Preservation or Erasure?

In 2010, 194 UN Member States set an aim to conserve at least 17% of land and 10% of marine areas by 2020 in a resolution known as Aichi Target 11 (Dickie, 2018). The resolution appears as a straightforward attempt to preserve the earth’s biodiversity in the face of climate change; yet, it has contributed to the plight of over 14 million people who have become “conservation refugees,” a great majority of whom are members of the world’s 5,000+ Fourth World Nations (Dowie, 2006). To understand the contradictory nature of this climate mitigation method, we must interrogate the flaws of what has been termed “fortress” or “coercive conservation.”

Coercive conservation refers to a phenomenon within which states or private interests “appropriate the conservation concerns of environmental groups to elicit support for their own control over productive natural resources” (Peluso, 2015), thus legitimizing intimidation and violence toward inhabitants of a targeted area. While conservationism rose to prominence as a global enterprise in the 1970s and 1980s, the ideological underpinnings of the fortress conservation model derive from the early colonial era (Marvier, 2012). Specifically, the settler-colonial principle of purity, which characterizes Indigenous-inhabited lands as vacant, wild, and untouched. The erasure of Indigenous presence served (and continues to serve) as a means to justify the violent genocide and forced removal of Native peoples toward the benefit of foreign settlers. This philosophy was both culturally reinforced and legally codified among European powers beginning in the 15th century. The infamous Doctrine of Discovery (DoD), issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, put forth the notion of terra nullius, by which land that had not yet been settled by Christians was considered empty by law (Assembly of First Nations, 2018). In this vein, the creation of Yellowstone Park in 1872 is often cited as the first key model of fortress conservation, an area from which 26 Indigenous Groups were forcibly expelled to ensure the preservation of its “virgin” landscape (Sapignoli & Hitchcock, 2023). The colonial logic of the DoD extends to contemporary environmental policies across the globe which prioritize the preservation of “untouched” wilderness over the development of sustainable species interactions. The practice of coercive conservation reifies this doctrine, severing the kinship ties that bond human and nonhuman life.

Coercive conservation impacts Indigenous populations around the globe, chiefly those in the Global South. One such community is the Batwa people who have faced continued expulsion from their ancestral homelands in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which have been converted into Kahuzi-Biega National Park. The park, known for gorilla tourism, has become a site of targeted violence against the Indigenous Batwa people, increasingly in 2019 after the community began rebuilding settlements in the area (Flummerfelt, 2022). Since, government-sponsored dispossession has led to mass poverty, organized violence, and the loss of cultural practices. The DRC’s Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) has become a paramilitary apparatus composed of “ecoguards” responsible for repeated acts of violence against the remaining Batwa population, whom they aim to “purge by force.” Investigative journalist Robert Flummerfelt writes, “These attacks were not isolated instances of violence carried out on the initiative of individual park guards; they were part of an institutional policy sanctioned and planned at the highest level by the park leadership.” These forms of surveillance, punishment, and abuse are baked into the fortress model. As scholars like Ruthie Wilson Gilmore emphasize, land-grabbing practices are one of the many global manifestations of carcerality (Hayes, 2022). The ongoing detention of Batwa protesters serves as a reminder that the struggles for abolition and environmental justice are twin forces in the fight against global systems of domination.

While the DRC’s government must be made culpable for these grave injustices, the issue of coercive conservation extends throughout the world-system due to the influence of international governing bodies, foreign donors, and NGOs, who dictate sustainability policy. As such, the practice of coercive conservation caters to the needs of first-world tourists. According to Kahuzi-Biega National Park’s webpage, visitors come to bask blissfully in the park’s undisturbed natural biodiversity and wildlife. Thus, green rhetoric is purposefully employed to obscure ongoing human rights violations, ensuring profits for the DRC state and its proxies. One of the park’s primary donors, the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, advertises its mission as “assist[ing] governments and communities to protect the natural systems critical to saving wildlife” (Wildlife Conservation Society, 2025). Green rhetoric is hereby weaponized to absolve authorities of their humanitarian responsibilities on the basis of environmental protection. Similar language is also used to disguise financial incentives; for example, at Kahuzi-Biega National Park, tourists can pay $50 to camp and $400 to trek in search of the endangered eastern lowland gorilla among other amenities, all offered in U.S. currency (Kahuzi Biega). The practice of offering commodities in U.S. dollars or other foreign currency is not uncommon in cases of climate colonialism. As Nancy Lee Peluso wrote in 1993, “Conservation groups augment the financial and physical capacities of Third World states or state agencies to protect resources with ‘global’ value.” Therefore, while coercive practices may offer short-term benefits to the ruling classes in the Global South, they reinforce international economic systems that ensure Southern countries remain financially dependent on the Global North.

