Fortress Conservation Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Fortress Conservation Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Fortress conservation i s a conservation model based on the belief that biodiversity protection is best achieved by creating protected areas where ecosystems can function in isolation from human disturbance. Fortress, or protectionist, conservation assumes that local people use natural resources in irrational and destructive ways, and as a result cause biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

Protected areas following the fortress model can be characterized by three principles: local people dependent on the natural resource base are excluded; enforcement is implemented by park rangers patrolling the boundaries, using a “fines and fences” approach to ensure compliance; and only tourism, safari hunting, and scientific research are considered as appropriate uses within protected areas. Because local people are labeled as criminals, poachers, and squatters on lands they have occupied for decades or centuries, they tend to be antagonistic toward fortress-style conservation initiatives and less likely to support the conservation goals.

A vocal supporter of fortress or protectionist conservation is John Terborgh, a tropical ecologist. He asserts that when needs of humans are weighed against needs of the natural world, nature always loses. He warns that the urgency of biodiversity conservation requires protection of species-rich areas by whatever means necessary, even if this requires suspending all economic activity in and around protected areas.

Many social scientists, such as geographer Roderick Neumann, argue that conservationists’ ideal of what “natural” landscapes “ought” to look like imparts heavy social consequences. It has facilitated the eviction and disempowerment of local people whose livelihood practices created the “natural” landscapes that conservationists seek to protect. This critique of fortress conservation points to the lack of scientific evidence to support conservation based on a separation of humans from nature. Drawing on nonequilibrium (or disequilibrium) ecological theory and recent advances in environmental history and anthropology, researchers have demonstrated that human interactions with the environment can play a valuable role in managing and maintaining biodiversity. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach challenge the contention long held by colonial and postcolonial scientists that the African savanna-rangeland’s extensive climax forest has been reduced to savanna as a result of human mismanagement. They demonstrate that current islands of forest were in fact created by human settlement in a once vast savanna. Their analysis reverses the traditional understanding of the direction of environmental change in that region.

In his book Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (2002), Dan Brockington critiques the protectionist conservation model, yet laments that fortress conservation will continue to be widely used despite its failure to adequately protect biodiversity. He argues that the alternative models of community-based conservation have been even less effective than the protectionist ones because it is nearly impossible that the benefits realized from conservation will ever offset the cost of being displaced from homelands; those who pay the costs are politically marginalized; and communities are comprised of many diverse interest groups, and their agendas may not coincide with conservation priorities.

Opponents to fortress conservation argue that conservation can only be successful if the needs of the local populations are taken into account. Alternatives to fortress conservation come in many forms, including extractive reserves, joint forest management, community-based conservation management, and integrated conservation and development projects. Community-based conservation models promote benefit sharing, which seeks to compensate local people for the resources they have given up by distributing income, employment, and other benefits from tourism. In other community-based conservation models, local people are contracted to manage part of their land for conservation goals, thereby ensuring that the financial benefits of conservation do reach the community most affected by conservation.

Central to the debate is the question of who gets to decide what resources are protected and in what manner. Supporters of protectionist conservation argue that scientific knowledge should be the primary measure of the need for conservation. Opponents of fortress conservation counter that it is time to diversify the voices that decide how to use and protect natural resources.

Bibliography:

Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (Indiana University Press, 2002);
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Katherine Homewood, “Policy, Environment and Development in African Rangelands,” Environmental and Science Policy 7 (2004);
Roderick Neumann, Making Political Ecology (Hodder Education, 2005);
Nancy Peluso, “Coercing Conservation: The Politics of Resources Control,” Global Environmental Change (v.3/2, 1993);
John Terborgh, Requiem for Nature (Island Press, 1999).