PowerSwitch

...is it all just a mirage?

A very thought provoking article from Stephen Corry that questions the BBC and its Natural World department. Some snippets:

Stephen Corry wrote: The same narrative is also peddled by the big conservation organisations, which thrive in financial symbiosis with the BBC’s orthodoxy as the corporation makes money from its programmes and as donations from the viewing public flow to the NGOs. Each presents the complex question of conservation in exactly the same way, and each proposes the same, simple – and entirely wrong – solution. It is“fortress conservation� with more and more“brave guards� and increasing military force and weaponry to defend the animals against the human killers (who are never white).

The online campaigns against trophy hunters often highlights that they are white btw

Then onto the setting:

Stephen Corry wrote: The wholly different narrative they expose begins with the revelation that protected areas were never “pristine wildernesses� in the first place; they were home to local peoples who actually created the “wild� ecosystems, and who were then thrown out and destroyed when parks were imposed by national governments. The grass plains of the Serengeti, the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS rainforest and so on, were all formed by vigorous human intervention over thousands of years. Experts now accept this, but it remains little known among the general public. Why? Because very few BBC nature viewers have ever been told the real history: After all, it profoundly undermines the fake one.

On what needs to be done - but won't:

Stephen Corry wrote:What all this highlights is the bias at the heart of the BBC’s Natural History Unit. It relentlessly promulgates the foundation myth of Western conservation, that “wildernesses� must be defended against the Africans or Asians who actually live there. Never mind that national parks in Europe often include working farms and even towns; in other continents the locals must be thrown out, and then shot if they try and go back in. Such pitting people against nature may be the metaphorical lifeblood of a conservation industry that relies on the TV portrayal of natural history, but it’s an entirely false antagonism that drains the real lifeblood from indigenous, tribal and other local people. Things must change, and not only to respect the law and human rights. If they don’t, we could soon be facing the end of protected areas and their wildlife. The local backlash against them is gaining increasingly angry momentum and is bound to prevail, especially in Africa where “our� cherished conservation is increasingly seen as nothing more than land-grabbing colonialism. The imagery that has filled our screens throughout my lifetime must acknowledge its bias and start reflecting the real world.

Stephen Corry: An inconvenient truth: Pristine Wilderness and Other Myths peddled by the BBC

Discuss...

I believe that even the moorland in the UK which is the main 'ecosystem' of many of the UK's National Parks was created by felling the original post Ice-Age beech (not too sure about the tree species?) forest in upland Britain by Stone-Age and Bronze-Age farmers. Therefore why should it be preserved. Probably due to the paragraph below.

There is an interesting political slant to the creation of National Parks in the UK too. As far as I remember quite a few ramblers in the 1930s went to prison for offences related to trespassing on Lord Somethingorother's grouse or sheep moor.

Conservationism is a bad joke. Always has been. It is a product of the posh righteous bubble seeded by the cancer of fee-paying education [of which the UK is ground zero]. Another visible facet to the 'us and them' bollocks of brexit/immigration/globalism/skiing in Austria/Retiring in Provence/driving a range rover BS.

The concept that Africa is a zoo without fences for 'the world' full of very pretty dangerous wild animals making agriculture impossible is not something the average African might benefit from so it's us and them again. I know, let's fund a 'charity' to pay the Africans to show people around the zoo..
It is actually ecological religion that we have to film the lion eating the antelope 'because it's nature'. Humans shouldn't be killing higher animals by ripping them apart alive, and there is no benefit to allowing it - except that we think cats are pretty and interesting.

The taboo truth is that advanced society only exists where predators are minimised. Humankind should be helping stewardship of the planet and that does mean altering it - not to a factory farm, monoculture or purely commercial interest, but it will involve taking out predators and wild animals and farming meat with responsible maximum welfare rules. This will take vigorous policing as the most righteous bunch of welfare teat-suckers are the farmers [followed by politicians/nurses/the media+charity+marketing virus/the rest of medicine/lawyers/the military/ and conservationists] The '1st world' is a long way from the debate because it involves land reform, user rights and ownership.