Wildlife conservationist Richard Leakey stirred up controversy at the Durban World Parks Congress on Thursday by saying conservation had to come before the rights of indigenous people.
Protected nature areas were too important to be ”subjugated” to people complaining of eviction from ancestral lands in the name of biodiversity, said Leakey.
Indigenous people deserved compensation but to let them manage the parks where they once lived risked unravelling environmental and economic gains, he said.
Indigenous groups reacted with anger, saying his views were out of step with efforts to redress historical injustices borne by ethnic groups such as the Twa and San.
”Leakey’s taking us back to the colonial era,” said Edward Porokwa, of Tanzania’s Masai.
About 2 500 environmentalists are at the congress, run by the World Conservation Union. Gonzalo Oviedo, of the union, said Leakey’s words were a step backwards in the effort to balance conservation with people’s rights.
But Leakey said that though colonisation had been a disaster, ”long before people there was nature, long before people there was climate change, long before people there were mass extinctions. Of course [there] should be compensation for losing land, but these parks belong to the world.” — Guardian Unlimited