As forest fires and floods rage in an unprecedented fashion across the planet, world leaders are scrambling to devise sweeping solutions to protect the last remaining vestiges of the planet’s biodiversity. But what are the assumptions underpinning the proposals being put forward? Vijay Kolinjivadi and Gert Van Hecken examine the impacts and manifestations of the “White Saviour” logic for nature conservation that prevails in the world today, and how it is informed by damaging and outdated notions of securitisation, cultural appropriation, and displacement.
There is no denying that the world’s biodiversity is under serious threat. A recent proposal that has gained significant traction to address this decline is to designate 30 per cent of the earth’s surface as protected areas by 2030 (commonly referred to as the Global Deal for Nature, or the 30×30 Plan). This proposal will be discussed at the world’s top-most biodiversity summit expected in 2022 in Kunming, China. The 30 per cent reservation for “nature” is itself viewed as part of a roadmap towards the idea that “Nature Needs Half” – a campaign calling for half of the world to be dedicated to nature, rather than human activities.
At first glance and given the urgent need to act to halt species extinction, nature conservation seems like a common-sense solution. The narrative of humans destroying a passive and innocent nature is enough to raise the empathetic emotions of any well-meaning person. Yet, a look beyond the surface reveals that the current protection agenda is not only a dangerous distraction from the root causes of environmental degradation but is also the ongoing legacy of colonial practices and modes of thinking. As historian Corey Ross describes, European colonisers in the 19th century decimated wildlife across large parts of Africa, primarily for forestry, mining, agriculture, and elite sport hunting. When the colonisers realised the impacts of their actions, they sought to redress them through protected areas for conservation, blaming locals for their generations-old subsistence practices and proclaiming themselves the experts of nature protection. Ross emphasises that Europe’s proclaimed “mastery over nature” was a core feature of its imperialist history, and a justification for subjugating populations around the world.
Unfortunately, this colonial legacy doesn’t seem to have altered much, and has instead become inscribed within a professionalised apparatus of technical and scientific expertise. It places the “White Saviour” as the ultimate arbiter of the value of natural spaces and which communities are entitled to inhabit or access them. Plans for 30 per cent or 50 per cent conservation overlook the violent history of the origins of conservation strategies and how they have served and continue to reinforce a destructive and colonial relationship with the environment, often by justifying nature protection as a “civilised” response to the inevitable destruction caused by rampant capitalist growth.
Whiteness as capitalist ecology
For the privileged classes, the ecological challenge has become a question of, firstly, managing public relations to deflect potential risks to future profit. Secondly, it has meant finding novel ways to extract profit from nature conservation itself. Finally, it has entailed draconian protection measures that attempt to fence off significant tracts of the planet, in the name of protecting natural and other species, to compensate for intensive and continuously expanding human development elsewhere. These three approaches are not mutually exclusive; the first two relate to maintaining existing economic systems, while the third appeases a kind of guilt for having decimated the living world over many centuries.
What unifies these options is a worldview that we refer to as “whiteness”. Beyond a matter of skin colour, “whiteness” refers fundamentally to belief systems rooted in Western European aesthetics and unequivocal faith in logics of modern progress that have historically shaped (neo)colonial strategies of resource exploitation and dehumanisation. In its current globalised form, whiteness is materially manifested through a homogenous ecology of capital production, ruthlessly erasing any types of diversity not regarded as profitable assets. This ecology of homogenisation has taken shape through structural inequalities constructed over the past five centuries.
Whiteness is a deeply normalised ideology that points the finger at an imperfect world that only requires greater technical sophistication and political will to manage. In it, nature become rebranded through bankable buzzwords like “nature-based solutions” or “ecosystem services”. Smallholder peasants and Indigenous people are reduced to participants of precarious wage labour markets or custodians of nature for cultural tourism. Yet, this framing is a paternalistic strategy to perpetuate business as usual. To halt ecological breakdown, it is rather our relationships to each other and to non-humans that need to change.
Constructing a protection narrative
The aim of the Kunming summit’s Global Deal for Nature proposal is to “halt the destruction of the natural world and slow extinctions of wildlife” by protecting 30 per cent of the earth’s land and water areas and to kick-start a decade of ecosystem restoration. The proposal is supported by a coalition of more than 50 countries, the world’s most influential conservation organisations, and hundreds of economists and natural scientists. Last year, the European Commission aligned its plans to this 30 per cent proposal by setting out an annual 20-billion-euro biodiversity strategy for 2030 to restore and protect the EU’s ecosystems. The EU’s support for further expanding protected areas around the world is also in line with the EU Green Deal, which aims to dedicate 1 trillion euros over a 10-year period.
While sounding ambitious, these proposals ultimately reinforce the valuing of nature according to its economic utility. The implication is one of hypocritical paternalism: half of “nature” must be protected by a morally enlightened modern man(kind) from destructive and uneducated others. Yet, this moral class of man(kind) fundamentally depends upon a constructed underclass for providing their own basic needs, while simultaneously holding them responsible for global ecological breakdown. Industrialised growth preys upon a growing base of cheap and unskilled labour as well as cheap resources of nature, to impose a universal understanding of “progress”. These contradictions never take centre stage as the source of the problem for this moralising class.
