The notion of conservation through the establishment of protected areas has, as we have seen, a long pedigree. From royal forests and hunting reserves, through game reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, to national parks, the practice has a history almost as long as civilization. Yet in recent decades, the establishment of protected areas has become a global business (Abramovitz 1991) and the types of protected areas have become much more sophisticated. To a large extent the refinement of these types of reserves is a response to problems that conservationists have encountered in their management and reflects attempts to accommodate the different degrees of human activity that should be permitted within their boundaries. The proliferation of ideal types has, however, kept far ahead of legislative changes. For this reason National Parks remain the most common type of protected area, especially in developing countries.

Scientific advances have seen a commensurate sophistication in concepts of biodiversity conservation - only one objective among many that underlie the definition of protected areas. Whereas the first parks in Yosemite and Yellowstone were established to preserve their scenic beauty and unusual geology, other protected areas have been established as much to secure certain ecological values - climate, soil conservation and regulating hydrology. Conservation of flora and fauna, began with efforts to conserve prized game animals and later other larger forms of wildlife that had typically been the prey of the hunter. Increasingly, as wildlife has been perceived by urban viewers as choses à penser rather than choses à manger, [footnote: 'things to think about' rather than 'things to eat'] the focus of much conservation has been on what have come to be known as the 'charismatic megafauna' - big spectacular animals of widespread popular appeal. Conservation of these species has absorbed the lion's share of the conservation budget.

It is only relatively recently however that the conservation of biological diversity - shortened as 'biodiversity' - has become a popular intent and this has ironically come about largely as a result of a growing perception that genetic material and genetic diversity is not just a mechanism of inheritance and evolution but part of humankind's heritage, a potentially lucrative resource.

As ecological awareness has grown, the focus has also shifted from the conservation of species (so-called alpha conservation) to the conservation of habitat (so-called beta conservation), a shift reflected in the change of name of one the largest conservation organisations, the World Wildlife Fund, to the WorldWide Fund for Nature. Special measures to protect areas of intense species endemism have led to the development of a third kind of conservation (referred to as gamma conservation)(Huber 1993).

Identifying priority areas for biodiversity conservation has also become a highly technical business. Although big mammals are still major targets, mainly to satisfy the expectations of public supporters, conservationists have broadened their concerns to embrace the full range of biodiversity, and in order to capture the greatest number of species, have thus focused much of their attention on the tropics, where over half the world's species are found in only 12% of its surface area. The result is that conservation practice has a tendency to be articulated along a North-South axis, with conservation institutions in the industrial world, funded by their members or the northern aid agencies, seeking to protect the resources of the developing world from the depredations of their own populations (Bonner 1993). This has had the unfortunate result of sharpening conservation's often top-down style of operation.

With biodiversity now vanishing at an unprecedented rate (Wilson 1988; Reid and Miller 1989), conservationists have realised that attempts to save all biodiversity are futile and that they must concentrate their scarce resources on key areas. The result is a policy of global 'triage' [footnote: the practice instituted in the First World War whereby French nurses separated the casualties into those which were not worth treating, those needing emergency surgery and those which could wait awhile for treatment] attempts to salvage areas of maximum diversity and least vulnerability, while writing off other areas as doomed or of lower priority (McNeely et al. 1990). An unintended result of this approach is that protected areas tend to be selected according to technical criteria while giving only secondary consideration to social and political issues. This also reinforces conservation's technocratic tendency, with the effect of marginalising indigenous people.

It is important to realise that few conservation agencies continue to believe that the establishment of protected areas will by itself assure the preservation of biological diversity, because, while protected areas attempt to isolate threatened areas from the forces destroying surrounding zones, they do not address the root causes of this destruction (cf Wells and Brandon 1992:xi). On the one hand this appreciation has led to attempts to institute captive breeding programmes to maintain gene pools of threatened species even after their natural populations or habitats are destroyed; ex situ conservation by putting germ plasm into cold storage is another approach. On the other hand, as dealt with more briefly in the second part of this paper, conservationists advocate a broader planning approach as a means of changing the direction of development strategies. Nevertheless, the creation and extension of protected areas absorbs most of the funds of non-governmental conservation bodies. Protected areas also remain a priority for many international funding agencies, like the World Bank and Global Environment Facility, as the most practical way of conserving the greatest amount of biodiversity (World Bank 1993:110).

