There is a massive land grab on an unprecedented scale, notably in Africa, using the mask of “conservation” and “protecting nature” to throw people off their land and wreck their nature-friendly ways of existence.
The Scientific American notes in its October 2021 editorial the danger of “a new model of colonialism” that “forces those least responsible for climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental crises to pay the highest price for averting them”.
"...In the Congo Basin, for example, armed eco-guards have brutally evicted Indigenous Pygmies from the rain forest to carve out protected areas. These wildlife reserves expanded following a CBD [the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity] resolution in 2010 to dedicate 17 percent of Earth's terrestrial surface to nature. Yet the protected areas are surrounded by or sometimes even overlaid with oil, mining or logging concessions. Unsurprisingly, chimpanzee, gorilla and elephant populations have continued to decline even as Pygmy peoples have been consigned to poverty and misery..."
There is now a new policy of the “30x30” campaign to protect 30 percent of Earth's land and sea surface by 2030.
In L’invention du colonialisme vert (‘The Invention of Green Colonialism’), the author, Guillaume Blanc, warns that in their bid to “protect” 30% or even 50% of the planet, there exists a threat essentially aiming to rid vast swathes of the non-Western world of all indigenous life.
He says that the “naturalization” of parts of Africa effectively amounts to “dehumanization” and involves “putting areas inside parks, banning agriculture, excluding people, getting rid of their fields and grazing grounds in order to create a supposedly natural world without humans”.
This is achieved by forced resettling of populations and the social disintegration that goes along with it, together with the use of fines, prison sentences, beatings, even rapes and murders. Missionary-like brainwashing propaganda, via the inevitable “participatory workshops”, has also been used to persuade people to leave their land. Blanc explains that the international conservation “experts” claim to be working for harmonious global governance. Their principles are supposedly moral – they are said to be fighting poverty, hunger and disease – and their standards are presented as ethical, in that the development they are promoting is allegedly sustainable, community-based and participative. It is deeply contradictory in content, “giving nature to the people; preventing the people from living in it”.
There are echoes of the historical enclosures in England and elsewhere in the way that living on the land, in traditional ways, has been criminalised in order to bring about disempowerment and helpless dependence on an industrial system. To justify the land grab a false image has been built up, explains Blanc, according to which Africa is a virgin natural paradise threatened by the presence of its own indigenous human inhabitants. The love of nature, and the desire to protect it, is thus twisted and weaponized into a new excuse to pillage and colonise Africa.
Peasant farmers in Africa are accused of “destroying nature”, while they in fact produce their own food, eat very little meat or fish, very rarely buy new clothes, move around on foot and don’t own computers or smart phones.
Blanc comments: “If we want to save the planet, we should all be living like them”. (3) Instead, such people are being ruthlessly driven from the land.
“Behind every social injustice endured by those living close to nature in Africa, we always find UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization], the WWF [World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund], the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature] or Fauna and Flora International”
Taken from
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