Love these extracts:

From Canada to the Amazon, scientists are trying to build on Native knowledge before it’s too late.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

Lauren Eckert, a conservation researcher at the University of Victoria, measures a yelloweye rockfish, one of the world’s longest-lived fish species. Courtesy of Natalie Ban

From his home in remote coastal British Columbia, Ernest Mason, a 77-year-old elder and hereditary chief of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation, remembers. He remembers a childhood fishing trip with his father, when they packed sleeping bags but caught so many halibut they were home before dark. He remembers setting traps for pink Dungeness crab and floating hemlock branches to collect edible herring eggs.

He also remembers watching the first two times the herring stocks collapsed, and then, fearing a third collapse, telling the Canadian government that he and the other chiefs were banning commercial fishermen from their traditional territorial waters. “I said, ‘We’ll do what it takes to protect what we have,’” Mason told Vox. “This is one of the ways our grandfathers taught us, how to look after things. That’s one of the chores now.”

For coastal Indigenous communities like Mason’s, these ancestral lessons can be the difference between plenty and poverty. Mason is one of the province’s few elders who was not forced into Canada’s residential schools, which stripped Indigenous children of their languages, oral histories, and cultures. This is one reason Mason, who often wears a baseball cap over his silver hair, remembers so much.

Around the world, the memories of elders like Mason are playing a powerful role in understanding and helping to preserve marine species. A growing group of researchers, some of them from within Indigenous communities, is translating the qualitative stories of fishermen into quantitative data, in a process that often requires sensitive negotiations and uncomfortable conversations between Indigenous leaders and Western institutions. Their recollections can help fill historical and geographical gaps that have eluded scientists until now.

Five years ago, University of Victoria PhD candidate Lauren Eckert interviewed Mason for hours about his earliest fishing memories. Since then, a series of Indigenous-led research projects — based on those memories and others — have rewritten best practices on the management of two species, Dungeness crab and yelloweye rockfish. “Science is exceptionally good at taking accurate snapshots that approach truth,” Eckert says. “But Indigenous knowledge includes long-term datasets that provide this massive canvas of information that spans decades to thousands of years.”

Both yelloweye rockfish and Dungeness crab are essential to coastal Pacific ecosystems. Dungeness crab, according to one government description, is “the most important crab species harvested” in the country’s western province. Yelloweye is threatened because adults must live 15 years before they start to spawn, making them vulnerable to overfishing.

But government managers only have reliable information on yelloweye abundance starting in 2001 — the same year a population crash forced them to start a targeted conservation plan. Yelloweye are considered a “data-poor” species, according to the plan, because data was only collected “sporadically” from the 1980s onward. This made it difficult for government scientists to tell how steeply the population had fallen since the advent of big-boat commercial fishing in the 1970s, says Eckert.

One place they hadn’t looked, however, was in the memories of those who were there all along.

To reconstruct the historical abundance, or baselines, of rockfish and crab, Eckert drew on an interview methodology developed after the 1990s Atlantic cod collapse. In this “vessel-based approach,” fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador were asked to recall memories of specific boats on which they had fished; this prompted specific memories of fish size and abundance, as well as when and where fish had been caught. Researchers translated the accounts of Central Coast fishers into box graphs estimating size, which corroborated the official modern catch records to an astounding — but not surprising — degree, Eckert says.

As biodiversity loss and climate change loom large over our planet’s fate, these types of projects are beginning to model healthier, less extractive relationships between biologists and the communities in which they work. In the process, they could also bring key species back from the brink of extinction.

Useful Indigenous knowledge for managing species has been brushed aside

Reached by phone in late May, Mason says he still fishes whenever he can, and had spent the past few weeks chasing a run of spring salmon. He speaks of a strong connection to the species that have sustained him. “Everything within our world — that’s where our stories are told, that is where our history is told,” he says.

When Mason was growing up in Klemtu, a verdant village in traditional Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory, it seemed as if a yelloweye rockfish hovered in every deep ocean crevasse. Often caught as unintended bycatch, these highlighter-orange fish have bulging amber eyes, scooped, goldfish-like pectoral fins, and a crown of towering dorsal spikes. Yelloweye can grow to nearly a meter and are one of the world’s longest-lived fish species — one caught in Alaska in 2013 was 121 years old.

