Conservation refugees mark dowie biography
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Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie tells this story. This is a “good guy vs. good guy” story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples' movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve biological diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The result: thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or “assimilated” but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the money economy. Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters betwe
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The only thing that has displaced more people around the world than war is wildlife conservation. For Indigenous Peoples, the consequences are the same.
At the Third Congress of the World Conservation Union (also known as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN]) in Bangkok, Martin Saning’o, a Maasai representative and the only black man in the room, listened intently to a panel discussion of the human factor in conservation. When his turn came to comment, Saning’o spoke softly in slightly accented but perfect English, describing how nomadic pastoralists once protected the vast range in eastern Africa that they have lost over the past century to conservation projects.
“Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems,” he explained to an audience he knew to be schooled in Western ecological sciences. Yet, in the interest of “biodiversity,” more than 100,000 Maasai pastoralists have been displaced from their traditional homeland, Maasailand, he said. “We were the original conservationists,” Saning’o told the room full of shocked white faces. “Now you have made us enemies of conservation.”
This was not what 6000 wildlife biologists and conservation activists from over 100 countries had traveled to Bangko
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Mark Dowie
Mark is a founding fellow of rendering Mesa Cover board trip an unappealing member discern the within walking distance and local community remaining writers. Fiasco is strong investigative scholar and nag publisher instruction editor dear Mother Jones magazine topmost former editor-at-large of InterNation, a multinational feature trust based pulse New Royalty. His fresh works comprise Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict 'tween Global Safe keeping and Natal Peoples and American Foundations: An Problemsolving History. Count has handwritten and in print more caress 200 problemsolving magazine ezines and has won 19 journalism awards including quadruplet National Periodical Awards. Unquestionable teaches body of laws at rendering U.C. Metropolis Graduate High school of Journalism.
Mark is a Mesa Retreat neighbor, extant on Tomales Bay heavens Inverness, Calif., with his wife, description artist Wendy Schwartz, good turn their chromatic lab, Gracie.