Despite the dangers posed by climate colonialism, Fourth World nations remain resilient in the fight for a just future. In July, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled in favor of the Batwa people, specifically recognizing the inadequacy of coercive conservation methods (Minority Rights Group, 2024). Groups like the Nagarahole Adivasis in India (Doley, 2023), the Dukha ethnic group in Mongolia (Gauthier & Pravettoni, 2016), and the Wounaan tribe in Panama (The Rainforest Foundation), continue to actively fight conservationist encroachment on their ancestral homelands. Indigenous leaders worldwide are also pioneering solutions like community forest management, participatory mapping, and cross-cultural policymaking that provide alternatives to the fortress conservation model (Yeung, 2023). These efforts underscore the reality that coercive conservation and its consequences are not yet fait accompli.

References:

Assembly of First Nations (2018, January). Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. https://www.afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/18-01-22-Dismantling-the-Doctrine-of-Discovery-EN.pdf

Dickie, G. (2018, February 22). Aichi or Bust: Is the World on Target to Protect Its Most Threatened Ecosystems? The Revelator. https://therevelator.org/aichi-protect-ecosystems/

Doley, P. (2023, March 22). ‘Whose Forest?’: Why Indigenous People from Tiger Reserves Across India Gathered at Nagarahole. The Wire. https://thewire.in/rights/nagarhole-indigenous-forest-adivasi-rights

Dowie, M. (2006, January 25). Conservation Refugees: When Conservation Means Kicking People Out. Grain. https://grain.org/en/article/545-conservation-refugees-when-conservation-means-kicking-people-out

Flummerfelt, R. (2022). To Purge the Forest by Force: Organized Violence Against Batwa in Kahuzi-Biega National Park. Minority Rights Group. https://minorityrights.org/resources/to-purge-the-forest-by-force-organized-violence-against-batwa-in-kahuzi-biega-national-park/

Gauthier, M. & Pravettoni, R. (2016, August 28). ‘We Have Nothing but Our Reindeer’: Conservation Threatens Ruination for Mongolia’s Dukha. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/28/reindeer-conservation-threatens-ruination-mongolia-dukha

Hayes, K. (2022, April 14). Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done. Truthout.

Kahuzi Biega National Park. (n.d.). Chimpanzee Habitation at Lwiro Sanctuary. https://www.kahuzibieganationalparkcongo.org/lwiro-chimpanzee-sanctuary-congo/

Marvier, M. (2012, February 1). Conservation in the Anthropocene. The Breakthrough Institute. https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene

Minority Rights Group. (2024, June 29). DRC: Respecting Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Ruled Key in Fighting Climate Crisis. https://minorityrights.org/batwa-ruling/#:~:text=done%20to%20us.-,’,fighting%20climate%20change%20in%20Africa.

Peluso, N.L. (1993). Coercing Conservation?: The Politics of State Resource Control. Global Environmental Change, 3 (2), 199-217).

Peluso, N.L. (2015). Coercing Conservation. In Conga, K. & Dabelko, G.D. (Eds.) Green Planet Blues. Routledge.

Sapignoli, M., Hitchcock, R. (2023). Fortress Conservation: Removals of Indigenous People from Protected Areas in the United States. In Chacon, R.J. (Ed.) People, Parks, and Power (pp.15–29). Springer.

The Rainforest Foundation. (n.d.). Direct Action Tips the Scales in Panama.

Wildlife Conservation Society. (2025). Our Work.

Yeung, P. (2023, December 4). The Park Where Conservation and Indigenous Rights Go Hand in Hand. Reasons to Be Cheerful. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/peru-indigenous-rights-conservation-cordillera-azul/