In the days before refrigeration, every yelloweye Mason and his father landed was eaten fresh, salted, or dried. Nothing went to waste. The years passed, and with them arrived faster, higher-powered commercial trawlers. Soon, Mason and his peers started noticing they weren’t catching enough yelloweye, even for their ceremonial potlatches, and the fish they were catching were getting smaller. The same was true for Dungeness crab.

Kitasoo/Xai’xais technical staff and political leaders had long expressed concerns about both species, and others, to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Yet the experiences of elders and fishermen were dismissed as merely anecdotal, says Alejandro Frid, an ecologist at the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance. Founded in 2010, the CCIRA works to incorporate the best of Indigenous and Western knowledge, says Frid, and represents four nations including Mason’s.

For more than 10,000 years, the Central Coast nations have developed and practiced intricate harvesting techniques based on respect and reciprocity — like harvesting herring eggs on hemlock boughs — that long allowed the species they relied on to thrive alongside their annual harvests, says Frid.

That Indigenous stewardship was swept aside with the arrival of European settlers, who were, says University of British Columbia marine biologist Daniel Pauly, “a bunch of racists.” Science, when properly done, Pauly says, draws on all available evidence. Canadian authorities “thought that the First Nations didn’t know what they were doing,” he says. “And in 20 years, they destroyed the salmon run.”

Even Canada’s very first fisheries legislation tried to force Indigenous memories and stewardship out of the equation, says Andrea Reid, a Nisga’a Nation citizen and the principal investigator at UBC’s new Centre for Indigenous Fisheries. The government went so far as to ban freshwater fishing weirs and nets that allowed for sustainable harvesting.

One great irony, Reid says, is that Indigenous “ways of knowing” are now widely seen as “inherently scientific” in her field, in that they use experimentation and observation to learn about nature. “Many Indigenous fishing approaches stem from relational values that treat fish as relatives that we live in reciprocity with,” says Reid. “Not commodities that we exploit or command and control.”

The Central Coast Nations are not alone in this boundary-breaking work. In one paper from 2004, researcher R.J. Hamilton lived alongside Western Solomon Island spearfishers for his research into topa, or bumphead parrotfish. In addition to biological surveys, Hamilton also conducted in-depth translated interviews with 21 fishermen, many of them elderly. Near the top of his paper, he made an effort to explain the importance of Indigenous knowledge, adding that “the anthropological nature of indigenous knowledge makes it a topic that is not well understood by many marine biologists.”

More recently, the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Amazon’s Xingu River spurred research into small-scale Indigenous fishers in a 2015 study published in the Brazilian Journal of Biology. The dam would cause a permanent disruption of a traditional way of life, wrote the authors, a conclusion that came to pass within a year. “It used to take an hour to get to the fishing grounds. Now it takes twice as long,” Natanael Juruna, a member of one Indigenous community, told journalist Isabel Harari in 2016. “Some places are inaccessible because the water level is too low and we can’t pass [in our boats].”

Capturing vanishing memories is validating for those who hold them

While the scientific approach to gathering memories may differ, there are patterns across research projects. Many papers published in this emerging field draw heavily on the methods of anthropology — a field that has its own history of racism and colonialism. Often, data takes the form of anecdotes and recollections, which are gathered during confidential, hours-long, in-person interviews.

In the case of the work done by Eckert’s team and the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance, interviewees were questioned on specific places and times as prompts — for instance, the first boat they worked on, or their earliest memories of catching fish — and promised that their fishing locations would be kept secret. Finally, the researchers anonymized, collated, and analyzed these memories before drawing conclusions from the patterns that surfaced.

Mason often felt frustrated that even as his nation fought for its tribal rights, many members of his community seemed to show deference to the Canadian government’s approval. Local and ancestral knowledge has been discounted even within Indigenous communities, says Reid. While working on her doctoral research, she herself often encountered elders who were ecstatic that their hard-won expertise was finally being taken seriously. “It has a legitimizing effect,” she says. “Even though they know more about salmon than I ever will.”

