Conservation Through Cultural Survival

Indigenous Peoples And Protected Areas

Stanley Stevens

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559634496
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610912563
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

For more than a century the establishment of national parks and protected areas was a major threat to the survival of indigenous people. The creation of parks based on wilderness ideals outlawed traditional ways of life and forced from their homelands peoples who had shaped and preserved local ecosystems for centuries.

Today such tragic conflicts are being superseded by new alliances for conservation. Conservation Through Cultural Survival assesses cutting-edge efforts to establish new kinds of parks and protected areas which are based on partnerships with indigenous peoples. It chronicles new conservation thinking and the establishment around the world of indigenously inhabited protected areas, provides detailed case studies of the most important types of co-managed and indigenously managed areas, and offers guidelines, models, and recommendations for international action. The book:

• discusses the goals and development of the global protected area system
• assesses the strengths and limitations of a range of different types of indigenously inhabited protected areas
• discusses key issues and indigenous peoples' concerns
• recommends measures to promote conservation
• suggests international actions that would promote co-managed and indigenously managed areas

Contributors who have been actively involved in projects around the world provide in-depth accounts from Nepal, Australia, New Guinea, Nicaragua, Honduras, Canada, and Alaska of some of the most promising efforts to develop protected areas where indigenous peoples maintain their rights to settlement and subsistence and participate in management.

Conservation Through Cultural Survival will be required reading for environmentalists, protected area planners and managers, and all who care about the future of indigenous peoples and their homelands.

PART 1

PROTECTED AREAS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Indigenous peoples created the world’s first protected areas centuries ago. Their sacred places—sacred forests and mountains, sacred springs, rivers, lakes, caves, and countless other hallowed sites and areas—were regions removed from everyday access and resource use, the abodes of nature spirits and powers with which people communed but did not interfere. Traditions of honoring and respecting such sacred ground may well go back millennia. On a larger scale, entire indigenous homelands could be considered to be the equivalent of what we now call national parks and protected areas, territories whose forests, grasslands, and other habitats, and the wildlife within them, have been used, managed, and conserved in accordance with cultural knowledge and values, customary systems of tenure, and local resource management institutions.

Indigenous territory today, as in the past, often contrasts sharply with surrounding lands. Vast areas inhabited and controlled by indigenous peoples today are little different at heart from the national parks and monuments, conservation areas, biosphere reserves, protected landscapes, and other managed areas that constitute the roster of nearly ten thousand protected areas identified globally by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN, the World Conservation Union). This is due in part to the effectiveness of conservation practices that have enabled communities to sustain themselves and the resources and biodiversity on which they have relied for generations. Local knowledge, practices, values, beliefs, institutions, and efforts often provide a better foundation for protected area management than plans devised and administered solely by outsiders.

The Western tradition of national parks and protected areas is a recent invention, and one that has had profound implications for indigenous peoples as well as for the preservation of wildness, biodiversity, valued cultural landscapes, spectacular scenery, and places of physical and spiritual renewal. The chapters of part 1 trace the changing relationship between indigenous peoples and protected areas over the past century and a quarter. In chapter 1, I examine the development of the current conception of protected areas and the significance for indigenous peoples and conservation of changing ideas about protected areas and wilderness, discuss indigenous peoples and their importance for conservation and global biodiversity, and review the tragic impacts of the implementation of early, Yellowstone-model uninhabited national parks. In chapter 2, I survey how new international thinking and initiatives have led to an increasing number of protected areas around the world that respect indigenous peoples’ settlement and subsistence.

Part 1 concludes with two case studies that highlight the challenges of creating these new kinds of protected areas. In chapter 3, I examine in detail the achievements and failures of one of the earliest, cutting-edge efforts to create a new kind of protected area in consultation and partnership with an indigenous people. Twenty years of experience in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park in Nepal, the homeland of the Sherpas, highlight the difficulties of achieving this despite a series of state-of-the-art innovations since 1976 in national park design and management that were intended to safeguard Sherpa land use, support community involvement in natural resource management, and maintain a high level of consultation and local participation in national park operations. Sagarmatha is an important example of how difficult it can be to maintain local involvement in a protected area, of how communication and trust can break down, and of how indigenous people can come to feel that a protected area violates their sovereignty and self-determination and robs them of their lands, natural resources, authority, and initiative.

In chapter 4, Peter H. Herlihy discusses the urgency and obstacles to protecting the rich tropical rain forests of the Mosquitia Corridor of Honduras and recognizing the land rights and self-determination of the four indigenous peoples who inhabit the region. He describes the different approaches taken in establishing the Rio Plátano and Tawahkan Asangni Biosphere Reserves and plans for their incorporation in a larger regional system of protected areas. While testifying to increasing national and international concern over the destruction of the rain forests, respect for indigenous residents’ land use, and the defense of their territories against encroachment by agricultural colonists, Herlihy’s account also calls attention to the complex negotiation over land and authority that underlies protected area management. Honduras offers an all too common example of the considerable challenges to effective conservation partnerships between indigenous peoples and protected area authorities in countries where legal, political, and financial support for indigenous rights, land tenure, and participation in conservation is weak and where agricultural colonization, population growth, and commercial resource development have powerful momentum.

