When Conservation Hurts
The Hidden Struggle of Indigenous, Tribal, and Traditional Stewards
by Dr Tom Corcoran. 2,900 Words
Published by ETHNOMAD March 2025
The Baiga elder stands at the forest’s edge, her eyes fixed on a stretch of land her people have tended for generations. The sal trees rise where they always have. The soil still carries the memory of cultivation. Yet the ground beneath her feet is no longer hers.
Renowned for their intricate tattoos, Baiga women carry their history on their skin. Each line marks a relationship with land, forest, and ancestry. The Baiga have long called themselves caretakers of the soil. They believe the earth is a living being, a mother, and for this reason, they resist ploughing it deeply or repeatedly. Instead, they practise Bewar, a form of shifting cultivation guided by seasonal cycles and restraint rather than extraction. Wild mushrooms, leafy greens, forest fruits, and the hardy Sikiya millet have sustained them for centuries. From this millet they make ghas ki roti, a food inseparable from identity, memory, and place.
“The jungle is only here because of us,” the elder says quietly.
Ameen, a long-time protector of tribal rights in central India, explains how this woman and her family were forced from this land within what is now the Kanha Tiger Reserve. Their removal was not the result of war, famine, or conquest, but of the western model of fortress conservation. The forest she helped sustain has been redefined as "wilderness." Her presence, once essential, is now described as a threat.
Across the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Central India, Southeast Asia, and beyond, Indigenous and tribal communities continue to be displaced in the name of progress and environmental protection. The logic is familiar: humans and nature must be separated for ecosystems to survive. Yet this idea rests on a dangerous fiction. Many of the landscapes now designated as protected were shaped, maintained, and sustained by human care long before modern conservation emerged.
Development, when imposed rather than negotiated, rarely follows a straight line. While improvements in healthcare, education, and infrastructure can offer real opportunities, the path from land-based self-sufficiency to resettlement is often one of loss rather than advancement. Evidence from forest-dwelling communities worldwide shows that even under favourable conditions, it can take three generations to regain social and economic stability after displacement. For many, that recovery never fully comes.
What is lost is not only land but language, ecological knowledge, ritual, and orientation in the world. Excluding the very people who have long cared for these environments severs the intricate feedback loops between human practice and landscape processes. Conservation that isolates wildlife from their human stewards risks becoming an agent of erasure rather than protection.
“The question is not whether humans belong in nature, but which humans are permitted to remain, and on whose terms.”
Baiga woman with traditional Godna facial tattooing, Madhya Pradesh, central India. The fine markings across her forehead are part of a once-universal practice among Baiga women, inscribed to mark identity, protection, and passage through life. Today, such tattoos remain among the last visible traces of a cultural system now rapidly disappearing. Photograph: Ameen Charles / Community Development Centre (CDC), Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh
What many now describe as untouched wilderness was once a worked landscape, shaped by fire, harvest, and restraint. Across North America, Indigenous communities actively managed forests, grasslands, and wetlands for millennia. Controlled burning reduced catastrophic fires, maintained open meadows, and encouraged biodiversity. Selective harvesting ensured regeneration. Seasonal movement prevented exhaustion of soil and water.
Research by scholars such as M. Kat Anderson and Frank Lake documents how Native American communities including the Ahwahneechee of Yosemite Valley, the Blackfeet of the Great Plains, and the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region sustained these landscapes through intimate ecological knowledge. Yosemite’s open meadows, later celebrated as pristine nature, were in fact the product of regular human intervention.
When these communities were forcibly removed during the establishment of national parks in the nineteenth century, the systems that maintained ecological balance collapsed. Forests grew denser. Fires burned hotter. Biodiversity declined. What followed was not preservation, but transformation.
Yet the image of wilderness as empty endured. Iconic photographs by Ansel Adams, widely celebrated for their beauty, reinforced the idea of landscapes untouched by human hands. The absence of people in these images was not neutral. It erased histories and justified displacement. Aesthetic power became political cover.
This model of exclusionary conservation travelled globally. Exported through colonial administrations and later embedded in post-colonial states, it privileged enforcement, tourism, and external expertise over lived knowledge. The result was a conservation system that measured success by absence rather than relationship.
Today, more than 200,000 protected areas cover roughly 15% of the Earth’s land surface. Their expansion has often come at a human cost rarely acknowledged in conservation narratives.
In India alone, over 100,000 Indigenous people had been evicted from protected areas by 2009. Subsequent studies indicate that displacement has continued. Research covering twenty-six protected areas between 1999 and 2019 documented the eviction of more than 13,000 families, predominantly from tribal communities. The National Tiger Conservation Authority reports that over 56,000 families have been relocated since the early 1970s in the name of tiger protection.
