The Story We’ve Been Told
Conservation is essential to reducing the looming threat of climate change.
Since the dawn of the modern environmental movement in the early 1900s, land conservation has been viewed as fundamental to environmental stewardship. Often cited as “America’s best idea,” land conservation in the form of national parks, forests, game refugees, and other public or quasi-public lands has been a highly popular policy position regardless of party affiliation. More recently, land conservation has been proposed as a key strategy to sequestering carbon in the soil and combating climate change. The Paris Agreement’s climate models assume a significant amount of negative emissions in the form of afforestation.
Conservation campaigns highlight the sacredness of biodiversity, nature and preservation, but they often ignore the history of displacement, racism and extinction.
The True Story
Conservation is Racist, Violent, Commodifying, and Unjust
There are numerous injustices brought about by land conservation that are often ignored by the broader environmental movement.
Foremost, land conservation has a dark and racist past. Famous figures who were highly vocal in the early days of land conservation, such as Madison Grant and President Theodore Roosevelt, were also avowed eugenists who were highly concerned with the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. Even John Muir, the “Father of the National Parks,” described Indigenous Peoples as “dirty and irregular” as well as “dead or civilized into useless innocence.” These white supremacists saw land conservation less through the lens of deep ecology or ecosystem services, and more through a colonial lens of acquiring land so that it could be managed by wealthy, white men for their seasonal leisure away from the poverty of urban centers.
“The settler...sees himself as holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species.”
Conservation was complicit in the colonization of unceded indigenous lands and, therefore, the national parks are fundamentally on stolen lands. Further, in the words of environmental historian Karl Jacoby stated, “Conservation is basically trying to say that ‘We the state and the state bureaucracies, have the appropriate knowledge to manage the environment in the best way,’ rather than indigenous peoples and other prior inhabitants.”
Although private ownership of land has existed in western societies for centuries, the commodification of conserved land is a recent phenomenon. The “fight” against climate change has accelerated the capitalist’s purchasing of land under the disguise of saving the world. The emergence of carbon offsets over the past decade has created a huge market for forest land conservation and, as a result, placed a specific and, often, inequitable price tag on the value of conserved land. This price tag is normally only tied to the value of carbon sequestration and ignores the broader social and ethical impacts of conservation, such as evicting indigenous peoples from their lands. In fact, as assessed by Edward Parson, the Paris Agreement models’ assumptions for carbon sequestration would require 300-1,000 M Ha of afforestation by 2100, which is about one to three times the area of India. A carbon reduction strategy of conservation contingent upon evicting hundreds of millions of people from their native lands will lead to massive injustices on global and historical scales.
Public Land Theft
This project seeks to deconstruct the notion that conservation﹣in its current, commodified, and racist form﹣is essential to reducing the looming threat of climate change.
Conservation is a microcosm of the structures that have caused climate change. Through the visual portfolio displayed in the six topics below, this site will bring light to a path of reconciliation and justice that is required to move forward in the work of climate activism.
As climbing bolts become permanent fixtures in the boulders of National Parks and trail blazes clear the path for packs of hikers, the outdoorsman displays their conquering of, both, nature and the inhabitants (human and non-human species alike) of these lands. This project does not intend to discourage people to interact and experience the outdoors, but hopes to encourage outdoor enthusiasts to question their engagement with conserved lands.
