From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation

The recent antiracist movement in the United States and beyond inspired the Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most prestigious global conservation organizations, to distance itself from its founder John Muir’s racist views. In a statement issued in July, 2020, Sierra Club’s Executive Director, Michael Brune, said, “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”1 However, the legacies and consequences of the racist history of American environmentalism extend far beyond the words and actions of the founding fathers of European and American environmentalism.

In this essay, we show that the effects of colonialism and racism are etched in the dominant philosophy, models, and institutional apparatus of global con­servation. While some scholars and practitioners have offered significant critiques of the dominant approaches to global conservation, the institutional apparatus that upholds the colonial and racist legacies of conservation continues to hold tight. We show that in recent decades global conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have contributed to further strengthening of this exclusionary and repressive institutional apparatus, especially with the emergence of the phenomenon of “militarized conservation.” Moreover, the arguments about the rights of ind­igenous peoples and rights-based approaches to conservation are increasingly being appropriated to serve exclusionary protected-area-based app­roaches to conservation. We suggest that the debates over competing models of conservation demand a newer emphasis on political and institutional reforms, coupled with public accountability of major international conservation NGOs.