Over the last week, millions of Americans
have tuned in to watch Ken Burns' latest series, The National Parks:
America's Best Idea. To his credit, Burns revealed both the good
and bad sides behind the history of America's Parks. To be sure the
forcible removal of Native Americans from their land, as well as the
struggles between conservationists seeking to protect the land, and
speculators and land barons seeking to exploit it for personal gain,
were all there against backdrops of some of the most spectacular vistas
and landscape remaining on this earth. However, what seemed to be missing
from the story, for most Indigenous Peoples, was the plot. This
is a war story - a war between worldviews: a worldview that holds People
as intricately within and part of nature versus a worldview that holds
nature as a place to visit separate from People.
This dichotomous world view is dangerously
out of balance. Belief that there is some land that we aggressively
exploit and other land which we steadfastly insist remain pristine,
is rapidly extinguishing the beliefs of the land's previous caretakers,
who saw all land as sacred and thereby worthy of protection. From
the Indigenous paradigm of protection and production, production and
protection, evolved complex conservation regimes whereby you protected
the land because it produced for you and it produced for you because
you protected it. This is in stark contrast to the practice of protecting
small plots of land, while removing the vast rest from protection, a
paradigm which has led to the unprotected earth shutting down its productive
capacity.
Burns unflinchingly tells how the creation
of the earliest Parks, Yosemite and Yellowstone, both had at their core,
the violent and forcible evictions of Native Americans who had been
stewards of these lands for millennia. However by showing us only half
of the legacy, the creation of our National Parks, Burns continues to
promote a worldview that has led to the collapse of so many of the earth's
productive systems and to a climate crisis which is making us all
vulnerable.
The driving impulse that Burns reveals
in the drama of the founding of the national parks did not see protection
and production as intrinsically linked, but rather as an either/or proposition.
The lands fortunate enough to become national parks were allowed by
the powerful economic interests of the day to be so, precisely because
they were deemed to have no commercial value. It was in fact, the powerful
political voices of the railroad tycoons who saw in the parks rich opportunities
to make money from hoards of curious tourists that tipped the scales
and led to many parks' creation.
Burns' epic is telling the history
of America's past, but it is a history that continues to have far-reaching
effects even today. The model of exclusionary protected areas is alive
and well and practiced throughout both the developing and industrialized
world. And like in the United States, it is the Indigenous Peoples who
have lived on the land for thousands of years, who bear the brunt of
such human-phobic conservation. Since 1990, in Africa alone, more than
1,500,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their homes and communities
in the name of setting aside protected areas as national parks. Resisters
have been killed and their homes burned just like their distant cousins
at Yosemite. And like the Native Americans of a century ago who faced
daily struggles with developers and land barons who were far more interested
in producing their fortune from the land rather than protecting the
land's productive capacity, so too Indigenous Peoples around the world
are most often forced from their land as penance for the sins of the
exploitative interlopers.
And Indigenous Peoples continue to
be forced to watch their lands being taken so they can become exclusive
enclaves for the world's jet-setting class. Last June, a Maasai village
in the Loliondo region in Tanzania was burned and more than two dozen
families forced from their communities by soldiers. The soldiers were
financed by billionaire United Arab Emirates defense secretary Major
General Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali, who purchased the Loliondo game
reserve from the Tanzanian government, and turned it into a private
park for himself and his friends to satisfy their fancy for shooting
large African game for sport.
To be sure, there are many wonderful
things to celebrate about America's National Parks, but America's
best idea? We are not so sure. Removing traditional owners from
their land, and denying the land the protection that these traditional
owners wisdom honed over hundreds of generations, has made America's
land - and the world's - far more vulnerable. Protecting small
slivers of land, as good as that sounds, served to enable the opening
the rest to often rapacious and unchecked exploitation. Many would
agree that has not been a very good idea. And the American contagion
of national parks that must be pristine, and free of permanent human
habitation has been a very bad idea in the eyes of Indigenous Peoples
in far distant places. Those who will never lay eyes on Yosemite, Yellowstone,
or the Grand Canyon are impoverished by the notion that humans cannot
now live in these places as they had for tens of thousands of years.
While America's National Parks may
not be our nation's best ideas, there are some new ideas in this new
century that offer hope. Australia's Kakakdu National Park, home to
ancient rock art at least 20,000 years old, is today inhabited and tended
by Aboriginal Australians who co-manage the internationally acclaimed
park with the federal government. And just recently in British Columbia,
Canada, for the first time, National Park land was returned to its traditional
Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation owners for use as an inhabited protected
area. The move toward inhabited parks, where the traditional protection-production
can flourish, is spreading. It is in returning Indigenous inhabitants
to protected areas from which they or their ancestors have been evicted,
and in protecting inhabited areas not now legally protected from unbridled
development that we will discover humanity's best idea.