Similar patterns appear across Africa and Southeast Asia. In Kenya’s Maasai Mara, pastoralist communities have been pushed aside to make way for national parks and luxury safari lodges. In the Congo Basin, forest peoples have been excluded from ancestral lands, even as illegal logging and extractive industries continue within protected zones.
Removal does not create neutrality. It creates absence. And absence is quickly filled, not by balance, but by pressure.
Displacement severs livelihoods and cultural continuity. Communities lose access to sacred sites, seasonal foods, medicinal plants, and social systems rooted in place. Resettled families are often moved to marginal farmland or urban peripheries where traditional skills offer little security. Poverty, malnutrition, and social fragmentation frequently follow.
The ecological consequences are no less severe. Investigations in the Congo Basin have revealed conservation personnel involved in illegal logging. In parts of Southeast Asia, park authorities have been implicated in wildlife trafficking. In Madagascar, valuable hardwoods such as rosewood have been extracted by networks operating under the shadow of conservation projects.
These failures are not incidental. They reflect systems that remove long-term custodians and replace them with short-term enforcement.
Maasai women stand at the edge of their grazing lands in East Africa. For generations, pastoralist communities like the Maasai have managed ecosystems through movement, seasonal restraint, and deep knowledge of land and wildlife. Conservation policies that treat human presence as incompatible with nature often overlook these relationships.
The Weight of Cultural Severance
Displacement is not only physical. It is cultural.
When land is lost, knowledge tied to that land becomes unusable. Agricultural calendars no longer align. Rituals lose their reference points. Songs and stories rooted in specific hills, rivers, or trees become abstractions.
Poverty, as experienced by many Indigenous communities, is often misunderstood. A simple life is not the same as deprivation. For many, land provides meaning, social coherence, and identity. When that connection is severed, poverty becomes more than economic. It becomes existential.
A Rohingya elder once described removal from her forest homeland in Burma in these terms. “When we are taken from our land, it is like losing our shadow,” she said. In her village, time was read through shadows cast by trees and hills. In exile, that orientation vanished.
Such losses are not easily repaired. Studies indicate that displaced forest communities may remain trapped in poverty for generations. Even when material conditions improve, the rupture of knowledge systems and social networks persists.
Yet resilience endures. Across continents, displaced communities continue to safeguard fragments of their heritage. Medicinal plants are carried across borders. Oral traditions are passed quietly within families. Rituals are adapted, hidden, or practised in new forms.
These acts are not nostalgic. They are strategies of survival.
Despite these failures, another story runs alongside the dominant narrative of exclusion. It is quieter, less visible, but consistently effective.
In Australia, Indigenous Protected Areas allow Aboriginal communities to manage vast tracts of land using a combination of traditional knowledge and contemporary science. Controlled burning has reduced wildfires. Biodiversity has improved. Employment and cultural continuity have been strengthened.
In the Amazon, Indigenous-managed territories consistently show lower deforestation rates and higher carbon storage than adjacent protected areas. A 2022 study published in Nature Sustainability found that Indigenous forests store significantly more carbon per hectare than non-Indigenous ones.
Along the coast of southern Madagascar, the Vezo people have sustained marine ecosystems through customary governance systems known as Dina. Faced with declining fish stocks, they established locally managed marine areas, enforcing seasonal closures and protecting breeding grounds. Fish populations rebounded dramatically, with some areas reporting increases of over 60%.
These outcomes are not accidental. They reflect governance rooted in accountability to place. Knowledge is tested over generations. Mistakes carry immediate consequences. Stewardship is inseparable from survival.
Similar successes appear in Bolivia, Guatemala, Canada, and the Pacific. Where communities retain authority, ecosystems tend to recover. Where they are excluded, degradation accelerates.
Vezo fisherman working coastal waters, southwest Madagascar: For generations, Vezo livelihoods have been governed by customary marine tenure, seasonal closures, and detailed knowledge of fish breeding cycles. These practices have sustained both people and marine life. When conservation frameworks are imposed without recognising such systems, they risk undermining proven forms of stewardship and harming the communities whose knowledge has long kept these waters alive.
Authority, Knowledge, and the Limits of Recognition
International frameworks such as ILO Convention No. 169 and rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights formally recognise the collective land rights of Indigenous peoples. On paper, these instruments mark significant progress. In practice, their impact is often constrained by the very systems meant to uphold them. Recognition is granted, but authority remains conditional.
The gap between legal acknowledgement and lived reality is not accidental. It reflects a deeper structure in which conservation continues to be governed through external expertise, managerial logic, and institutional authority. Indigenous rights are affirmed, yet decisions about land use, access, enforcement, and acceptable forms of knowledge are still largely made elsewhere.
This is not simply a failure of implementation. It is a legacy of colonial thinking that persists beneath contemporary conservation language. While overt colonial administrations have receded, their assumptions endure: that nature is best managed from a distance, that legitimacy flows from formal credentials rather than lived competence, and that local knowledge is valuable only once translated into institutional terms.
As a result, Indigenous and traditional communities are frequently invited to participate, but rarely to lead. Their ecological knowledge is documented, consulted, and selectively incorporated, yet seldom allowed to set the terms of conservation itself. Participation becomes procedural. Authority remains external.
This hierarchy of knowledge has practical consequences. Conservation strategies designed without deep grounding in local realities repeatedly fail to anticipate seasonal cycles, social obligations, or the fine-grained decision-making that sustains ecosystems over time. Enforcement replaces stewardship. Compliance replaces care.
Decolonial thinking, in this context, is not an abstract academic exercise. It is a necessary recalibration of who is trusted to know, decide, and act. It requires recognising that many Indigenous conservation systems were never lost. They were displaced, marginalised, or overwritten by models that mistook control for protection.
The challenge, then, is not to romanticise Indigenous knowledge, nor to reject science. It is to dismantle the assumption that science must always sit above tradition, rather than alongside it. Data without context misleads. Tradition without adaptation stagnates. But where empirical research and lived ecological knowledge meet as equals, conservation becomes both more ethical and more effective.
Sustainable conservation does not emerge from integration alone, but from a redistribution of authority. Until Indigenous and traditional communities are recognised not merely as stakeholders but as rightful stewards, conservation will continue to reproduce the very imbalances it claims to correct.
PORTRAIT OF SHREEEAM GURJAR, KRASKA VILLAGE, GURJAR TRIBE, SARISKA TIGER RESERVE, RAJASTHAN, INDIA
A member of the Gurjar pastoral community, his relationship with the forest is shaped by generations of lived knowledge rather than policy or management plans. For communities like the Gurjar, conservation has long been practised through seasonal movement, restraint, and familiarity with animal behaviour. When such knowledge is excluded from protected landscapes, what is lost is not only access to land, but an entire way of understanding and caring for the living world.
The Question Conservation Must Face
In the hills of Central India, the Baiga do not speak of conservation as a policy or an outcome. They speak of obligation. The forest is not something to be protected from people, but something sustained through restraint, reciprocity, and memory. When those relationships are broken, the damage is not symbolic. It is ecological, social, and enduring.
Across the world, similar systems have long governed how people live with land and water. In Australia, Aboriginal fire practices shaped entire ecosystems, preventing catastrophic burns and renewing grasslands for millennia. Along the coasts of Madagascar, the Vezo learned to read currents, breeding cycles, and seasons with a precision no satellite image can replace. In the Amazon, Indigenous territories continue to show lower deforestation and higher biodiversity than adjacent protected areas, not because they are untouched, but because they are actively cared for.
These are not isolated successes. They reveal a pattern that conservation has too often refused to acknowledge. Where Indigenous and traditional communities retain authority over their lands, ecosystems tend to recover and endure. Where they are removed, landscapes unravel. Poaching increases. Fires burn hotter. Extraction accelerates. The idea that nature thrives best in the absence of people collapses under its own evidence.
Displacement, however, remains one of conservation’s most persistent tools. Entire communities have been moved for the creation of parks, reserves, and wildlife corridors, often with little consultation and inadequate compensation. Families are relocated to the margins of towns or unfamiliar farmland, severed from the knowledge systems that sustained them. Sacred sites fall out of use. Songs lose their meaning. Skills tied to specific soils, trees, and waters become impossible to pass on.
The cost of this rupture is measured not only in poverty or loss of livelihood, but in time. Studies show that displaced forest communities can take generations to regain stability, if they do at all. What disappears in the meantime is irreplaceable: ecological knowledge refined over centuries, encoded not in manuals but in practice.
Conservation was never meant to erase people. Yet its dominant models have too often privileged distant expertise over local understanding, enforcement over trust, and tourism over continuity. The result is a system that claims to protect nature while undermining the very relationships that have sustained it.
A different approach is not speculative. It already exists. Indigenous Protected Areas, community-managed forests, locally governed marine reserves, and customary land tenure systems demonstrate that conservation rooted in rights and responsibility works. These models do not reject science. They complement it, grounding data in lived experience and long-term accountability.
The question facing conservation today is not whether humans belong in nature, but which forms of human presence are recognised as legitimate. If conservation continues to treat Indigenous and traditional communities as obstacles rather than partners, it will remain ethically compromised and ecologically fragile.
Land remembers those who care for it. So do rivers, reefs, and forests. Where people remain embedded in these places, knowledge persists and life adapts. Where they are removed, both culture and ecology thin out, leaving behind landscapes that may look protected on a map, but are poorer in every sense that matters.
The future of conservation does not lie in creating emptiness. It lies in restoring relationships.
