And here's one more letter praising Chapin's article, with a particularly damning insider critique of Conservation International, from Liza Grandia, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at U.C.-Berkeley.  A shorter version of her letter may yet be published in a future issue of World Watch, but here we give it to you now, in full:

November 17, 2004

Dear World Watch Magazine:

Thank you for the excellent piece by Mac Chapin, a long overdue critique of the conservation colonialism of the largest transnational environmental NGOs. His comprehensive analysis has opened an important discussion of what I like to call international "cowboy conservationism."

Having been closest to Conservation International (CI, henceforth), I wish to speak specifically of that organization. World Watch will likely receive letters from well-intentioned apologists for CI who may still believe that they still are working in partnership with indigenous and local peoples despite mounting evidence to the contrary.  

Ten years ago, CI was a decentralized and somewhat disorganized organization -- but it was fun and effective. They hired talented local people as in-country directors and delegated full authority to them. There were successful projects in places like Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, and Papua New Guinea. And the money began to flow in.  

Instead of investing those funds in field projects, they hired more people in the Washington, D.C. headquarters. Gradually, prestige and decision making shifted from the field programs to CI's new internal think tanks:  the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, the Center for Conservation and Government. When my Guatemalan colleagues and I traveled to Washington, D.C. for meetings, I could see the shock in their eyes when they saw how luxurious the new headquarters were in comparison to their own spare field offices.

During this growth spurt in the late 1990s, CI hired more biologists and business people. Social scientists were made to feel unwelcome. As one senior director blurted out in a fit of rage after being challenged by field staff at a planning retreat, "I hate anthropologists."  

Ambitious headquarter staff wanted to feel they were making decisions. They pulled in the reins of the field directors and demanded more reports, more budget requisitions, more complicated planning frameworks -- but it was a one-way street of communication. Field programs rarely had a chance to learn from each other and discuss the challenges of community-based conservation.

At the same time CI was restructuring, there was a changing paradigm shift in the conservation movement away from partnerships with indigenous and local peoples to trendy "business-environment" models. At the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, indigenous peoples were heralded as environmental heroes -- with the Kayapo front and center. Ten years later at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the pendulum had obviously swung the other direction. Led by IUCN, the international environmental groups held their own forum in a swank banking facility next to the main Sandton Convention Center. Next door was the posh "business and environment" forum. Civil society organizations and indigenous groups were relegated to a drafty expo center called NASREC, one hour south of the official U.N. forum.  

In Johannesburg, I recall a brash young Conservation International cowboy who complained to me that he'd wasted an entire morning at the civil society forum at NASREC because no one was talking about the environment. Funny, I pointed out to him, perhaps that's because the northern conservationists set up their own separate forum.  

While partnerships with business certainly can be another effective tool for protecting the environment, there is a world of difference between organizations like the Environmental Defense whose entire mandate is to engage with corporations to reform their practices and organizations like CI who "take the money and run." Unless business reform is an explicit part of their work, they allow themselves to be used as the "green washing" for these corporations without anything in return. For example, CI's latest annual report shows that they receive money from Dow AgroSciences -- but they certainly do not have corresponding programs to address the impacts of pesticides on biodiversity and human health or the encroachment of plantation agriculture on protected areas. Ditto for the environmental pillage caused by Chevron Texaco, Chiquita, McDonalds, Esso, Exxon Mobil, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, to name just a few of the most infamous multinationals who support CI.

This leaves CI in-country field staff in an awkward and often dangerous position. For example, the Guatemalan staff were campaigning against an oil pipeline to be built across Laguna del Tigre National Park. Unbeknownst to Guatemalan staff, top level management at CI headquarters held negotiations to ask the same oil company to fork up a donation for a conservation endowment for the park. Without even exploring the ethical dimensions of how this endangered the Guatemalan field staff, I simply might point out that you can't object to plunder while asking Genghis Khan for a donation and then expect to be taken seriously.

