Conserving Dispossession? A Genealogical Account of the Colonial Roots of Western Conservation

Abstract

Western dominant global conservation is generally conceived of and understood as an unqualified ‘good’. The dark side of this so-called unqualified ‘good’ is told explicitly by listening to the testimonies of Indigenous peoples, the world over, who bear witness to and enact resistance against the practices of dispossession, eviction, and forced incorporation into a capitalist economic underclass that serve as the means of achieving ‘conservation’. This article offers a limited genealogy of this exclusionary conservation. It does so through focusing on the Euro-Western values integrated into this model that are steeped in histories and continuous practices of colonial dispossession.