Читать книгу The Invention of Green Colonialism - Guillaume Blanc - Страница 11

It was thanks to Samson that I was able to find out more about this national park. That is not his real name, since for him, and for all the inhabitants cited in this book, caution requires that their anonymity be respected. In Paris, teachers at Inalco (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) taught me the basics of Amharic, the Ethiopian lingua franca. In Addis Ababa and in Debark, officials from the EWCO (Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Organization) granted me access to their entire archive – almost 20,000 pages of correspondence, minutes and progress reports. And, from 2007 onwards, the inhabitants of Simien have made me welcome in their mountains. On each of my visits there, they have helped me understand that living in the Simien Park means living illegally. Since cultivating the land and raising livestock are punishable by law, being born in a national park means being a squatter in your own home.

This story has revealed a world whose existence I did not even suspect. I thought that the African parks were harmonious natural spaces. Instead, I discovered whole areas undermined by violence.

I say ‘the African parks’ because the Simien is by no means an isolated case. There are around 350 national parks in Africa, and in most of them, local populations have been driven out in favour of either animals, forests or savannas. This is the case in 50% of parks in Benin, 40% of parks in Rwanda and 30% of parks in Tanzania and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the course of the twentieth century, at least a million people were driven out of protected zones in Africa.⁴ And in those parks which are still inhabited, agriculture, pastoralism and hunting are largely forbidden and punishable by fines or prison sentences. It is not therefore Ethiopia’s attitude to nature which constitutes an exception in the world, but rather the world’s attitude to nature in Africa. For over a century, under the influence of experts from the North, this coercive naturalization of specific areas has affected every single country within the continent.

These environmental policies were devised by Europeans during the period of colonization. And, since independence, they have been implemented by individual African states. The leaders of these states have sovereignty yet they systematically bow to any orders imposed by the international conservation institutions.⁵ Behind every incidence of social injustice imposed on those living in natural environments throughout Africa, the presence of UNESCO, the WWF, the IUCN or Flora & Fauna International (FFI) is never far away.

Such a claim is certainly surprising. Indeed, so powerfully does it go against what we have been led to believe that some people refuse even to contemplate it. It should therefore be made clear at once that this book does not set out to denigrate the environmental cause or to criticize the ecological battle. On the contrary, this work hopes to participate actively in these processes. If the worldwide destruction of biodiversity is to be avoided, it is imperative that we understand our mistakes.

As political scientist Luc Semal explains, African societies will be forced to face the collapse of their ecosystems just as is already the case in Europe, America and Asia. Specializing in environmental movements and a leading expert in animal extinctions,⁶ Semal highlights the weight of anxiety provoked by the now very real prospect of the ecological and human disasters which are threatening to erupt on a worldwide scale under the cumulative effects of global warming, dwindling resources and the disappearance of certain species of fauna and flora.⁷ Yet the expulsion of inhabitants from African national parks will in no circumstances provide a solution 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?