“EVERYTHING WITHIN OUR WORLD — THAT’S WHERE OUR STORIES ARE TOLD, THAT IS WHERE OUR HISTORY IS TOLD.” —ERNEST MASON

Indigenous knowledge can actually surpass and transcend the grasp of Western science, argues Frid, the CCIRA ecologist. Stories some refer to as “myths,” adds Pauly, are often vital insights passed down through generations, capturing truths and teachable lessons about everything from floods to famines. “It’s a sad statement of how there was an undervaluing of traditional and local knowledge, that [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] couldn’t see it for its own value, that it had to be translated into their own terms,” says Frid. “But it did initiate a transformation.”

In 2017, after a decade of data-gathering by the coastal nations, DFO announced it would establish a decision-making pilot program that required Indigenous leaders and government executives to agree on Dungeness crab management strategies. It was part of the government’s commitment to reconciliation, which included 2019 changes to the fisheries act designed to “lay the groundwork for better and more collaborative fisheries management,” says DFO spokesperson Jo Anne Walton. (While some DFO scientists support this blended approach, Frid encountered some reluctance that he likened to “kicking and screaming.”) The nations have yet to see changes in how yelloweye are protected.

Living up to an old adage

Years ago, Mason met with Fisheries and Oceans Canada envoys and listed off the many species that rely on small, oily herring: ling cod, halibut, red snappers, quillbacks, salmon. From there, he says, he worked his way up the food chain: “I named off humpback whales, killer whales, sea lions, seals, otters, and the birds; the loons, eagles, ravens.”

Later, Mason recalls, a federal minister expressed confusion about why orcas were dying off. With the knowledge he grew up with, it seemed simple: Without herring, the salmon went hungry; without salmon, orcas starved. He didn’t need a research study to tell him that. “For goodness’ sakes, you’re supposed to be looking after the fisheries,” he remembers thinking.

But Mason says that today, he focuses on preserving and reviving his nation’s lands and waters for future generations, not past harms. “Hopefully, we’ll get it back to a point where all our traditional foods are plentiful again,” he says. Even in the leanest, hardest times, Mason’s ancestors could harvest abalone, clams, cockles, mussels, sea cucumbers, and Dungeness crab from the low-tide ocean bottom. The ultimate goal, he says, is to live up to the old adage he once heard from his father: “When the tide is down, the table is set.”

 More than 30 percent of the Earth is already conserved. Thank Indigenous people and local communities.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

The Pangasananan territory in the Philippines has been conserved for centuries by the Manobo Indigenous people. Courtesy of Glaiza Tabanao/ICCA Consortium

In a lush swath of tropical forest on the eastern coast of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines, you can glimpse the brilliant plumage of the rare rufous-lored kingfisher or — if you’re lucky — hear the shrill cry of the large Philippine eagle, a critically endangered species.

Wildlife is abundant here, but not because the region was left untouched in a protected area, or conserved by an international environmental organization. It’s because the territory known as Pangasananan has been occupied for centuries by the Manobo people, who have long relied on the land to cultivate crops, hunt and fish, and gather herbs. They use a number of techniques to conserve the land, from restricting access to sacred areas to designating wildlife sanctuaries and an offseason for hunting, owing in part to a traditional belief that nature and its resources are guarded by spirits.

Pangasananan is one of many areas around the world that remain ecologically intact due to the conservation practices of Indigenous peoples or local communities. Although these places are not widely documented by researchers, they cover an estimated 21 percent of all land on Earth, according to a new report by the ICCA Consortium, a group that advocates for Indigenous and community-led conservation.

That means Indigenous peoples and local communities conserve far more of the Earth than, say, national parks and forests. (Protected and conservation areas overseen by countries — some of which overlap with Indigenous territories — cover just 14 percent of all land on Earth, according to the report.) The consortium says its report is the first effort to try to measure the extent of areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities, known as ICCAs or territories of life.

Despite the outsize role that Indigenous peoples play in protecting nature, their contributions often go overlooked. The modern conservation movement was built on the false idea that nature starts out “pristine” and untouched by humans, as the environmental journalist Michelle Nijhuis has written. That put many of the movement’s early efforts, including protected areas, at odds with Indigenous land management — the very activities that created many landscapes that countries are now racing to protect.

“We’re discounted,” Reno Keoni Franklin, chairman emeritus of the Kashia Pomo Tribe in California, told Vox. “Tribal knowledge in land conservation is often used and quoted but rarely matters until a white person says it. Unfortunately, that’s just the truth of the last 100 years of land conservation in the US.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher today. More than 50 countries, including the US and the other wealthy nations that make up the G7, have committed to conserving at least 30 percent of their lands and waters by 2030. Some Indigenous activists fear that reaching that goal, known as 30 by 30, could come at the expense of Indigenous land rights.

But they also see an opportunity to change the paradigm of conservation to one in which the enormous contributions of Indigenous peoples are recognized and supported. The consortium’s report could help propel that shift. It finds that if you consider areas conserved by Indigenous and local communities, in addition to formally protected and conserved areas, more than 30 percent of the world’s land is already conserved.

Indigenous lands preserve biodiversity

A huge amount of land is owned or governed by either Indigenous peoples or local communities, which the consortium defines as groups whose cultures and livelihoods are deeply embedded in the land. Estimates vary, but according to the consortium, that number is at least 32 percent globally.

The majority of those areas are conserved and in “good ecological condition,” according to an analysis by the consortium and the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

To Indigenous peoples and their allies, this finding is intuitive. “We see ourselves as part of [nature] because it’s life-sustaining,” Aaron Payment, chairperson of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan, told Vox. “Our very lives depend on living in ecological balance with our natural resources.”

A world map showing the extent of Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ lands.

New estimates suggest that Indigenous peoples and local communities conserve at least a fifth of all land on Earth.

The UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre/ICCA Consortium

“Potential ICCAs” cover more than a fifth of all land on Earth, the report finds. That number is roughly 17 percent if you only include the ICCAs that fall outside areas conserved or protected by countries and private entities. (The consortium uses the word “potential” because these areas are approximated based largely on an analysis of large data sets; only some of them are documented ICCAs.)

Academic research supports the idea that much of the natural habitat within Indigenous land is conserved. One study, for example, found that Indigenous territories harbored more biodiversity than protected areas in Brazil, Australia, and Canada. Another found that at least 36 percent of the world’s remaining intact forest landscapes — continuous tracts of forest and other natural ecosystems — are found within Indigenous territories.

Research has also shown that in some regions, Indigenous control of lands seems to reduce deforestation as much as formal protections, or even more. “Biodiversity is declining more slowly in areas managed by [Indigenous peoples and local communities] than elsewhere,” more than 20 researchers argued in a recent perspective article in the journal Ambio.

While different Indigenous and local groups have different cultures and practices, they tend to share a holistic and human-inclusive view of nature that’s imbued with cultural or spiritual value. It’s this view, in part, that forms the basis for Indigenous land management, which often includes protecting sacred lakes or forests, or creating rules against exploiting certain species.

That’s not to say that Indigenous peoples don’t alter habitats and drive down populations of animals, or that they bear the responsibility for protecting wildlife. But in general, the concept of conservation appears to be more embedded in Indigenous traditions, compared to Western cultures.

That certainly seems true in Pangasananan, an old Manobo word that means “a place where food, medicines, and other needs are obtained,” according to Glaiza Tabanao, a consultant for the Philippine Association for Intercultural Development who contributed to the ICCA Consortium report. It has served as a life-sustaining refuge over the years. During World War II, for example, local families retreated to the woods to escape Japanese soldiers. And in more recent times, they relied on it for food as some of their livelihoods collapsed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is what we gain from protecting our territory and its forests,” said Hawudon Sungkuan Nemesio Domogoy, a Manobo leader. “We will surely survive this pandemic.”

Some Indigenous peoples risk their lives for conservation

Nonetheless, the value these communities provide to global conservation efforts — defending their land with their lives, in some cases — is often ignored.

“Much of their contributory effort goes unrecognized and disrespected,” wrote Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, a member of the Kankana-ey Igorot people in the Philippines and the former UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, along with several co-authors, in an article published last year in World Development.

Franklin, the Kashia Pomo tribal leader, told Vox about a local example of this problem. On a recent call to discuss conservation efforts in Sonoma County, a county official (whom he declined to name) mentioned the activities of two local conservation organizations but not of the Kashia Pomo tribe. His tribe has protected thousands of acres of land through parks and easements, Franklin said. “She just completely ignored us,” he said.