Following the Dollar -- Another Tropical "Boom and Bust"

Another danger of CI's "aggressive fundraising machine," as Chapin points out, is the donor dependence it creates. As an example, he describes the millions that USAID poured into the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the lowlands of Guatemala from which CI headquarters collected a cool 24-38 percent overhead off the work of its Guatemalan team. When USAID funding for the Maya Biosphere was scheduled to dry up in 2001, CI headquarters staff realized they were going to have to channel some serious funds to Guatemala. Suddenly the hottest Mesoamerican hotspot cooled down. Perhaps not coincidentally, CI management decided to free themselves of this burden by announcing unilaterally that ProPeten (CI's Guatemala program) should become an independent Guatemalan NGO and allowed little negotiation over the process that would take.  

But CI didn't simply pull out of Guatemala. When word came out that USAID/Guatemala's environmental funding would shift to the highlands, CI followed the funding wind. Sure, CI may "partner" with local organizations to get established there, but they should be forewarned that CI is a fair weather friend.  

CI will claim to donors that they do, in fact, "partner" with indigenous peoples. But, who exactly are these partners? Where? Who ultimately makes the decisions? How many indigenous peoples do they have on their board? Even on their staff? What are the scales of pay equity in the organization? Do fieldworkers have comparable benefits to Washington, D.C. staff? Or any benefits at all? From my experiences with CI, they do not. When ProPeten separated from CI in 2002, my Guatemalan colleagues had to threaten to sue to get their rightful benefits according to Guatemalan law.

Hotspots and Corridors

In his article, Chapin shows the commonalities in the Machiavellian rhetoric of the international conservation organizations in describing their large-scale conservation approaches -- "hotspots," "ecosystems," and "living landscapes." Working at the national level is no longer sufficient; they must instead work at a "corridor" level. Always invoking crisis, the conservation cowboys declare they must save biodiversity whatever the cost. This often leads to strange bedfellows. In an age of globalization, conservation "corridors" unfortunately also tend to correspond to corridors of neoliberal economic development.  

For example, take the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which is uncomfortably wrapped up with the Puebla to Panama Plan (the PPP), opposed by hundreds of civil society organizations across Central America. The PPP is a $10 billion program designed by Mexico's neoliberal President Vicente Fox and backed financially by the InterAmerican Development Bank. It proposes a network of roads, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, natural gas pipelines and many other mega-development projects that threaten Central America's remaining forests. Although more than 95% of PPP funding is destined for infrastructure projects and undemocratic legal changes to facilitate the Central American Free Trade Agreements (CAFTA), the PPP's marketing team is smart. They've greenwashed the package by earmarking a mere five percent of the budget to support biodiversity conservation and ecotourism. Not surprisingly, CI stepped up to the plate to take the IDB's "ecotourism" money, though CI had abandoned all its commitments to ecotourism initiatives in Peten back in 2002.

In 1992, CI loudly supported NAFTA, and I will not be surprised if CI very soon announces its support of CAFTA (the upcoming Central American "Free" Trade Agreement). By contrast, indigenous peoples, social scientists, and hundreds of civil society groups oppose both the PPP and the CAFTA because they know it will bring more misery to indigenous peoples and the rural poor.  

I have just returned from two years of living among Q'eqchi' communities in the Guatemalan and Belizean lowlands (the very same communities the conservation cowboys accuse of "slashing and burning" Peten's forests, as described by Chapin). My research found that the PPP and CAFTA will likely increase landlessness among the Q'eqchi' and they'll be left with no other option but to invade protected areas. I can already hear the conservation cowboys blaming the Q'eqchi' people for deforestation, rather than recognizing their own complicity with the oil companies and the other forces of corporate globalization that compel the poor and indigenous peoples to destroy their own forests for survival.  

Direct Conservation

Perhaps that is why CI is now calling for strict preservationism. Frustrated with the messiness of ICPDs ("integrated conservation and development programs") and so-called "poverty alleviation," CI now advocates what they call "direct conservation" -- i.e. just buying up concessions from third-world governments. The colonial rhetoric of CI's resource economists who push these "conservation incentives" would make Cecil Rhodes proud. I recall how at a conference in 2002, a senior CI economist whipped out a calculator, punched in a few numbers and declared to the audience that buying up a 45,000 hectare timber concession in Bolivia would be "less than the cost of a house in my neighborhood."