CHAPTER 1

THE LEGACY OF YELLOWSTONE

STAN STEVENS

Indigenous peoples have a large, perhaps pivotal, role to play in sustaining the earth as guardians of critical habitats and biological riches. (Durning 1992:7)

This is our community forest that was just put inside the new national park. No one consulted us! We protected this forest before the roads were put in. We set up a roadblock on the new road to stop the illegal logging. We caught the district police chief and arrested him for logging. We warned him not to come again. (Tambon leader, Thailand, 1990, quoted in Alcorn 1991:317)

In little more than a century, national parks and protected areas have become a major global phenomenon. The establishment of parks to preserve natural wonders at Yosemite in 1864 and Yellowstone in 1872 inspired what ultimately has become a truly international effort to protect some small remnant of the planet’s natural heritage not only for the enjoyment of future generations of humanity but also for the sake of the diversity of life on earth.¹ National parks and protected areas have become more than a means to preserve scenery, places of spiritual renewal, venues for outdoor recreation and tourism development, or scientific research sites. They have become a major tool in global efforts on behalf of preserving endangered species, habitats, and ecosystems, and valued natural and cultural landscapes. Today, there are nearly 10,000 protected areas in more than 160 countries, administering more than 5 percent of the earth’s land surface, an area nearly the size of the United States (IUCN 1994). International conservationists hope to double this area by the year 2000 (Thorsell 1992:144; Miller 1992:56) and protect a full 10 percent of each of the planet’s biomes (McNeely 1993a:48).²

Many of the areas that have been established as protected areas and many of those that are suitable for future addition to the protected area network are the homelands of indigenous peoples. This has been a matter of great concern to many of these peoples, who fear that insensitive conservation planning will cost them their lands, their ways of life, and their existence as peoples. These are very valid concerns. In the past, the establishment of national parks and other protected areas has indeed often threatened the survival of indigenous peoples. Most such parks have been based on premises of strict nature protection, and the result, from the Americas to Australia and from Asia to Africa, has been the eviction of indigenous peoples from their homelands (Dasmann 1976a, 1976b; Clay 1985; West and Brechin 1991a; Kemf 1993).

Yet there have also been new alliances between environmentalists and indigenous peoples in recent years. New kinds of protected areas based on indigenous management or co-management have been established, parks that support indigenous peoples in their endeavor to maintain their rights to land, subsistence, and self-determination. In some parts of the world, indigenous peoples are themselves proposing the establishment of such protected areas. If these new approaches to grass-roots conservation become widely accepted, they will change the nature of global efforts to support environmental protection and cultural survival.

PROTECTED AREAS

A protected area is “an area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means” (IUCN Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas 1994:3).³ The term gained popularity in the 1980s, supplanting the earlier terminology of “national parks and equivalent reserves.” Protected areas include national parks—the most internationally famous and prestigious of all—but they also encompass a much broader spectrum of different types of nature parks with a wide range of goals and different types of management regimes.

The diversity of types of protected areas is evident in the breadth of the classification schemes that have been developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN, also now known as the World Conservation Union), the leading international environmental umbrella organization, to categorize global protected areas for the United Nations.⁴ The first IUCN classification scheme, ratified in 1978 by the IUCN General Assembly, included ten different categories of protected areas, ranging from strict nature reserves and national parks to multiple-use management areas, biosphere reserves, and World Heritage sites (table 1.1).⁵ An amended classification approved by the 1994 IUCN General Assembly in Buenos Aires streamlined this system to six categories, but as table 1.2 indicates, these continue to encompass a broad range of different types of protected areas. Differences between the 1978 and the 1994 classifications in nomenclature and protected area definitions are significant, and reflect not only new thinking about the purposes and management goals of protected areas but also new insights into ecology and environmental history that have led to rethinking of concepts of nature and wilderness. These important topics are taken up later in this chapter.

