What's Up With Decolonizing Conservation?

What's Up with Decolonizing Conservation?

Why the societies most responsible for ecological overshoot still mistrust the peoples who best protect biodiversity.

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Earth Overshoot Day fell on 30 July this year. Canada's fell on 8 March. If everyone on the planet lived the way we do here, it would take 5.5 Earths to keep up.

Now ask yourself who gets audited on whether their land use is sustainable.

It is not us.

This essay follows that question into the Rocky Mountains and back out to the world. It opens with sixteen plains bison flown by helicopter into the Banff backcountry, and a ceremonial hunt seven years later that was the first on that land in roughly 145 years. The animals had been absent for about 160 years. The hunters had been absent for 145. The gap between those two numbers is a park boundary.

Inside you will find:

🦬 Why Canada's first national park was built by subtraction, and why the historical record points less to a Victorian taste for wilderness than to sport hunting, tourism revenue and assimilation

📊 What a review of 111 studies found about Indigenous-managed lands, plus the finding buried inside it that almost nobody quotes

💰 How the funding cycle for Indigenous stewardship quietly keeps authority exactly where it has always been

🌍 Why no country's economic strategy connects planning to physical resource limits, and what that says about who gets scrutinized

Written for readers who have sensed a contradiction in environmental politics without quite having the language for it. It names the mechanism without telling you what to think, and it takes the strongest objection to its own argument seriously rather than ducking it.

Download it and see who is actually being supervised.

Want to talk about it? How about starting a community conversation circle to discuss this article with family, friends and other curious learners from all walks of life? https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/fdc844a1-9921-4d7a-afff-37fb8f65b311 Got an idea for a conversation starter but don't see anything related on this PayHip site? Reach out to Mark. He'll be happy to put together an article for you at no cost -- mbdurieux@gmail.com. However, first come, first served.

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