More responses to "A Challenge to Conservationists".

• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

Editor's Note: Following are several additional responses to "A Challenge to Conservationists" (November/December 2004), by Mac Chapin. A number of other letters, which we do not have space to print, can be seen on our website at www.worldwatch.org/ww/chapinletters/. The three NGOs discussed in the article--Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)--all responded to Dr. Chapin's points in letters that appeared in the January/February issue of World Watch. (The first letter below, from a Nature Conservancy program director, was inadvertently omitted from the initial batch of responses.) In addition, all three have posted lengthier comments on their websites, at www.conservation.org/ex/CIWEB/wwresponse, www.nature.org, and http://panda.org/people/worldwatch, respectively.

Mac Chapin's article raises a number of critical issues for conservation, and I am very happy to take up the challenge to conservationists explicit in his title. A few preliminary points. First, Chapin is to be congratulated for flushing this important topic into the open, where it can be addressed in a transparent manner. Second, it would be idle to deny that there are frequently tensions between conservation organizations and indigenous peoples, and these too should be out in the open where we can study, discuss, and learn from them. Third, it is a matter of record that Chapin and the Native Lands NGO he heads have a distinguished record in promoting conservation in indigenous lands in Central America and elsewhere. I should say that although I do not know Chapin personally, his work in ethnocartography has been a direct practical and intellectual inspiration for The Nature Conservancy's Amazon program, as we struggle to support indigenous peoples and their organizations in their efforts to map and plan natural resource management on their land. I regard him as a natural ally.

It was all the more painful, therefore, to read his article, an incomplete, naive, and overstated caricature of a complex reality. I do not intend to write a rebuttal as such, if only because I agree with his central point: conservation and sustainable development on indigenous lands should be more central to the work of the major international conservation organizations than it is. But the readers of his article deserve an alternative perspective on the issues he raises, painted in the grays of the real world rather than the black and white of Chapin's polemic.

I take three issues to be central to Chapin's critique. First, he is worried that the rapid growth of large international conservation organizations, allied to a biology-driven process of setting priorities, has led them to distance themselves from community conservation, especially in indigenous areas, and focus their energy on competition for resources from funders instead. Secondly, he believes this process has been reinforced by the moral compromises attendant upon their seeking governmental, corporate, and multilateral funding, which reduces their ability and desire to defend human rights, especially land rights. Finally, he has a specific concern that indigenous peoples and indigenous priorities are being excluded from "conservation" as practiced by the large conservation organizations. I will deal with each in turn.

First, the alleged distancing from community conservation. The large international conservation organizations about which Chapin writes are complex transnationals which are not monolithic and do not speak with one voice. They market themselves and their work, as does [Chapin's NGO] Native Lands. They compete for funds. Many people within them like competing for funds. I think there should be a marketplace for ideas. Competition for funding is not a bad thing in itself, nor is it somehow inimical to community conservation; the sharper the competition, the better the conceptual quality of the proposal. Competition for funding has a number of important benefits. It forces conservation organizations to distinguish between themselves and develop alternative approaches. I find Chapin's worries about large international conservation organizations dividing up the globe between them perplexing. The environmental threats we face are enormous and operate over extensive geographies. It makes sense for conservation organizations to separate themselves into different geographical areas, not to avoid conflict, as Chapin suggests, but to ensure there is no duplication of effort. I consciously avoid involving TNC's Amazon program in an area where CI, WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), or WWF are active. In a context where vast areas (including large numbers of indigenous groups) receive no external support, there seems little justification for two organizations to be active in the same place.

It is indeed the case that the large international conservation organizations use biology to set their geographical priorities. Ecoregions, hotspots, whatever; frankly, as an anthropologist, I find the detail a little arcane. There is indeed tension, even acrimonious technical debate, fully referenced in Chapin's article, between anthropologists defending the conservation utility of indigenous lands and biologists taking a different position. But this debate is, literally, academic. Well over 20 percent of the Amazon basin is now titled indigenous land; almost equally important swathes of other biodiversity-rich landscapes belong to indigenous peoples. In the Brazilian Amazon alone the indigenous reserve system is larger than the combined land area of California, Texas, and Florida. The very biology-driven priority-setting exercises which make Chapin nervous point to the importance of areas titled to indigenous peoples, as the most cursory glance at the maps of geographical priorities produced by CI, WCS, WWF, and TNC shows. At least in the Amazon, having a conservation program that does not deal with indigenous peoples and indigenous movements is like having a foreign policy that ignores China. Biology reinforces this argument rather than weakens it, and WCS and TNC especially have moved far and fast on this over the several years since the references Chapin cites were published.

A large part of the problem here is a disjunct between Washington, where the senior managers and marketing departments of the major conservation organizations are located, and the field. Chapin talks of this disjunct and cites a number of field programs as models of effective community involvement, including some run by TNC and WCS. But he alleges these programs are atypical and unrepresentative of the crypto-corporate values prevailing in these same organizations in Washington, where he makes vague, unsourced allegations of "drift" from support for indigenous peoples and community conservation in general.

It is a shame that none of the managers and program staff from conservation organizations actually doing the work most relevant to Chapin's concerns participated in the various...