The varied categories of the IUCN classification systems are intended to represent a “gradation of human intervention” (IUCN Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas 1994:6). At one end of the spectrum (especially Categories I–III) are the types of protected areas that have often been referred to as “national parks and equivalent reserves,” the strict nature protection-based protected areas that have been the focus of most national and international protected area efforts since the nineteenth century. These were mainly concerned with the preservation of wilderness. National parks, for example, were long defined by the IUCN as areas “where one or several ecosystems are not materially altered by human exploitation and occupation” (IUCN 1971:13). At the other end of the spectrum, in Categories V through X in the 1978 classification and Categories V and VI in the 1994 one, are several types of protected areas where people continue to live and use natural resources. In these protected areas, goals vary from the preservation of culturally created landscapes (Category V protected landscapes) to areas in which subsistence or commercial resource use is carried out in a sustainable fashion (Category VIII multiple-use management areas in the 1978 scheme and Category VI managed resource protected area in the 1994 one).⁶ Some of these types of protected areas, such as protected landscapes and seascapes, managed resource protected areas, and biosphere reserves, provide especially suitable frameworks for the establishment of protected areas that recognize indigenous peoples’ settlement and land use rights. Under the recently developed Guidelines for Protected Areas Management Categories (1994), however, IUCN’s Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas now recommends recognition of indigenous peoples within all six categories of protected areas, including national parks and wilderness areas, as long as this does not undermine the basic goals of protected area management.

Table 1.1

IUCN Categories of Protected Areas (1978)

I. Scientific Reserve/Strict Nature Reserve. To protect nature and maintain natural processes in an undisturbed state in order to have ecologically representative examples of the natural environment available for scientific study, environmental monitoring, and education, and for the maintenance of genetic resources in a dynamic and evolutionary state.

II. National Park. To protect outstanding natural and scenic areas of national or international significance for scientific, educational, and recreational use. These are relatively large natural areas not materially altered by human activity, and where commercial extractive uses are not permitted.

III. Natural Monuments/Natural Landmark. To protect and preserve nationally significant natural features because of their special interest or unique characteristics. These are relatively small areas focused on protection of specific features.

IV Managed Nature Reserve/Wildlife Sanctuary. To ensure the natural conditions necessary to protect nationally significant species, groups of species, biotic communities, or physical features of the environment when these require specific human manipulation for their perpetuation. Controlled harvesting of some resources may be permitted.

V Protected Landscapes. To maintain nationally significant landscapes characteristic of the harmonious interaction of resident people and land while providing opportunities for public enjoyment through recreation and tourism within the normal lifestyle and economic activity of these areas.

VI. Resource Reserve. To protect the natural resources of the area for future designation and prevent or contain development activities that could affect the resource pending the establishment of objectives based on appropriate knowledge and planning.

VII. Natural Biotic Area/Anthropological Reserve. To foster the way of life of societies living in harmony with the environment to continue little disturbed by modern technology; resource extraction by indigenous people is conducted in a traditional manner.

VIII. Multiple-Use Management Area/Managed Resource Area. To provide for the sustained production of water, timber, wildlife, pasture, and outdoor recreation, with the conservation of nature primarily oriented to the support of the economic activities (although specific zones can also be designed within these areas to achieve specific conservation objectives).

IX. Biosphere Reserve. To conserve biological diversity within natural ecosystems, safeguard genetic diversity of species, and provide opportunities for research in both natural and altered environments. Biosphere reserves have a core natural zone and surrounding buffer, settlement, and restoration zones. Designated by the Man and the Biosphere Programme, UNESCO.

X. World Heritage Site (Natural). To protect natural features of world heritage quality. Designated by the World Heritage Committee, UNESCO.

Source: Adapted from McNeely et al. 1990:59.

Table 1.2

IUCN Categories of Protected Areas (1994)

I. Strict Nature Reserve/Wilderness Area. Protected area managed mainly for science or wilderness protection.

Ia. Strict Nature Reserve. Area of land and/or sea possessing some outstanding or representative ecosystems, geological or physiological features and/or species, protected primarily for scientific research and/or environmental monitoring.

Ib. Wilderness Area. Large area of unmodified or slightly modified land and/or sea, retaining its natural character and influence, without permanent or significant habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural condition.

II. National Park. Protected area managed mainly for ecosystem protection and recreation. Natural area of land and/or sea, designated to (a) protect the ecological integrity of one or more ecosystems for present and future generations, (b) exclude exploitation or occupation inimical to the purposes of designation of the area, and (c) provide a foundation for spiritual, scientific, educational, recreational, and visitor opportunities, all of which must be environmentally and culturally compatible.

III. Natural Monument. Protected area managed mainly for conservation of specific natural features. Area containing one, or more, specific natural or natural/cultural feature of outstanding or unique value because of its inherent rarity, representative or aesthetic qualities, or cultural significance.

IV Habitat/Species Management Area. Protected area managed mainly for conservation through management intervention. Area of land and/or sea subject to active intervention for management purposes to ensure the maintenance of habitats and/or to meet the requirements of specific species.

V Protected Landscape/Seascape. Protected area managed mainly for landscape/ seascape conservation and recreation. Area of land, with coast and sea as appropriate, where the interaction of people and nature over time has produced ...

Table of contents

• ABOUT ISLAND PRESS
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• ACRONYMS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 - PROTECTED AREAS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
• PART 2 - CO-MANAGEMENT
• PART 3 - INDIGENOUS MANAGEMENT
• PART 4 - LINKING INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND CONSERVATION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS