Conservation Refugees
Conserving the environment is no easy feat and some tough decisions are definitely going to be made along the way. There are even some decisions that will be made that won’t necessarily seem moral. That’s exactly what’s happening with conservation refugees. Indigenous peoples are being forced to leave the land that they as a tribe have inhabited for hundreds of years in order for conservationists to protect the environment that these people lived in. While saving the environment is an incredibly important task, the rights of others need to be put into perspective. For this reason, it is morally unacceptable for conservationists to create conservation refugees.
When these indigenous people are forced to leave their land, they are placed into worse conditions than they had before. Dowie in “Conservation Refugees” discusses a great example of conservation refugees who were forced to move to a place that is not ideal. The Batwa people were forced to leave their land after it became a national park and word got out that they were killing silverback gorillas, even though they weren’t really killing them. These people were then moved into camps where there wasn’t any running water. Basically, these people went from living a life that they were comfortable and happy in and were forced to live in a place where they couldn’t even clean themselves with running water in order to save the environment. Is it morally acceptable to force people to live somewhere where they are worse off than where they lived before? If this were to happen now in Tucson and people who lived in homes were forced to move into tents on the side of the road in order to preserve the land their house was built on, there would definitely be an upr...
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...ates takes pride in their culture. If they were forced to take up a different country’s systems of medicine and education, people wouldn’t stand for it. So why is it okay to force other people to completely change their way of life? Not only have they been moved from their home, but are also forced to start a different educational system. All of this change at once isn’t good for anyone and can lead to culture shock.
Works Cited
"Conservation Refugees." Conservation Refugees. Survival International, n.d. Web. 06 May 2014.
Dowie, Mark. "Conservation Refugees." Orion Magazine. N.p., Nov.-Dec. 2005. Web. 06 May 2014.
Rodgers, Paul. "Polar Bear Apocalypse." The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 11 June 2006. Web. 07 May 2014.
Smith, S. E. "Faces of New Colonialism: Conservation Refugees." This Aint Livin. N.p., 16 Aug. 2012. Web. 06 May 2014.
Though Coulthard’s argues that Indigenous people’s ressentiment is a valid expression of Indigenous anger against colonial practices under certain
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The government itself said they were doing this for the survival of the Indian race and if that was the case they wouldn’t have moved them to a place they had never been, a place they didn’t know anything about, location thousands of miles away that they couldn’t survive, much less thrive in. Instead they, moved them to a dry desert like land that they did not want. The government said that they would pay for ...
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Westoby, P., & Ingamells, A. (2010), ‘A critically informed perspective of working with resettling refugee groups in Australia’, British journal of social work, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 1759-1776.
Major settlements occurred after the nineteenth century. The British had quickly out-numbered the Aboriginal community, leaving them powerless to the changes or the invasion. The belief systems of the Europeans overpowered the aboriginal’s way of life, pressuring them to conform to the...
Starting from the beginning, natural resource consumption has been a process in environmental injustice. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830 forced Americans Indians from the east to western reservations in a form of ethnic cleansing (Schaefer 146). Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen, the authors of Ecocide of Native Americans: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples, make note of a specific quote that non-American Indian settlers phrased during the process, which is “kill the Indian, but save the man” (10). In the book they also point out an interesting fact about how the settlers spoke of the “final solution” well before the Nazis used the phrase. Anyhow, after reforming and internally colonizing Native Americans, the non-American Indian settlers pushed them even further into their corner. A specific occurrence would be the incident at the Great Sioux Reservation. Non-Indians were supposed to keep away from their land and not allowed to hunt. However, in 1874 non-Indians flooded the territory in search of...
Bringing Them Back to Life, an article written by Carl Zimmer for National Geographic April 2013 edition, discusses the possibilities in modern science to clone and revive species that have been driven to extinction in the past ten thousand years (445). Throughout this article, the author makes use of the rhetorical devices logos, ethos, and pathos to argue to an audience that humans have an obligation to revive species which have been driven to extinction directly due to human influences. Though the author acknowledges the benefits of species revival, and attempts to rebut his own arguments, the author’s use of fallacies takes away from the credibility of the article.
Flanagan, Thomas. "Native sovereignty: Does Anyone Really want an Aboriginal Archipelago?". In Crosscurrents: Contemporary Political Issues, 3rd ed. ed. Mark Charlton and Paul Barker, 9-15. Toronto: Nelson, 1998.
Gibson, J. William. "The New War on Wolves." Los Angeles Times. 08 Dec. 2011: A.25. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.
The history of indigenous peoples disadvantage began with the dispossession of land. Indigenous people were stripped off their hunting grounds and ...
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