The ethic underlying the conservation of biological diversity is that it is for the global good and the needs and rights of future generations. Nevertheless profit motives have never been far away. Indeed the first parks at Yosemite and Yellowstone in the United States were created largely as a result of pressure from the railway building lobby, which sought to increase the numbers of fare paying passengers by routing their tracks near to scenic sights for what today we have reinvented as 'ecotourism' (DiSilvestro 1993).

Conservation is thus plagued by an uncomfortable internal contradiction. On the one hand it seeks to preserve wilderness free of human contamination, yet on the other hand it has to make conservation pay by promoting non-damaging forms of use. This raises the question, never far from the forefront of indigenous peoples minds when they learn that their lands are to be developed for conservation, conservation for whom? Like most development efforts, much conservation that excludes local people is justified in terms of a conventional trade off between global or national interests and local interests (Dixon and Sherman 1991).

'We were chased out on the first day. I didn't know anything was happening until the police ran into my compound. They all had guns. They shouted at me, told me to run. I had no chance to say anything. They came at us and we ran, they came so violently. I was frightened for the children - I had eight children with me - but we just ran off in all directions. I took my way and the children took theirs. Other people were running, panicking, even picking up the wrong children in the confusion. I lost everything. I had 31 cows and some goats and hens. They were killed - 20 cows were killed and the rest taken. They burned everything, even the bed and furniture and the kitchen. We're poor now.' (Joy Ngoboka, evicted from the Kibale Game Corridor, Uganda, 1 April 1992 cited in Feeney 1993:2)

An unhappy truth which conservationists have only recently come to admit is that the establishment of most National Parks and protected areas has had negative effects on their prior inhabitants. So powerful has been the notion that conservation is about preserving wilderness that conservationists have been intensely reluctant to admit that indigenous peoples and other local residents have any rights in protected areas. The facts are, however, that like it or not, most protected areas are inhabited. Recent figures for Latin America suggest that 86% of protected areas in Latin America are inhabited (Kemf 1993; Amend and Amend 1992). Some 80% of the protected areas of South America have indigenous peoples living inside them. In Central America, the figure is 85% (Alcorn 1994). Worldwide, according to the IUCN's figures for 1985, some 70% of protected areas are inhabited (Dixon and Sherman 1991).

The world's first National Park at Yellowstone had first been conceived by the romantic artist George Catlin as a preserve for both nature and Indians (see opening quote). But the prevailing view of Indians, at the time that the park was created in 1872, was that they were 'sneaking red devils'. The resident Shoshone of Yellowstone were thus expelled, not altogether 'willingly', and subsequent records suggest that there were violent conflicts between the park's authorities and the Shoshone: as many as 300 people were killed in clashes in 1877 and nine years later administration of the park was turned over to the US Army (Kemf 1993:5-6).

As it had commenced so it was to go on. Relocation, often forced, of indigenous peoples has been a recurring necessity in order to establish protected areas in the image chosen for them. One of the most grotesque examples of this process was documented by Colin Turnbull in his book 'The Mountain People' which described the consequences for the hunting and gathering Ik of their expulsion from their traditional hunting grounds by the establishment of the Kidepo National Park, in colonial Uganda. Obliged to adopt subsistence agriculture in the barren highlands neighbouring the park, the Ik suffered prolonged famine leading to a total collapse of society and the disappearance of all mores except naked self-interest. Traditions of food-sharing vanished as the Ik slowly died of hunger while seeking to delay the inevitable through 'poaching', begging and prostitution (Turnbull 1972).

Forced relocation to make way for national parks has been a particularly severe problem for indigenous people in watershed forests which are often afforded strong protection to conserve soils - and thus prevent the siltation of downstream engineering projects. Thus the Dumoga-Bone National Park in Sulawesi, Indonesia, while noted as a successful example of buffer zone management by the World Conservation Union (Sayer 1991:44), in fact required the expulsion of the indigenous Mongondow people, who had been forced up the hillsides by the agricultural settlement and irrigation projects in the lowlands (Down to Earth No. 5 1989).

The last remnants of Sri Lanka's aboriginal people, the Vedda, were likewise expelled from the Madura Oya National Park in the catchment of the controversial Mahaweli Development Programme. Although they had been demanding rights to their lands since at least 1970, the Vedda were obliged to leave there lands with the gazettement of the Park in 1983. Brought down out of the hill forests to small settlements where they were provided houses and small irrigated rice paddies, the Vedda - traditionally hunters and gatherers supplementing their subsistence by shifting cultivation - had trouble adapting to a sedentary life. Subsequent surveys showed they resented the lack of access to forest produce, game and land for shifting cultivation and were fast losing their own language. Only one small group insisted on remaining in the forests where they were persistently harassed by officials. International protests in support of the Vedda led to Presidential promises that some land would be set aside for them: a promise which, to date, remains unfulfilled (Chandrasena 1993).

