*Originally published in 2022. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

The current environmental crisis is unprecedented. According to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2022), it is almost inevitable that we will reach or exceed 1.5 oC warming in the near-term, and some experts have warned of a sixth mass extinction. The need for preservation is evident and pressing, and after 150 years of marginalising narratives and practices, it is time to embrace a post-colonial regime.

It is widely considered that modern environmentalism started in the 1960s, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a key marker, which highlighted the potential negative impacts of human activities on the natural environment (for instance, the impact of pesticides on bird population) and paved the way to further reflection on the relationship between economic development and the environment. However, the first efforts to preserve the natural environment are much older. For instance, the Age of Enlightenment and, later, the Industrial Revolution and resulting pollution of coal-burning industries, prompted the emergence of Romanticism, a movement which opposed the scientific rationalization of nature and contributed to the search for “wilderness”; a natural environment that would be pristine, untouched, and free from human inhabitants. This aesthetic appreciation of wilderness was driven by transcendentalism and the belief in God’s immanence in nature. This is best illustrated by the paintings of that time, like Thomas Cole’s famous landscape painting of “The Garden of Eden” (1828). It is at that time that Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in the US. What people valued was its apparent wilderness and lack of human presence. However, Yellowstone was not “empty”; Native American tribes were living there and had to be displaced. This was the starting point of a long story of dispossession on behalf of nature conservation, a story still occurring today.

Area-based conservation has often been linked to colonialism. Conservation policies, designed by external actors, have often involved evictions or dispossession of local communities. This is not surprising in itself, since conservation initiatives are ultimately about power: the power to control and use the lands. Indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable to encroachments on their territory, precisely because of their lack of legal rights to the lands they have traditionally used. 

The mainstream approach adopted for the creation of protected areas has been a “fortress” approach. Fortress conservation is an approach based on defence: the defence of the natural environment against human intrusions. It assumes that natural resources are used in an irrational and destructive way and that the only way to protect them is to........

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