[Coral-List] Chagos Conservation
Richard Dunne
RichardPDunne at aol.com
Fri Jan 29 10:46:14 EST 2010
Dear Listers
This is an extract from the Mauritius Times published on Friday, 29
January 2010 written by Dr Sean Carey (Research Fellow at the Centre for
Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) at
Roehampton University, UK)
The original posting is
onhttp://mauritiustimes.com/index.php/the-news/111-sean-carey
*//*
It refers to an article published in the Times Newspaper (London) on 26
Jan 2010 to which Charles Sheppard drew our attention in his post that
day (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6997414.ece)
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Frank Pope’s article in /The Times /last week,“Investment is essential
for biological wonderland of the Chagos islands”,was written to
highlight the pristine state of theBritish Indian Ocean Territory and
why the area should be designated a Marine Protected Area (MPA). “There
is none of the fertiliser, pesticide, silt or construction debris that
are choking reefs elsewhere,” he says before issuing a series of
warnings about the various categories of people who, with the notable
exception of “scientists who go without sunscreen for fear of
contaminating the water”, would mess up the area if allowed in. Put
simply, the claim is that the current pristine quality of the
Archipelago is all down to “the lack of inhabitants”. Tourists are
particularly problematic we are told: “Conservationists warn that even
small numbers of visitors would risk destroying the area’s value as a
scientific reference point against which to gauge climate change.”
Fishermen are also dangerous because according to one marine scientist
“the position of the islands and the prevailing currents helps to seed
fish stocks and reefs elsewhere in the Indian Ocean”.**
But then we come to Pope’s real target: the possible return of some of
the exiled Chagos Islanders whose case is currently before the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
**
Their return to their homeland would involve “constructing an airport
and town” which would be “both financially and environmentally ruinous”
to the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office although Pope conveniently
omits to mention that Mauritius has stated that it will pick up the
costs of resettlement and install suitable transport links (not
necessarily an airport) once sovereignty of Chagos is regained from the UK.
**
It is also revealing that Pope does not provide any details of the
negative environmental effects of the population of around 3500 people
(who may or may not use sunscreen) composed of US and British military
personnel and their predominantly Filipino workforce on the base on
Diego Garcia, the largest in southernmost island in the Chagos
Archipelago. For the record, the base boasts the world's longest runway
built on crushed coral -- after a total of 5 million cubic yards of
'coral fill' was blasted and dredged from the reef and the lagoon for
construction purposes (or “harvested”, as the US Navy puts it).
Nor do we read anything about the significant number of people that sail
through the area and armed with the appropriate £100 a month permit
issued by the BIOT authorities can moor on the outer islands of the
Archipelago like Peros Banhos and Salomon where some of the Islanders
once lived.
In fact, Pope’s highly selective account well illustrates a general
problem with a traditional and conservative approach to conservation
that has a long but not very glorious history. Last year leading US
investigative journalist, Mark Dowie, published /Conservation Refugees:
The Hundred –Year Conflict between Conservation and Native Peoples /(MIT
Press) where he exposed some of the injustices that have often been at
the heart of many apparently successful land conservation projects.
At Yosemite in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, for
example, there was a concerted and ultimately successful effort from the
mid-19^th -century until 1914 when the area became a national park, to
expel a small group of Miwak Native Americans who are thought to have
settled in the valley some 4000 years ago.
Similarly, nearly all of the other national parks in the USA, including
Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount Rainier,
Yellowstone, and Zion, were created by expelling, sometimes violently,
tribal peoples from their homes and hunting grounds so that the areas
recovered could remain in a “state of nature” free from human contamination.
This process has been replicated in other parts of the world as well.
Indeed, Dowie estimates that over the last 100 years at least 20 million
people, 14 million in Africa alone, have been displaced from their
traditional homelands in the name of nature conservation by consciously
employing “the Yosemite model” (which in Africa was renamed “fortress
conservation”) often with the tacit backing of NGOs like The Nature
Conservancy, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the African Wildlife
Foundation.
Exactly 40 years ago, a British social anthropologist, Mary Douglas, in
a lecture delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London
pointed out that in assessing risks to environments caused by “human
folly, hate and greed” it was vitally important to achieve a moral
consensus by carefully scrutinising the concepts and theories which
powerful groups used to explain things to themselves (and others).
But Douglas also issued a warning that relying on mainstream scientists
who had absorbed not only the biases of their own professions but were
also possessed by the emotional (and she might have said political)
attachment to system-building was of little use for guidance in trying
to resolve serious environmental problems. Insight was much more likely
to come from those operating at the margins or where a number of
disciplines intersected, she claimed.
History has proved Douglas right. According to Mark Dowie and others,
the old model of conservation which falsely opposed nature (good) and
culture (bad) is being replaced with something much more dynamic, a new
transnational conservation paradigm. A younger generation of scientists
recognise that properly engaged indigenous and traditional peoples have
a vital role to play in preserving fragile ecosystems.
Which brings us neatly back to the Chagos Islanders. They may be
relatively recent inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago (they first
arrived in 1783) but no one can legitimately claim that they do not
possess the status of an indigenous or traditional people just like
those descendants of former African slaves and Indian indentured
labourers who live on other Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius,
Reunion, Rodrigues and the Seychelles. And the only reason the
Chagossians no longer reside in their homeland, part of the colony of
Mauritius until it was illegally excised in 1965, is because they were
forcibly removed by the British authorities.
While the evidence is clear that uncontrolled fishing can have
catastrophic consequences the idea that a small settlement of
Chagossians and a carefully controlled number of eco-tourists are going
to destroy the pristine qualities of the proposed MPA in the Chagos
Archipelago is nothing short of preposterous and flies in the face of
evidence from other parts of the world like American Samoa, Australia,
Chile, Indonesia and the Philippines where indigenous and traditional
peoples are fully involved in the conservation and maintenance of marine
reserves.
Environmentalists like Pope may be able to line up a fair number of
scientists and traditionally-minded conservation groups to back their
argument, but the rest of us realise that the game has moved on. This is
not just because of evolving social and political realities which have
undermined a hierarchical view of the world based on the principle that
conservationists always know best, but because the old opposition
between nature conservation where humans were seen as “the enemy” in the
preservation of biological diversity has been rightly found wanting and
is being slowly but surely being replaced by a much better model.
*/
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Richard Dunne
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