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Recently, a paper in @Society4ConBio's Conservation Letters, hailed great successes by mainstream, western conservation in preventing extinctions.
They never once mention Indigenous peoples.
Read my and @faisal_moola's response: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12782
They never once mention Indigenous peoples.
Read my and @faisal_moola's response: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12782
Indigenous societies share territories with at least 19 of the species discussed in the paper by Bolam and colleagues.
Its hard to imagine that they played zero role in conservation.
Its hard to imagine that they played zero role in conservation.
Its also important to acknowledge that the conservation methods they promote in this article--protected areas, hunting and fishing closures, etc--are methods that have been used over and over to harm Indigenous peoples and dispossess them of their land.
This can't go unsaid
This can't go unsaid
Right now, global biodiversity targets are being re-negotiated. Not centering, or even acknowledging Indigenous people in a paper like this is harmful and negligent on their part because its papers like these that inform policy. That influence who gets a seat at the table.
As an aside, I also have significant concerns about the expert consensus methods that Bolam et al used to reach their findings, and the apparent lack of measures taken to address overconfidence bias, confirmation bias, or faulty, "post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning
We chose here to focus on the erasure of Indigenous peoples, however, given the word limit and that this is the most important message to draw out in response to their paper.
Here's a link to the original paper https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12762
And here's just one of many great papers that establishes just why Indigenous people are so important to conservation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719307803
My last point is this: if you are doing conservation science and not including or acknowledging the Indigenous people in that area, the contributions they've made for millennia, and the likely harms they've experienced because of western conservation,
you're doing it wrong
you're doing it wrong
