to any of these problems. Quite the contrary, any notion that confining nature within parks is a better way of protecting the planet is a delusion. And, by nourishing that delusion, international conservation policies constitute a kind of optical illusion which effectively hides the real problem: the massive and worldwide deterioration of ‘our’ everyday environment.
In order to save nature, international experts insist that African states must evict those living within the national parks. In concrete terms, they want them to prevent agro-pastoralists from eroding the strips of land they cultivate and from stripping bare the plateaux where they allow their cattle to graze. But the argument is a nonsense in the true sense of the word – it goes against reason. Accusing peasants, like those from Gich, of destroying nature fails to acknowledge that these people are in fact producing their own food. Like all those evicted from the African national parks, they move around essentially on foot. They eat very little meat and fish. They rarely buy new clothes. And, unlike two billion individuals, they own neither computers nor smartphones. In short, if we want to save the planet, we should live as they do. Yet UNESCO, the WWF and the IUCN nevertheless view their eviction as ethical and necessary, in other words just and justified. Why?
Green colonialism
As current events are beginning to demonstrate, the whole issue of worldwide ecology is influenced by the colonial past. In August 2019, for example, when French president Emmanuel Macron suggested that the fires burning in Amazonia should be placed under international control, Jair Bolsonaro was quick to condemn ‘a colonialist mentality’. ‘Macron […] wants to “save” Amazonia as though it were [still] a colony,’ wrote the Brazilian president on his Twitter account.8
At the same time, in the context of Africa, a controversy erupted in the United States after the release of the new film version of The Lion King. Millions of spectators flocked to rediscover the Disney characters, with voiceovers recorded by Afro-American artists – including the singer Beyoncé and the actor Donald Glover. The remake met with worldwide success but a number of intellectuals condemned what they saw as a ‘perfectly colonial’ film. According to them, The Lion King perpetuates the notion of an Africa which is more about nature than it is about human beings. In such a context, Africans would have no place in their own continent but would instead be intruders whose presence disturbed the equilibrium of a green planet.9
Nor did Asia escape such clichés. In October 2019, Le Monde devoted a special report to the rise of eco-fascism. The French daily turned its attention in particular to the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, carried out by an Australian extreme-right activist. A few minutes before killing fifty-one Muslims in two different mosques, Brenton Tarrant published a manifesto on social media networks: ‘[T]he environment is being destroyed by overpopulation, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not overpopulating the world.’ For all those who, like him, consider themselves eco-fascists, the message is clear: ‘Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.’10
Such extremists are not alone in believing they have been charged with a mission. According to other media sources, many international experts also suffer from a neo-Malthusian anxiety. They set themselves the task of saving nature in all the countries in the southern hemisphere before ecologically irresponsible local inhabitants end up destroying it.
In this respect, the written press in particular targets the WWF. In 2012, in PandaLeaks, the journalist Wilfried Huismann exposed the role played by the WWF in the forced expulsions of indigenous populations from national parks in Africa and Asia.11 In 2016, the association Survival International in turn launched an attack on the WWF, accusing it of financing the military campaigns of the Cameroon government against tribes living in the protected forests in the south of the country.12 Finally, both BuzzFeed News and Mediapart condemned what they refer to as ‘green colonialism’. In 2019, they claimed that the WWF was training and arming guards who then beat, raped and sometimes killed women and men accused of poaching. According to both these websites, such atrocities are the common lot of several national parks in India, Nepal, Gabon and the Congo – in short, in the former European colonies.13
The link between colonial geography and the current policies of an international institution like the WWF is glaringly obvious, even flagrant. But the situation is also more complex than it appears and the media struggle to furnish a clear explanation of what green colonialism really is. For that, we need to turn back to history.
The story began in North America, at the end of the nineteenth century. The United States and Canada created the first national parks in the world and, in each case, local people were evicted. The two countries (re)introduced supposedly authentic animal species, (re)planted supposedly original forests and (re)seeded supposedly natural plains. Then, once these tasks had been successfully accomplished, they turned their attention to making nature in its wild state – the wilderness – into a national symbol. In each national park, nature became the nation’s soul. It was described to the public as the authentic essence of the two societies, the original face of two countries which were shaped from the collective experience of a wild and uninhabited landscape, and not out of the violence of a colonial conquest.
At the beginning of the 1930s, this enthusiasm for national parks spread to Europe. European governments rarely expelled the inhabitants of their parks. Although they, too, were exploiting the concept of nature, their approach was different. Rather than creating a virgin and timeless wilderness, they chose to highlight the link between their nations and a nature which has been humanized since time immemorial. For example, in Switzerland, the mountain pastures were transformed into sacred ground, the symbol of land which had been farmed in the same way over the course of many centuries by the people of one and the same nation, irrespective of any differences between them. In a similar vein, Germany set about making its forests and their folklore into the symbol of the smaller homelands (Heimat) where the local people could learn to love the greater fatherland (Vaterland).
The process is therefore the same as in North America. Everywhere they appeared, national parks encouraged an extension from the local to the national, from local park to the nation which protects it, from the love of a small area to the love of a much more extensive one, as so eloquently described by the historian François Walter.14
During the mid-1960s, it was the turn of France to adopt the model. The France of small farmers and peasants was in the process of vanishing and the state was in quest of some form of substitute for the rural identity of the nation.15 As a result, in the national parks of the Vanoise, the Pyrenees or the Mercantour, park authorities saw their mission as that of ‘restoring the ecological balance of such places’. They banned the industrialization of agriculture, (re)naturalized ecosystems with high-altitude grassland in some cases, or peat bogs in others, and (re)introduced animal species, including wild vultures, black grouse and ibex. According to the French government, such an approach would guarantee the ‘natural return of species of particular interest in terms of national heritage’.16
This return to the past was, however, by no means natural. Nor was it particularly objective. In the rivers of the Cévennes National Park, for example, the park administration reintroduced beavers on the basis of their ‘authenticity’, even though they had disappeared from the region in the fourteenth century. By contrast, no operation on a similar scale was envisaged to combat the disappearance of grey partridges or wolves. Less emblematic or more dangerous, these species nevertheless disappeared barely a century ago.
Such subjectivity regarding authenticity is all the more flagrant when we see how, in France, park authorities protect what they describe as ‘the character of the site’. They renovate traditional sheep pens. They rent out land to agro-pastoralists who, thanks to reduced rents, can continue to live there. They maintain transhumance routes and, at the beginning of the summer, pay out subsidies to those shepherds who agree to undertake their transhumance on foot, and not