National Parks established to protect mountain gorillas in Zaire, Uganda and Rwanda have also entailed the expulsion of Batwa 'pygmies', whose extremely marginal position in the local political economies has resulted in them being apparently entirely ignored by subsequent attitudinal surveys of affected people (Hannah 1992:34; Wells and Brandon 1992:76). Nevertheless, the Batwa achieved international notoriety in the feature film 'Gorillas in the Mist', where they are explicitly blamed for the murder of the conservationist Diane Fossey thus perpetuating the myth that conservation in Africa can only be achieved through violent confrontation with indigenous peoples (Adams and McShane 1992).

Forced relocations are not a thing of the past. Further north in Uganda, mass expulsions of forest-dwellers and peasant settlers have recently been carried out under a World Bank, European Community, DANIDA and NORAD funded project to create a wildlife corridor between the Kibale Forest Reserve and the Queen Elizabeth National Park. Completely contrary to the World Bank's and the Development Assistance Community's norms on relocation under development projects, some 30,000 indigenous people in the Kibale Forest Reserve and Game Corridor were expelled without warning, leading to mass impoverishment, burning, looting, the killing of livestock, and other serious human rights violations including deaths (Feeney 1993). Shortly after the evictions the EC's chief technical adviser reported that:

'This successful operation... has opened up the possibility of the frustrated elephant population of Kibale once more being free to migrate between the Queen Elizabeth National Park and the forest...' (cited in Feeney 1993:4)

According to the World Bank, which itself ascribes to the wildlands approach to conservation 'resettlement is particularly important when the local people's activities are fundamentally incompatible with the preservation objectives of Wildland Management Areas' (Ledec and Goodland 1988:97). Yet it is far from clear whether the social, political and environmental problems incurred by transplanting people out of protected areas are justified even in strictly environmental terms. Not only do they create a difficult political environment for the protected area to function within but they also disrupt neighbouring environments into which the people have been displaced.

The study of forced resettlement has become something of a science due to its increasing frequency as an adjunct of 'development' programmes (the World Bank, for example, expects to forcibly relocate at least 3.1 million people in the years from 1986 to 1996 (World Bank 1993) ). As one World Bank study has noted, forced relocation can 'be expected to cause multidimensional stress' (World Bank 1982). These stresses include 'psychological stress' including the 'grieving-for-a-lost-home syndrome', 'anxiety for the future' and 'feelings of impotence associated with the inability to protect one's home and community from disruption'. These stresses may become so great as to cause problems under the second category of stress: 'physiological', discernible as an actual increase in health disorders. While such conditions may be reversible, the stress factors that come under the rubric of 'socio-cultural stress' may not be. The 'cessation of a range of familiar and satisfying economic, social and religious activities which are tied to the oustee's old home' are related to an overall breakdown in society, particularly political structures (Scudder and Colson 1982; Partridge et al. 1982). The leaders of the oustee communities find themselves in a 'no-win situation', since they lose legitimacy if they approve the removal of their people against the will of the majority, but also if they oppose the removal, because ultimately they are proved powerless (World Bank 1982). Societies that are removed from their lands not only lose the economic basis for their survival, but 'a major reduction in their cultural inventory due to a temporary or permanent loss of behavioral patterns, economic practices, institutions and symbols' (Scudder and Colson 1982:271).

Materially most oustees are substantially worse off following removal from their original areas. The fact that compensation is usually inadequate (Scudder and Colson 1982:270) is compounded by the fact that cash compensation is often squandered improvidently by people unused to land markets. Indigenous people, unaccustomed to dealing with land as a saleable commodity, frequently fall easy prey to the unscrupulous. Summarising the experience of years of work trying to mitigate the impact of forced resettlement programmes, Thayer Scudder of the University of California has noted that 'forced resettlement is about the worst thing that you can do to a person short of killing him' (Claxton 1986).

The environment too often suffers as a result of forced relocations. Traditional balances between humans and their environments are disrupted. People are confined to small and inappropriate land areas; traditional social institutions and patterns of land management and tenure, which used to regulate access to resources are undermined. Short term problem solving behaviours replace long term planning. The net result is environmental degradation (Colchester 1987).

