Protected Areas
The 'parks without people' conservation model has its roots in the 19th century U.S.A. It has expanded worldwide and given rise to an elitist conservation industry dominated by big conservation NGOs. This model has become another major threat to the physical and cultural survival of forest-dependent communities, their knowledge and their traditional conservation practises.
The Sangha region is entirely under the control of three concessions that have colonial origins and continue to deploy guards against the forest inhabitants to prevent them using their ancestral lands.
The tens of millions of euros that the government of Acre received from the German government for its REDD+ program failed to stop deforestation. Despite this fact several Brazilian states continue to receive funds from the German government.
With the Covid-19 crisis, the initiatives of movements and collectives based on feminist economics have gained strength. Feminist economics leads us to reflect on the updated mechanisms of control, while continuing to affirm the capacity for resistance and reconstruction of bodies in movement.
A key tactic for the giant pulp producer, Suzano S.A, to keep expanding its industrial eucalyptus plantations in Brazil, is to market itself as a company that practices “conservation” and “restoration.” This conceals its disastrous track record related to forest and forest-dwelling populations.
Before, conservation organizations were focused on raising money to create protected areas in forests supposedly threatened with destruction; today, they constitute a bona fide transnational “industry” that manages and controls areas that go far beyond forests.
In Africa’s Congo Basin the many promises of rights-based and participatory conservation have miserably failed to materialise. For communities living in and around protected areas, the reality continues to be one of dispossession, impoverishment and widespread human rights abuses.
Testimonies of community women impacted by carbon and forest conservation projects that today are included in the so-called Green Economy.
A story of the peoples of the Atlantic Forest in southern Brazil in a disputed territory where the green economy competes with community-based economies.