Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 73

conservation NGOs: The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Conservation
International (CI), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Wildlife
Conservation Society (WCS). These groups are influential in shaping
how conservation is perceived, understood and defined in today's world.
Such portrayals simultaneously reflect specifically western notions of
conservation, and frequently ignore or attempt to 'reform' other ways
of living and being in the natural world (see Duffy, 2010). For example,
some interpretations of 'biodiversity' assume this means no people -
thus biodiversity as an objective provides 'a rationale for the creation
and maintenance of areas where wildlife is protected, but people are
forced out' (Duffy, 2010: 53). Translated into practice, this results in the
creation of manufactured national parks which, among other things,
are people-free wildernesses precisely made by the eviction of previous
human occupiers.
Environmental activists and conservationists have been charged
with ideological ecological elitism insofar as attention is directed
at 'nature' not 'people'. Environmental action and reform directs
resources toward the affluent and away from issues and problems that
are important to the poor. Issues of wilderness, wildlife and natural
preservation are privileged over and above the interests and needs of
humans, and especially those who are not members of elite groupings
(see Brisman, 2009; Duffy, 2010; Rivers III and Gibbs, 2011). Those
who can afford to be ecologically virtuous or to push for causes that
are oriented toward protecting and conserving 'nature' are portrayed
as 'good' - those who express different interests or who cannot afford
to take the most preferable ecological action are seen as part of the
problem. In part, the criticism here is that ecological justice, as distinct
from environmental justice, has tended to attract the affluent and the
white, those from privileged socio-economic strata.
transforming nature
Conventional understandings of human intervention in the
environment can be analysed in terms of collective changes over time
in areas such as land use; resource extraction; external inputs (fertilisers,
chemicals, irrigation); emissions (pollutants and waste); and modification
and movement of organisms (plants and animals) (see for example,
UNEP, 2007: xii).
The drivers behind how these interventions manifest in specific
terms include such things as: