Decolonizing Nature: How “Wilderness” Dispossesses Indigenous People

In 2019, we learned that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had been funding and arming paramilitary groups throughout the global South.¹ These militias, ostensibly created in an effort to stop poaching have, among other things, killed and tortured Indigenous people. We as leftists rightly recoil from these acts of racist and imperialist violence, but the conservation movement has in many ways been built on the dispossession and death of Indigenous peoples. This recent expose reveals only the most blatant modern form of an older racist, colonialist understanding of humanity’s role in the natural world.

In retrospect, it is clear that killing and displacing Indigenous groups which lived in a mutually beneficial relationship with their environment for tens of thousands of years and replacing them with a civilization that has brought Earth to the brink of eco-apocalypse in the span of two centuries was not the best strategy for protecting the environment. However, this was the common sense for centuries. The notion that humans, especially Indigenous humans, must be removed from nature in order to save it, and that “pristine wilderness” must be quarantined from an inherently destructive humanity has its historical roots in white supremacy.² When European colonists arrived in North America, they did not recognize the active management of ecosystems by Indigenous groups as “agriculture.” As Indigenous people lived on but did not “steward” the land in a capitalist sense, the land was viewed as a “virgin wilderness” being “wasted” on “unproductive” peoples. Their dispossession was therefore legitimated by God, who had “given” the land to European settlers to tame and cultivate. Such notions were invoked during the foundation of the United States, and have been used by the religious right in Israel to justify the ongoing expropriation of Palestinian territory. 

Of course, the Indigenous people of the Americas, like Indigenous people all over the world, were engaged in active management of the ecosystems in which they lived and in cultivation of resources to support their societies. Advanced agricultural techniques like prescribed burning were used to encourage the growth of gardens of edible food within old growth forests or prairies, just as the purposeful management of Bison and other game stood in for (arguably much crueler) European-style animal husbandry. These practices of cultivation were alien, and indeed invisible, to European eyes.

The settler-colonial notion of uncultivated “wilderness” as a place to be appropriated and developed according to European standards has a seemingly contradictory shadow.³ After the “closing of the frontier” in the 1890s, settlers in the Americas began to long for the romanticized past of colonial conquest. Wealthy settlers, perhaps finding their apogee in Theodore Roosevelt, began to consider “untouched wilderness” as a spiritual necessity for what they considered the quintessentially American character of the frontiersman. The frontier ethos, in Roosevelt’s words, “taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision.” This became the motivation for much of the early conservation efforts of the United States. Yet many US National Parks, often considered the most impressive and wide-reaching conservation achievement in the world, were once the sacred homelands of Indigenous nations who were run out, tortured and killed in the name of “conservation.” 

Although at first glance this preservationist mindset might seem totally distinct from the notion of wilderness as a place to be conquered and civilized, it too was built on racist assumptions; namely, an erroneous conception of “nature” as something completely removed from society, cultivation and production. The preservationist mindset makes the same error in assuming that the North American landscape was also “uncultivated” and free from human influence. This created the imperative to remove people from the land to be preserved to recreate a fictitious landscape free from human intervention. The misguidedness of this idea is on display today at Yosemite National Park, the first land specifically set aside for conservation in the United States. The park was created to protect the open black-oak woodlands from which visitors could enjoy spectacular mountain vistas. Yet to preserve this sublime experience and allow “nature” to take its course, the Ahwahnechee people had to first be removed from the land. But only decades later, Yosemite’s vistas began to disappear as conifers took root between the magnificent oaks, blotting out the sky and mountain views. In fact, the beautiful woodlands of Yosemite were kept that way only through the purposeful intervention of the Ahwahnechee, whose controlled burns removed conifer seedlings but left the mighty fire-resistant oaks unscathed. As Bookchin notes,

The great prairies of the Midwest were literally created by Indian torches, which were systematically applied, long before those lands were expropriated by Europeans. Since humanity’s discovery of fire, few forests that we can call “virgin” remain today…⁴

Far from “untouched nature,” the very areas ecologists and conservationists sought to protect were created through the careful management of Indigenous inhabitants, some of whom were eventually displaced by such efforts.

The Janus-faced notion of “pristine wilderness” has been wielded against Indigenous peoples for centuries, but is based on a fundamentally mistaken view of nature and wilderness. It sees nature through a primarily aesthetic lens, as a frozen snapshot of a perfectly picturesque landscape, untouched, untouchable and totally separate from the worlds of society and production. Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of dialectical naturalism reminds us that nature is not static, but an evolutionary process wherein human social life is not separate from but develops out of the natural world, which is the material basis of all human production and cultivation.⁵ Ecological societies are not separated from their local ecosystems, nor do they simply dwell “in” them. Rather, the social and ecological systems are continuous, and form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

Bookchin’s magnum opus The Ecology of Freedom drew extensively from Indigenous cultures, referred to as “organic society,” to describe the principles that might animate a social ecological society, including complementarity (compensating for the “inequality of equals”), usufruct (a communist ethos based on use not ownership), and the irreducible minimum (guaranteed access to means of existence).⁶ Indigenous societies animated by these principles have existed for tens of thousands of years, while our anti-ecological society has rapidly brought the biosphere to the brink of collapse. They have been able to meet human needs while avoiding the destruction and simplification of ecosystems that has been a hallmark of colonial capitalist civilization. Even today, the United Nations recognizes that 80% of extant biodiversity is located on Indigenous lands.⁷

There is a danger of misinterpreting these facts to mean that Indigenous people are somehow essentially distinct from other peoples; that there is an innate or metaphysical connection between the “race” of Indigenous peoples and Earth. But leftists must reject this essentialist notion as well, as it creates yet another hierarchy of reified racial categories. It is intimately tied to the same white supremacist sentiments that hold Indigenous people to be of another kind— perhaps even closer to non-human animals—than other humans. Such essentialist notions are unhelpful in constructing a just, equitable and ecological future. In the revised 1991 edition of The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin warned against the emergence of a “highly romanticized” view of Indigenous societies on the ecological left.⁸ He emphasizes that Indigenous peoples are no different than the people who become colonizers in any “structural sense,” but rather, the difference is that “their thinking occurs in a cultural context that is fundamentally different from ours.”⁹ The lesson leftists must take from Indigenous cultures is not that this or that group of humans is inherently ecological or anti-ecological, but that a “harmonized view of nature follows directly from the harmonized relations within the… human community.”¹⁰

The most basic concepts of evolution belie the claim that any species could evolve to be uniquely unsuited to live among other species. Such a species simply could not have survived, as humans have for hundreds of thousands of years, without wiping itself out. Human society evolves out of the strictly zoological world of first nature, and is no less a part of the biosphere than are pods of whales or flocks of birds. The issue is therefore not humanity or civilization per se, but a particular hierarchical, colonial, capitalist society which simplifies and interrupts Earth systems to the detriment of humanity and other species. “[I]f we are not to sink into the fatuities of romanticism and mysticism,” Bookchin argues, then the question is “not whether humans should intervene into nature…but how they should intervene and toward what ends.”¹¹ The structure of our society inexorably determines our ontological outlook and subsequently our relations with the rest of nature; we can design it to function in reciprocity with the rest of the natural world, or in conflict with it. Our task is not to return to an idealized past, or to fetishize and appropriate the cultures of Indigenous peoples. Rather it is to determine which aspects of the current dominant society bring us into conflict with the rest of the natural world, to identify the historical junctures out of which these characteristics arose, and to imagine alternative paths society could take. In this endeavor, societies which have developed along more ecological paths are indispensable resources. 

It is clear that a society constructed on ecological principles is incompatible with capitalism, which considers non-human nature as nothing more than a collection of commodities to be extracted, and colonialism, which creates the kind of systematic deprivation and domination which drives things like the illegal wildlife trade. John Bellamy Foster has described ecological imperialism in relation to the “metabolic rift,” building on Marx’s writing on how early British capitalism severed the metabolic connection between peasant farmers and the land they worked.¹² Prior to capitalism, plant, animal and human waste were returned to the fields from which the peasant’s food came, so that peasants lived in a reciprocal, cyclical and ecological relationship with the land. Under capitalism however, nutrients extracted from the soil in the form of food are exported to distant locales and disposed of, so that the relationship becomes a unidirectional, exploitative one. This led to what Foster considers the forebearer of today’s resource-extraction colonialism—the mining of bird guano by the capitalist nations from the islands of South America. Today, this exploitative relationship has been exported all over the world, as resources are extracted from the global periphery to be consumed primarily in the imperial core. We know that poaching is driven by demand from developed countries and exacerbated by economic strife, and that bushmeat hunting did not become a real threat to wildlife populations until imperial powers drove these species to the brink of extinction through natural resource extraction and habitat destruction.

Colonialism and ecological devastation are but two intertwined articulations of the hierarchy and domination that structures our entire society. Our current ecological crisis has arisen out of this parallel crisis in human society. If we want to conserve biodiversity and end neocolonial relations, we must reconfigure our capitalist colonial world into a just and ecological one, dismantling all systems of hierarchy and oppression, returning stolen lands to Indigenous people, and providing a dignified life for all. 

1. Karen McVeigh, “WWF accused of funding guards who ‘tortured and killed scores of people'”, The Guardian (March 4, 2019). [Accessed November 6, 2019] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/mar/04/wwf-accused-of-funding-guards-who-allegedly-tortured-killed-scores-of-people.
2. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, Environmental History, (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1996), 7-28.
3. ibid.
4. Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1999), 69.
5.  Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1996).
6. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Oakland, AK Press, 2005).
7. S. Garnett, et al, “A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation”, Nature Sustainability (Vol. 1, No. 7, 2018), 369-374.
8. Bookchin 2005, 15-63.
9. ibid 110.
10. ibid 115.
11. Bookchin 1999, 73.
12. John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology”, American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 105, No. 2, 1999), 366-405.