Although resettlement has been and continues to be one of the most common means of dealing with indigenous people in protected areas, alternatives have long been tried. Continued residence by indigenous peoples has sometimes been tolerated, often to encourage tourism, on condition that the people maintain a 'traditional' lifestyle and do not change the way they hunt or farm. Such policies, referred to as 'enforced primitivism' by the World Bank (Goodland 1982), which rejects them, were quite vigorously applied by the apartheid-based regimes of southern Africa. As Robert Gordon (1985) has documented, the policies were based on racist concepts which advocated that 'we must treat the Bushmen as fauna and realize that he is incapable of assimilating European ideas'. Accordingly the last group of Bushmen in South Africa were allowed to live by the Gemsbok National Park where they were expected to live on government handouts and by 'traditional' hunting. The experiment in preserving the Bushman 'race' was not a success, as the Bushmen not only sought to change their way of life - they wanted clothes, improved housing and hunting dogs - but also intermarried with other local Africans. After some years one of the park wardens noted with disgust 'their desirability as a tourist attraction is under serious doubt, as is the desirability of letting them stay for an indefinite period in the park. They have disqualified themselves...' (cited in Gordon 1985:32).

In Botswana, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was originally established as a reserve area to protect the San 'Bushmen' and other traditional desert dwelling groups and their habitat. Within the reserve, the San and other hunter-gatherers are allowed to hunt without licences as long as they use their traditional weapons (Hitchcock and Holm 1993:326). The reserve thus protects them, at the cost of setting limits on how they can develop their economies. However, conservationists have grown increasingly concerned at the changes in the Bushmen's ways of life - they have adopted small herds of cattle, have concentrated at the tube-wells where limited government services are provided and some have begun hunting with non-traditional weapons - and have called for bans on hunting and even the expulsion of indigenous people from the area (Hitchcock 1990). The Government acceded to the pressure and set about developing plans to resettle the groups inhabiting the reserve. The move prompted an international outcry from human rights groups, which pointed out that the Reserve was suffering much worse damage from diamond mining, ranching and tourism (Survival International 1988). The Government subsequently backed down and the resettlement plan was dropped (Hitchcock and Holm 1993).

Conservationists now face another problem. As a result of their success in generalising a conservation model that excludes people, national parks legislation in many countries necessarily requires the removal of residents - such laws are the norm in South America for example (Amend and Amend 1992). As a result, conservationists may find that they are legally obliged to resettle people from national parks even though there is no evidence that their presence poses a threat to the local ecosystem or biodiversity.

A case in point is the Korup National Park in the Cameroon, a 126,000 hectare forest inhabited by about one thousand people and used by several thousand more. According to the legal decree under which the park was established, these villagers will have to be resettled (Sayer 1991:36). But researchers developing a management and resettlement programme for the park have been sharply divided about both the necessity and advisability of the resettlement. Early surveys suggested that with the exception of one community in the very south of the proposed park, which was engaged in a vigorous trade in bushmeat across the border to Nigeria, the levels of hunting, farming and gathering were probably sustainable. Subsequent more detailed research did not disprove this, although levels of hunting were found to be higher than previously thought (Infield 1988:45). On the other hand, these studies revealed that hunting was the single most important source of cash for the majority of villagers, representing more than half of their meagre income, yet the restrictions imposed by parks regulations meant that development of alternative means of generating a cash income would also be illegal (Infield 1988). The Worldwide Fund for Nature thus felt obliged to argue that 'the presence of villages within the park whose inhabitants are involved in hunting, trapping and agriculture is incompatible with the operation of the park' and they advised a voluntary resettlement programme based on creating incentives to relocate to neighbouring forest areas with better soils, where roads, community development initiatives and improved services would be provided (Republic of Cameroon 1989). It remains unclear whether this programme will be successful (Sayer 1991:38), especially as the Government has been unwilling to pay compensation to villagers for the abandonment of homes, crops and fruit trees.

At the same time, the imposition of restrictive legislation and the threat of relocation, which has now hung over these people's heads since 1981, has created a hostile attitude towards the park (Infield 1988). Surveys showed that 'many, perhaps all, of the thirty villages within the Park and three kilometres from its boundary claim traditional rights to land and natural resources within the Park itself' (Devitt 1988). One specialist looking into the managerial aspects of the park advised against resettlement arguing that the local political disruptions would foment greater antagonism to the park and make management and policing untenable or very costly. The specialist also pointed out that the same laws that made resettlement from the park necessary would also apply in the buffer zones to which they were relocated, making their presence there equally illegal (Ruitenbeek 1988).

