Ecology of Empire.
How Restoration Science Reproduces Colonial Violence.

ISSUE 7 / ENVIRONMENT

Human-driven environmental collapse has reached the point of global crisis. According to the ICUN Red List, one-third of assessed species are threatened with extinction, with species being driven to extinction hundreds of times faster than the background rate. Such a loss of ecosystem integrity is a frightening and wicked problem which demands immediate and drastic action. 

To make space for intensive agriculture, horticulture, and the resource requirements of colonisation, land-use change has degraded habitat across Aotearoa, with devastating effects on Indigenous wildlife and communities. 

Most immediately, habitat degradation in Aotearoa took the form of wide scale deforestation to build dwellings in the colonies and across the world, to clear land for development, and to supply timber for the British Navy. Today, more than 90% of native forest has been lost. In parts of the country this is even higher. On Banks Peninsula more than 99% of native forest was felled for building Ōtautahi and settlements across the region, a supply which was meant to last for centuries yet was exhausted within a few decades. 

Other types of native habitat such as wetlands and rivers have been degraded as we have shifted towards intensive agriculture. Wetlands have been drained across Waitaha to make room for urban development and pasture, and rivers have been confined to prevent flooding. Remaining native habitats are further degraded by pollution and run-off from industrialised farms.

It’s easy to attribute this environmental degradation to the profit demands of contemporary late-capitalism. While this isn’t an entirely untrue assessment, the roots of environmental exploitation run deeper. The underlying ontology that enables capitalist exploitation of the Earth is the separation of humans and the environment, wherein people are an entity separate from “wild” ecosystems. 

“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’” – Genesis 1:28

The environment is constructed as subservient to the interests of Man, that he might exploit it as he see fit, and if he is situated above, rather than as part of the environment, exploitation of the Earth’s resources becomes just. 

Colonisation and Conservation

In response to degradation of our ecosystems, the discipline of restoration science has risen to prominence in conservation literature over recent decades. 

Classical restoration ecology aims to restore ecosystems to a “historical” or “natural” state, a slippery and politically loaded concept. It is often taken to mean an environment before human intervention, thus reproducing the separation between humans and the environment. 

Nowhere is this separation of people and environment more apparent in restoration policy than in the practice of protected areas, so-called “fortress conservation”. Sections of land are cordoned off by state authorities as “conservation land”, often at the behest of conservation NGOs or treaties such as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD). Although on the surface this might seem like a sensible way to prevent the exploitation of the land by corporations, it has been leveraged to enact extreme colonial violence. 

An independent investigation was conducted into allegations of human rights abuses in protected areas in Cameroon, DRC, Republic of Congo, and Nepal. This investigation found that World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) failed to investigate allegations of murder, beatings, rape, and torture by the “ecoguards” that it supports. This included the violent enforcement of protected areas, preventing Indigenous communities from accessing their ancestral land. Nearly half of the protected areas investigated were created without adequately consulting Indigenous communities, and in the DRC the WWF prevented subsistence hunting and fishing by Indigenous communities. These examples are neither rare nor confined only to the WWF. 

In the mid-2010s, the UNCBD replaced Aichi Target 11 with a more ambitious “30x30’”conservation target under the Global Biodiversity Framework, aiming to place 30% of the Earth’s land and sea under Protected Area frameworks by 2030. 

The 30x30 framework does allow for protected areas under Indigenous or local land management, however less than 2% of these protected areas are actually under Indigenous governance. This plan has the potential to affect hundreds of millions of Indigenous people worldwide. 

Not only does fortress conservation reproduce colonial violence, it is also ecologically unsound. Most systems that are considered to be of such high value are those that have historically been under Indigenous land management. It is pure hubris on the part of international conservation organisations to believe that they can do better. In Aotearoa several projects involving the harvest of species such as tuna or kiekie have achieved better conservation outcomes through shared or Indigenous led governance, although not without failings on the part of the Crown.  

Crown conservation law has perpetuated colonialist control of the environment. The now-repealed Scenery Preservation Act of 1903 allowed the Crown to forcibly purchase any land that it decided had conservation or aesthetic value, including Māori land, and even in the modern day the Wildlife Act prohibits the harvest of many mahinga kai species. For example the harvest of kererū for food has been illegal since 1907, despite this species being sustainably harvested for hundreds of years prior by Māori. Dr Madeline Shelling, a specialist in reforestation and Māori food security, argues that controlled consumption of the species could be vital in its sustained survival. By preventing Indigenous practices, the reproduction of this knowledge is damaged, and policy that ostensibly serves the public good becomes another tool of colonisation.

Pākēha conservation NGOs compound this problem further in their “advocacy”. Forest & Bird throughout it’s history has doggedly lobbied against the rights of local iwi, including lobbying against the Ngāi Tahu Settlement under the pretext of protecting access of conservation land. Even when Crown authorities such as the Department of Conservation engage with Indigenous practices and knowledge, they are often only concerned with narrow ecological usefulness, rather than the larger sociocultural significance of these practices. Indeed, these organisations engage with Māori practices in such narrow scopes such that their engagement with Indigenous interests at large is often limited to a shallow inclusivity politics. 

Future-forward restoration

It is hard to see how restoration practices that centre the same logic that has caused environmental collapse will be capable of reversing that environmental collapse.

A future-forward discipline of restoration would be one that centres the idea that people and environment are not distinct, centres and engages with a totality of Indigenous aspirations and thought, rather than picking and choosing specific perspectives that the state or conservation NGOs deem to be useful.

Restoration science is a discipline practiced by people situated within community, society and power structures, and it should acknowledge this, rather than pretending to serve some supposed “intention of nature”.