This moralising narrative continues to treat justice for the marginalised and oppressed in isolation from the management of nature and the environment. Global conservation organisations like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Geographic Society, to name a few, play a key role in perpetuating this narrative. They work with multinational corporations towards long-term investable strategies like carbon and biodiversity offsets, climate adaptation to securitise built infrastructure, and protected areas for global tourism. When global conservation organisations depend fundamentally on private equity holders to carry out their advocacy campaigns, it is little surprise that they work in furthering, or at least not opposing, the interests of large corporations. Moreover, when conservation science is funded in part by private endowments from agribusiness interests and their state-led partners, a particularly noxious alliance emerges whereby the latest scientific analyses directly fuel private-sector-friendly solutions. This in turn serves as the impetus for new scientific research grants, continuing the cycle. The result generates a professionalised class of experts that work, perhaps unwittingly, as “saviours” to frame problems, define solutions, and ultimately deflect any threats to modern capitalist society.
White saviours of nature
The claim that “Nature Needs Half” infuses several particularly damaging relations that have historically shut out any other alternative. The “White Saviour” embodies what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen call the “imperial mode of living”: the expectation that both individual and societal orientations can proceed through an unlimited appropriation of resources. This “imperial” lifestyle is the essence of the European settler’s dream of the “New World” – a vast frontier of unlimited natural resources to treat as one-way flows for industrialisation, wilderness to conquer or romanticise about, and “primitive” Indigenous and racialised people to put to work as dehumanised labour. The violence of this settler dream is not mitigated by making economic production more material or energy-efficient, nor by fencing-off large tracts of land for preservation. Rather, these measures only sustain delusional “save the world” fantasies of settler tech-utopians and self-proclaimed environmentalists.
A “White Saviour” logic manifests itself most clearly in the treatment of “nature” through a utilitarian value ethic by which the non-human world is reframed as “natural capital” and becomes exploitable resources for profit, even in the name of its own “protection”. Protected areas are to be strategically repackaged as under-utilised assets ripe for exploitation to reap the multiplier effects that “protection” will provide for the economy, including the growth of nature tourism and financial flows in the trade of carbon credits and other “ecosystem services”. For instance, proponents argue that protecting 30 per cent of the earth’s surface will generate a financial output of 64-454 billion US dollars per year by 2050. In doing so, nature is rendered manageable to deflect risks to imperial lifestyles while being a lucrative asset in its own right.
A more ecologically-attuned approach towards interconnected social and ecological crises would recognise the linkages between industrial economic growth, forced migrations of displaced people, urban sprawl, and the demands of capital-intensive lifestyles, and the climate change, fragmentation, and mass extinctions that result. A “White Saviour” ecology, however, views them all as separate crises to be addressed in isolation. As a result, deeply entangled social and ecological crises are addressed through technocratic quick fixes that are designed to produce calculable, predictable, and efficiency-oriented results according to artificially set deadlines like 2030 or 2050. “White Saviour” ecology has no incentive to bring about structural changes in human-nature relationships because it benefits from the status quo.
Perhaps most striking is the “White Saviour” approach to engaging with Indigenous people in conservation. In reflecting upon the guilt of seeing the physical world being destroyed, European colonisers saw the forests and fields around them as “pristine and untouched”, even though evidence points to the fact that primary forests were rather outcomes of generations of active stewardship, imbued with cultural significance by non-European peoples. Yet, the brutal colonial has stood the test of time from the 15th century to 2021. Land continues to be defined in terms of how “productive” it is for economic growth potential; either it is living up to its productive capacity or it is under-utilised and requires investment. Productive uses include industrial monocrops for export markets, protected areas designed largely for tourism, and strategic buffers for national defence. Indigenous peoples of all continents and generations-old expertise of living on Earth were, by and large, blamed for their backwardness and savagely humiliated or simply wiped out in order to conform to a European “standard” of modernity and “progress.” Ironically, today this very standard of modernity and progress is replicated by putting Indigenous people to work in service of securing the colonial project from ecological collapse. By framing Indigenous participation as custodians of nature, the actual demand of autonomous self-determination for Indigenous people is yet again conveniently sidestepped by the historical perpetrators of colonial violence. By infantilizing their knowledge through concepts like “cultural ecosystem services”, “nature-based services”, or “traditional ecological knowledge”, their contributions are tokenised and re-appropriated to justify land grabs for nature conservation and offset projects.
While industrial fisheries, agriculture, large-scale mining, and mega-infrastructure projects are cast as unquestioned modern marvels of progress, smallholder peasants and agropastoral communities are assumed to be un-ecological and part of the problem. These people, who represent the vast majority of food producers on earth (largely women) are depicted as needing “education” at best or are targeted for land dispossession and cultural erasure at worst. This often takes the insidious form of development banks and multilateral organisations like the FAO and the World Bank claiming that access to land, markets, finance, and integration into the wage economy for smallholders is essentially the only sustainable option available. Failing to play the capitalism game makes these people part of the problem – often discussed in terms of an “overpopulation” problem, with racist and classist undertones. With the expansion of protected areas, nature conservation joins forces with large-scale mining and energy projects as well industrial agriculture and paramilitary forces in depriving millions of people of their only means of subsistence and sovereignty in order to adopt capital-intensive and presumably “greener” lifestyles. In practice, this means forcing smallholder agriculturalists to adopt migrant status in the search for cheap work. This is hardly an ecologically beneficial outcome.
We need transformative relationships
A “White Saviour” Deal for Nature responds to ecological breakdown by prioritising a pristine and historically flawed imaginary of wilderness over the real struggles of people for basic needs, dignity, and justice. It comes to rescue modern globalised society from its own destructive ecological effects, without recognising that the logic of endless economic growth is an inherently destructive ecology, one which bears the everyday violent and ongoing histories of white supremacy.
Teaser photo credit: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) @ USAID Biodiversity & Forestry / Flickr.com