In general, most areas that Indigenous peoples protect aren’t considered in tallies by environmental organizations of how much land on Earth is conserved, unless they fall within formal protected or conserved areas. And where these regions do overlap with protected areas, Indigenous peoples are often the de facto custodians of the resident biodiversity — but rarely do they formally govern the areas, according to the ICCA Consortium.

“Indigenous peoples and communities are conserving more than state protected areas, they’re doing a better job than state protected areas,” said Holly Jonas, global coordinator for the ICCA Consortium. “It’s absurd to not have explicit recognition for them.”

García, a research professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the lead author of the Ambio perspective. In countries like Australia, India, and Bali, Native peoples and local communities have long used tools like controlled burning, grazing, and the construction of canals to sustain themselves and maintain the ecosystems. Yet formal protected areas sometimes put an end to these activities and cause the ecosystems, as they were, to disappear, Reyes-García said. In some cases, that can create problems such as the spread of invasive species.

Making matters worse, these communities tend to lack political power, especially at the national level where most policies relevant to biodiversity are put in place, Reyes-García said. Indigenous advocates also worry that new goals to expand conservation areas under a major international biodiversity treaty, which are being negotiated now, won’t explicitly mention the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities, and their contributions.

Perhaps most troubling is an issue that extends well beyond the topic of biodiversity: Local communities have legal rights to only a small fraction of the land they live on. According to the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a land rights advocacy organization, countries recognize the ownership rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afrodescendents on just 10 percent of terrestrial land. (RRI is in the process of updating this figure.)

Some Indigenous advocates fear the “30 by 30” global conservation effort

A failure to respect and recognize the contributions of Indigenous peoples has devastating consequences. In the past, governments often uprooted Indigenous communities in the process of creating protected areas, or restricted their traditional activities. By some estimates, 10 million people in developing nations have been displaced by protected areas.

These practices arguably have spilled into the modern age. In Pangasananan, a protected area designated by the Philippine government overlaps with nearly half of the territory. “It’s viewed by the community as problematic,” in part because it “criminalizes” traditional activities like hunting and fishing, according to Tabanao.

Indeed, “our farms and fallow areas are overlapped by the protected area,” said Hawudon Danao, a hunter in the Pangasananan territory. “I hunt in the forests surrounding our farms. My son fishes in the creeks near our farms. Now that these are not allowed, how are we going to live? Where do they suppose we get our food and money for our needs?”

Hawudon Tinuy-an Alfredo Domogoy, the Manobo chieftain, was named after the Tinuy-an falls (pictured behind him). Courtesy of Glaiza Tabanao/ICCA Consortium

That’s why some Indigenous advocates are afraid of what a plan to conserve at least 30 percent of Earth might bring, said Kundan Kumar, director of the Asia program at RRI. One worst-case scenario is that countries and conservation organizations violate Indigenous land rights as they massively expand the world’s network of protected areas — especially considering that many of the remaining biodiversity hot spots are on Indigenous lands. “The fear is there,” Kumar said.

But an alternative scenario is also possible: Countries could seize this moment to support Indigenous and community-led conservation, financially and otherwise. Essentially, this would entail funding these communities to do what they’re already doing, and support efforts to strengthen land ownership, Reyes-García said.

Countries could meet their 30 by 30 goals by including areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities, according to the ICCA Consortium. And a growing body of research shows that one of the best ways to promote conservation is to give legal ownership of land to Indigenous people. Simply acknowledging that much of the world’s intact habitat exists today because — not in spite — of Indigenous peoples would also be helpful, Reyes-García said.

The Biden administration has a game-changing approach to nature conservation

Some countries are starting to make progress. Since 2002, at least 14 countries have passed legislation that recognizes Indigenous land rights, according to RRI. In the US, there’s also a growing effort to repatriate land to tribes. Environmental groups including the Sierra Club have started reckoning with their dark pasts and founders who held racist views of American Indians.

The Biden administration, for its part, includes the potential contributions of tribal conservation in its draft plans for 30 by 30. “Tribal nations have been serving as stewards of their land since time immemorial,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, said on a press call announcing the initiative, known as America the Beautiful. Campaign for Nature, a group spearheading the global 30 by 30 goal, has also called on countries to integrate and respect Indigenous rights as they implement the target.