Sure, buying up Third World land might be cheap enough -- but thorny questions of sovereignty and the policing of those areas still remain unresolved.  Perhaps that's why CI recently invested some of their "scarce conservation dollars" on a major study on "Strategies for Improving the Enforcement of Environmental Laws Globally." Amazingly, nowhere in this 34-page document do the authors worry about aligning themselves with the military dictatorships governing most of CI's so-called "hotspots." Even more amazingly, not once in their "in-depth" case study of Chiapas do the authors even mention the Zapatista revolt. While CI may claim to be "apolitical" in such matters, in places as politicized as Chiapas, silence is, indeed, very political.

Alternatives

As Chapin shows, CI, TNC and WWF combined control about half of all conservation dollars available today. From my observations, most of this money is lost to expensive D.C. salaries, frequent travel, and conservation conversation workshops in five-star hotels. I would encourage the donor community not only to fund a series of independent evaluations of their conservation investments, as Chapin suggests, but to also look for alternatives.

There are hundreds of highly capable local and indigenous organizations that can more effectively and accountably carry out conservation work in their own countries. Rather than losing their money to the high overheads and inefficiencies of the three conservation behemoths, donors might support more local projects and invest in network-building forums that would allow them to gain new skills and share experiences. The home mortgage of a senior CI economist might be enough to purchase a timber concession, but it can also pay for a lot of local salaries and projects. For example, after separating from CI in 2002, ProPeten, with a totally Guatemalan staff, has managed to maintain programs and momentum at a fraction of the former budget. ProPeten has also broadened its base by integrating health, organic agriculture, education, and other local priorities into its conservation work.  

In closing, I offer one example of how indigenous organizations can advance their agendas for land security and dignified livelihoods while also contributing to conservation. Across the forests of northern Guatemala, as mentioned above, the landless Q'eqchi' Maya are usually those who get blamed for deforestation. What the international conservation cowboys fail to see is that the Q'eqchi' cut down the forest not because they are ecologically evil, but because under the current Guatemalan legal structure, that's the best way to claim land security.  

To address that problem, an anthropologist, Anthony Stocks, a dynamite Peace Corps volunteer, Jason Pielemeier, and a Q'eqchi' leader, Ernesto Tzi, worked with a group of Q'eqchi' settler communities around the Candelaria caves in the impoverished Chisec region of Alta Verapaz. When they were actually consulted, the Q'eqchi' communities agreed the forests around the caves should be protected. What's more, they expressed interest in co-managing the area as a park. They were even willing to buy the land themselves to protect their forests in perpetuity around these sacred caves. As subsistence farmers, though, they couldn't afford to pay for land at the normal purchasing price of US$128 per hectare.

Stocks helped the communities negotiate with the Guatemalan government land agency, FONTIERRAS, for a lower purchasing price for the land that the communities would leave in conservation. The villagers learned GPS skills, measured their own land, and developed management plans for the area. They also started a project to grow cacao, coffee, and cardamom -- all of which can be sustainably planted under the forest canopy. Interestingly, when the communities received their land tenure, people began to ask for information about family planning. And, spontaneously, many adjoining communities asked to participate. A local Q'eqchi' organization, SANK, now runs the program and they are now working to develop their own kind of conservation corridor for jaguars, while giving hundreds of families the first secure land tenure they've ever had. This project also set a legal precedent that could revolutionize land distribution and conservation in Guatemala.  

Trusting local groups and indigenous peoples may seem like a leap of faith from swank Washington, D.C. offices. But given the mounting pile of failures by the Big Three, it's probably a better gamble for donors to invest in people and organizations that understand that without justice, there will be no conservation and without conservation, no justice.

Sincerely,
Liza Grandia

Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
U.C.-Berkeley