Expelled from Paradise

The video Conservation Refugees looks at the practice of expelling indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands to make national parks devoid of humans. Begun in the United States in locations like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Olympic and Grand Canyon, removing peoples close to nature has not only created refugees of once prosperous cultures living in harmony with nature, but perhaps inadvertently made the wildlife and forests more vulnerable to commercial interests. Without their traditional guardians, powerful political families have usurped their role without the benefit of indigenous knowledge or limits of symbiotic social mores. In Central Africa, the Batwa forest dwellers have in one generation gone from a paradise of plenty to the lowest of outcasts in urban slums.