“The conservation community cannot pursue a conservation agenda that disenfranchises tribal communities,” Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, told Vox in April. “Their rights and their approaches need to be at the forefront of 30 by 30.”

By Zach Fitzner, Earth.com staff writer

PNG is home to a large portion of the world’s third largest tropical rainforest.  Many aspects of human culture are unusual in Papua New Guinea as well. Geographic features such as mountain chains and rivers that divide animal populations and create more speciation (and biodiversity) also lead to the formation of different human cultures.  

Perhaps due to PNG’s rugged landscape, the country has the largest diversity of human languages, with 841 living languages and 12 extinct, according to Ethnologue.  840 of the living languages are indigenous languages.  Of this diversity of languages, 124 are threatened and 40 seem to be actually dying.  Similar to factors that drive diversity in culture and biology, similar environmental factors can favor simplification and extinctions.  

Some animals like the Norwegian rat (Rattus norvegicus) are so successful in new environments they outcompete native species, driving them towards extinction and simplifying a complex ecosystem.  Similarly, certain cultural aspects such as religion (Christianity and Islam are good examples) spread and outcompete in many cases indigenous beliefs.  This is true in the case of language as well, as some languages such as English and Mandarin are thriving the world over, while others such as Haida or Kawishana are becoming rarer and rarer.  

The reasons for the relative success of both species and cultural elements are usually contextual, as the animal or language survives because it fits well into the environment it is competing in.  This is all to say that in Papua New Guinea, cultural diversity and biodiversity are both threatened and the key to saving one may be the key to saving the other.

All the regulations needed to protect the unique environment of Papua New Guinea are in place.  Unfortunately, Mongabay reports that enforcement of environmental law leaves the regulations toothless.  Much of the environmental legislation in PNG is actually part of a legacy of colonialism left by Australia.  Independence was declared in Papua New Guinea in only 1975, so colonial rule is still in living memory and it’s not surprising that it isn’t a memory many want to re-live.  Beyond that, much of the environmental laws were originally crafted for use in England or Australia and simply imported into PNG without any thought to the difference in environment and cultures.  

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Newsroom reports that 25% of New Guinea’s rainforest has been destroyed in the last 30 years.  Mongabay found that often development that destroys PNG’s natural forests also disenfranchises local people.  As host of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in 2018, Papua New Guinea evicted thousands of people near a conference hall for development of a show piece.  As APEC’s poorest member nation, it seems the government of PNG put perception of their nation over the realities faced by their own populace. Top-down government hasn’t traditionally held sway in Papua New Guinea, though.      

Lake near Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea, Image Credit: Michal Knitl

Mongabay reports that John Aini is a traditional community leader in Papua New Guinea as well as an award winning conservationist and fisheries scientist.  Aini believes that conservation projects that balance indigenous communities with scientists are more successful than the older colonial approach to conservation.  John Aini and his brother, Miller Aini and anthropologist Paige West, founded The Roviana Solwara Skul (Salt water School), a school that teaches both western conservation science and traditional knowledge.  John Aini has spoken out about ‘decolonizing’ conservation. The local, indigenous model of conservation Aini is promoting in Papua New Guinea flies in the face of the United States model of big government protecting each park with little regard to local desires, traditions or cultures.  The American model has often led to evicting indigenous people in North America as well as other places, such as Africa where it has been implemented. Besides the injustice, this model also distorts views of nature as an ‘other’ place, somewhere people can’t and shouldn’t live instead of a view of humans as an integral part of nature.  

Unfortunately, the grassroots, indigenous approach to conservation isn’t popular with large NGOs.  Many organizations pay lip service to working with local communities, but the reality often falls short.  Sometimes local people are given jobs but rarely are whole conservation efforts and high end leadership roles given over to indigenous or local communities.  John Aini told Mongabay that he’s given up on trying to work with large NGOs, instead finding other means of funding his efforts.  

Papua New Guinea is a rapidly changing place that only very recently came into contact with the ‘outside’ world.  Not only are forests at risk but also ways of living with those forests that have held sway and developed in isolation over 60,000 years since humans first arrived on PNG.  Social justice for the local people in places like Papua New Guinea is intimately tied to environmental justice.

—

By Zach Fitzner, Earth.com Contributing Writer  

Find more related articles

Source:  https://www.earth.com/