BOX: 
Animal Rights and Indigenous Peoples: the fur wars in the Arctic.

Today it is possible to distinguish between two schools of environmentalism. On the one hand are those who argue for adjustments in human interactions with the biological environment in order to ensure the sound functioning of ecosystems and the conservation of species diversity, because ultimately human survival will depend on them. Such 'utilitarian' groups favour a pragmatic acceptance of humankind's use of nature, accepting 'culls', 'sustainable cuts' and 'allowable annual yields' without sentimentality. On the other hand, other environmentalists argue for a new respect for nature based on a rejection not only of 'anthropocentrism' and 'speciesism', but also on a respect for 'animal rights'. For these groups the killing of warm-blooded animals and other beings, even the cutting of forest trees, are immoral acts in themselves and constitute a violation of the individual rights of other forms of life. Like the wilderness preservationists before them, these environmentalists advocate putting nature off limits to human beings as a means of protecting it.

Yet, in practice, the distinction between these 'utilitarian' and 'deep ecology' approaches has always been blurred. Most environmental and conservation groups that rely on public support in the western industrial countries for fund raising and popular campaigns have pegged their work on the appeal of large furry animals - so-called 'charismatic megafauna' - and on sensational photographs of harpooned whales, battered baby seals and butchered elephants. Since they rely on a culturally generated sense of outrage in their general public they have consciously and unconsciously set their agenda to suit these cultural perceptions.

Indigenous peoples have suffered badly from the effects of these cultural blinkers. In the Arctic, in particular, where temperatures are too low for agriculture, the hunting, killing and butchering of animals has been basic to indigenous peoples' ways of life. Interaction with the outside world has inevitably drawn these peoples into the international market and they have thus come to depend to a large extent on a commerce in skins and furs to maintain their livelihoods. But conservationists and later animal rights activists have successfully campaigned to end this trade. Beginning with species that were classed as threatened, but then expanding their campaigns to embrace all furs, environmentalists have succeeded in substantially reducing the trade and as a result have all but undermined these peoples' ways of life. The result has been quantified in a massive increase in welfare dependency, family breakdown, alcoholism, divorce, truancy, suicides and emigration among peoples whose views of nature have not accorded with western ones, even though their deeply held religious beliefs resonate with a respect for animal spirits (Lynge 1992).

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The world over, conservationists are now beginning to realise that the strategy of locking up biodiversity in small parks, while ignoring the wider social and political realities has been an ineffective strategy. So long as polluting and unsustainable land use patterns prevail outside, the future of the parks is in jeopardy (DiSilvestro 1993). At the same time, the establishment of protected areas without taking into account the needs, aspirations and rights of the local peoples may create ultimately insoluble social problems which may threaten the long term viability of the parks quite as much as the perceived threats, which caused them to be established.

As Jeff Sayer (1991:1) of the World Conservation Union has noted:

'Legal protection is rarely sufficient to guarantee the continuing integrity of conservation areas. Local people, often with good reason, frequently see parks as government-imposed restrictions on their legitimate rights. Patrolling by guards, demarcation of boundaries and provision of tourist facilities will therefore not deter them from agricultural encroachment. Illegal hunting and gathering of forest products will be difficult to control. Laws which are resented by the majority of the population are difficult to enforce. In these situations, protected areas lose support and credibility, and their condition rapidly deteriorates.'

For example, resentment among Sherpas at the imposition of the Sagarmartha National Park (Mt. Everest) and the undermining of traditional commons management practices led to an acceleration of forest loss. Local elders estimated that more forest was lost in the first four years of the Park's creation than in the previous two decades (Sherpa 1993:49). In India, resentment by local people to national parks legislation and enforcement agencies has caused increasing problems. In some cases, as Gadgil and Guha note, villagers have responded by setting fire to large areas of national parks, such as the Kanha National Park of Madhya Pradesh. This kind of 'incendiarism' has occurred in areas as far apart as the Ho areas of Bihar and the Nagarhole National Park in South India, which displaced the Bette Kurumbas and Jen Kurumbas peoples to establish a tiger sanctuary, where some 20 square kilometres of forest were recently burned after wildlife guards were accused of killing a poacher (Furer Haimendorf 1986; Roy and Jackson 1993).

