Ed. note: This article was originally published at Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises.
“The elders tell us we’ve got three years before it gets really intense. And it’s going to happen unless we change our consciousness now. We need everybody in this time. We are all gurus. You’re a guru, believe it or not. There are no more singular gurus. The answers are in your hearts.” — Illarion Mercullieff, (Unangax̂ , Aleut)
RAPID CITY, S.D.—Wild nature on planet Earth is in a state of free fall. It is a “biodiversity crisis,” in the language of wilderness conservationists and policymakers. In what is being described as a sixth mass extinction, unique species who evolved over millions of years are today being swept out of existence at a rate unseen since the collapse of the dinosaurs. The losses are “dizzying,” with 70 percent of the world’s wildlife populations eliminated just since 1970, said Stephen Woodley, an ecologist and vice chair for science and biodiversity at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Humankind is both a victim of this crisis as well as “the asteroid” causing the collapse. Some, of course, are more “asteroid” than others.
Gathering in the last week of August in the Black Hills of South Dakota, or Hé Sapa in Lakota, speakers and organizers of the 12th convening of the World Wilderness Congress say the extinction crisis is intrinsically tied to both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the rising heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels.
To arrest the climate crisis, in other words, requires deepening and expanding protections for wilderness. And that has increased attention on those wild lands and waters that lie beyond urban and agricultural areas, “wilderness” zones that today represent only 26 percent of the Earth. Only about a quarter of that quarter—around 6%—have some form of official protections.
Increasingly, global conversations on conservation are recognizing that restoring wilderness also requires restoring land and agency to Indigenous communities, tribes, and nations. Yet not so long ago, wilderness conservation as a Western paradigm was rooted in the genocide and eviction of original peoples from their traditional homelands by colonial powers. Today’s conservation efforts increasingly involve—or are even led by—Indigenous peoples. It’s been a slow paradigm shift that is center stage at WILD12.
Woodley was addressing the audience as part of a panel dedicated to the intersection of indigenous land tenure and The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Adopted in 2022, Target Three of that vision calls specifically for preserving 30 percent of the planet’s lands and waters as wilderness by 2030*. It further calls for “recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories.”
Chief Tashka Yawanawá and Laura Yawanawá speaking at WILD12. Image: Greg Harman
Yet even such language was developed without significant Indigenous input, stated panelist Andrea Carmen, the Yaqui executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council. And while Indigenous land rights are recognized in a fraction of existing wilderness spaces, biodiversity targets like Target Three put the bulk of those remaining lands, and the people occupying them, in the crosshairs.
“Just do the math. How much of that targeted land is going to be targeting the lands and territories and waters that have been traditionally owned, used, occupied, and acquired by Indigenous peoples themselves?” Carmen asked.
Without clear delineation of land rights, shifting conservation priorities risk doing further harm to Native communities.
Illustrating the difference between Western conservation framings and many Indigenous cosmologies, Carmen added:
“Our word for the spirit world [translates as] the flower wilderness. Not the flower garden.”
The Framework’s 30 percent by 2030 goals are also a far cry from the 50 percent of lands and waters called for protecting at the conclusion of WILD9, held in Mérida, Yucatan, México, in 2009. That declaration evolved into an international campaign known as Nature Needs Half, later popularized by famed biologist E.O. Wilson in his book “Half Earth.”
The increased attention to placing Indigenous thought and leadership at the center of wilderness preservation efforts has resulted in some improvements.
“Anyone talking about us now, we are not excluded in the target, we are included,” said Ramson Karmushu, a Maasai organizer dedicated to documenting and preserving Indigenous knowledge. “Everyone who is coming to do conservation is thinking about indigenous peoples and is including us in all of these discussions.”
Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, welcoming attendees this week to the 12th World Wilderness Congress.
In Amazonia, it is Indigenous peoples who are most involved in maintaining the well being of wilderness, a tropical zone prized at least rhetorically by governments around the planet. Success in protecting spaces like the Amazon have involved both shifting international and national frameworks and Indigenous organizing efforts.
“For us Indigenous people, land means future. Because for us the land is our home. Where we fish, we hunt, we get our medicine,” said Chief Tashka Yawanawá, who has been leading the Yawanawá people for 20 years.
Today, the Yawanawá people manage roughly half a million acres of forest. But as recently as the 1980s, they were very nearly eliminated by colonial powers who at one time exploited them as slave labor, and later by neocolonial rubber barons. In 1982, Yawanawá said, his people had been reduced to 120 individuals and boxed into a mere 19,000 acres.
Across the celebrated “lungs of the Earth,” roads created by poachers, illegal miners, and cattle raisers create “arteries of destruction” that spread ecosystem collapse. By contributing to global warming, the destruction of contiguous forests has interrupted rain cycles, enhanced drought, and brought fires to new and terrifying extremes.
“Who is more affected by the climate change than indigenous people?” Yawanawá asked audiences at WILD12. “Because we see the difference every day, every night. It’s not normal to dry so much, but everything is burning in the Amazon.”
At this year’s gathering, Wild12 participants are calling for the acceleration of land restoration for and to Indigenous peoples—alongside restoration of Indigenous decision-making authority about how to manage those lands.
This is, essentially, the message of Land Back, a rallying cry for many Indigenous peoples and allies that has captured increasing attention within and without the expanding climate justice movement.
Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth who led a conversation spotlighting the leadership of Lakota women, said she grew up being taught that that the land and the people are one, an understanding that informs what she means when she says Land Back.
“When we’re saying Land Back, we’re not talking about the land. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s still here. We’re talking about ourselves and the way we were forcibly removed from it,” Two Bulls said. “It’s something to think about as we present conversations and solutions and alternatives about ways to navigate climate crisis and climate catastrophe and climate change.”
Ultimately, the Earth is a living being who is not dependent upon humans for Her well being, several speakers stressed as the convening entered its third day. But humans have an opportunity to heal themselves and their communities by dedicating themselves to the task of improving the Earth and the restoration of natural ecosystems.
Illarion Mercullieff, president of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership & Lifeways, echoed this sentiment:
“We’re not going to save Mother Earth. She’s lived for billions of years without us. Then we come along the last quarter of million years and think what we destroyed we can help fix,” Mercullieff said.
He recalled how the Earth’s health improved after COVID-19 struck, driving global economies to a massive slowdown.
“What happened? You could see the Himalayas from India for the first time in 30 years. The ozone layer above the Arctic healed. This was Mother Earth showing us she can heal herself. She does not need us.”
This project of protecting wilderness, in other words, is our opportunity not to heal the land, but to heal ourselves.
Western conservation science tells us that there are many paths to restoring the land to protect our place upon it, said the IUCN’s Woodley.
“Protected areas work to save nature. So does management of species at risk,” he said. “So does management of invasive species. All of these things work. We just need to do more of them. But we know that in wild lands we’re not going to move at all without involving Indigenous and local peoples.”
Were that sentiment on paper, it’s clear that many at WILD12 would opt to strike “involving,” replacing it with something more ambitious.
*Target 3 Language: Ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas, and of marine and coastal areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are effectively conserved and managed through ecologically representative, well-connected and equitably governed systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous and traditional territories, where applicable, and integrated into wider landscapes, seascapes and the ocean, while ensuring that any sustainable use, where appropriate in such areas, is fully consistent with conservation outcomes, recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories.
