Rainforest Foundation UK.

• Author: Counsell, Simon
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

Mac Chapin raises some very important points in his article "A Challenge to Conservationists."

Our own experience as an organization that has worked for the last 15 years to help indigenous communities throughout the tropics to secure their territories and protect their environment has been that ill-considered strict conservation projects are increasingly undermining the efforts of indigenous peoples. Indeed, many delegates to a recent international conference of indigenous representatives stated that the activities of conservation organizations are now the single largest threat to the integrity of their lands.

Some conservation organizations adopted more progressive policies towards indigenous peoples during the 1990s and early 2000s. However, these seem to have been, at best, only patchily applied on the ground or, at worst, simply abandoned altogether. For example, a recent survey estimated that some 54,000 indigenous people have...