One of the major problems with the protected areas approach has been that the national agencies charged with administering these areas are, generally speaking, small, politically marginal and underresourced. In Africa for example, one study found that most countries spend less than a fifth of the minimum amount of money considered adequate for parks management. The world famous Amboseli National Park in Kenya had a budget in 1988 of only US$25,000. In 1987, the budget for all Madagascar's protected areas was under US$1,000 (Hannah 1992:3). The same parlous situation has been documented in Central America, where of the 21 protected areas which existed in 1989, only 13 had regular personnel. Only 9% of the 84 people who did work in these areas had professional training (Utting 1993:93). In Brazil, according to local conservationists, the agencies are not so much underfunded as politically unstable, inefficient and lack well-qualified staff. The result, of course, is that national parks become open access areas, where local peoples' rights are denied but state protection is unenforced. The few parks personnel are spread out over vast areas, have inadequate transport and other resources and spend most of their energies trying to supplement their meagre incomes by legal and often illegal means. This leads to an acceleration of social impoverishment and environmental destruction. Without the support of local communities, protected areas may be self-defeating.

As Janis Alcorn (1993:424) has noted, classical conservation initiatives have:

'focused on supporting protected-area strategies implemented through state governments. Park departments, with staff trained by academic centers that teach strategies based on protected areas, still espouse the conservationists' goals and agenda... But, despite the confluence of those two agendas, park departments and other state agencies have failed miserably at conserving biodiversity, globally and in Amazonia. Instead, paper parks abound, and deforestation rates have increased. While states have pleased conservationists by announcing the creation of parks, a careful look at state performance shows a general pattern whereby state-linked elites are continuing to log and mine in protected and reserved areas.'

In Africa, over a million square kilometres of land have been set aside as national parks and game reserves (Hitchcock 1990), yet they have been remarkably unsuccessful at protecting wildlife. Commenting on the problems confronting national parks in Central Africa, Stuart Marks (1984:4-5 cited in West 1991:xviii) in his book titled 'The Imperial Lion' argues:

'Materialistic Northerners have sought to preserve African landscapes in the only way they could, by separating them from daily human activities and setting them aside as national parks where humans enter on holiday... Wildlife protection, like other imposed policies, has always carried with it the implications of force, of quasimilitary operations, and of sanctions. It is my contention that for the West to persist in its support of preservationist policies that hold vast acreages of land hostage to its myths is to ensure their certain destruction through African needs and perspectives.'

More recently, World Wildlife Fund authors Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane (1992:xv, xvii) have reached similar conclusions:

'As long as conservation operates on the notion that saving wild animals means keeping them as far away as possible from human beings, it will become less and less relevant to modern Africans. Parks and other protected areas will eventually be overrun by people's need for land unless the parks serve, or at least are not completely inimical to, the needs of the local population....Conservation will either contribute to solving the problems of the rural poor who live day to day with wild animals, or those animals will disappear.'

A study by Madhav Gadgil (1992:268) in southern India, found that the assertion of state control over natural resources led to 'severe conflicts with the local populations attempting to maintain their customary rights to resources. In the process, the local traditions of resource conservation have been increasingly disrupted or have broken down altogether.'

In a like vein, Sanjoy Deb Roy of the Indian Forest Service and Peter Jackson (1993:160) of the World Conservation Union note that:

'All of India's nearly 500 protected areas are virtual islands surrounded by villages and agriculture land, where people are desperately short of the basic resources of life, such as firewood, building materials and grazing areas for their livestock. Inevitably they invade the reserves and come into conflict with the authorities. Poaching of animals, timber and other forest produce is rife, and cattle and goats are found in most reserves. Resentment at the wildlife authorities' attempts to control the situation has exploded in violence against officials and guards.'

These protected areas have already displaced some 600,000 tribal people and forest-dwellers and affected many more. According to some social activists in India, the Ministry of Environment and Forests plans to establish a further 650 Wildlife Sanctuaries and 150 National parks in the next few years, displacing as many people again (PRIA 1993). Indeed many third world environmentalists, in countries such as Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia and the Philippines believe that national parks are often purposefully established as a means of denying local peoples' rights and reserving the areas for future exploitation. In India, conservation groups have realised that protected areas from which tribal peoples have been expelled are unusually vulnerable, deprived as they are of their first line of defense.

Conservationists have fought shy of admitting the underlying reason that the classical approach to protected area management has failed. For the choice that they have made is to impose their vision, their priorities and their values of landscape, nature and society on other peoples, securing their endeavours through the power of the State and its right of eminent domain. Almost by definition, therefore, conventional protected areas have been at odds with indigenous peoples' rights to self-determination and territorial control.