The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

By Elisabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change

On May 9, 2019 Blue Origin — Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company — posted this video of Jeff Bezos speaking at the Going to Space to Benefit Earth event. One of the visions of Blue Origin, as outlined on the web site, and the focus of Mr. Bezos’ presentation is that millions of people must live and work in space in order to “preserve Earth” and that we will “go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.”

He begins his presentation by making some true statements — that the Earth is not infinite (who knew!) and will eventually run out of energy for our use (again, who knew!). Mr. Bezos then quickly veers into human supremacy in the extreme, with a couple of innocuous sounding but telling remarks: that our lives are better than our parent’s lives, which were better than our grandparent’s lives (really better? Or just more energy intensive?) — completely ignoring all the non-humans we share this planet with — and that we could power our culture’s current energy needs if only we covered Nevada in solar cells. “It is mostly desert, anyway,” he says, ignoring the fact that deserts are in fact teeming with amazing life of all kinds from beautiful desert flowers to lizards, birds, tortoises, and so many more; ignoring the fact that solar farms in Nevada and other areas are bulldozed of all life before the toxic and deadly shining solar cells are installed.

As Mr. Bezos correctly points out, if we continue growing (GDP, energy use, etc.) at 3% a year, our historical trend in the modern era, we’d have to cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar panels to supply our energy needs in 200 years. Unintentionally, he’s hit upon a big problem with renewables: the land use requirements are unsustainable, and aside from the fact that along with running out of fossil fuel energy, we will eventually run out of the raw materials to make solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, smart grids, and so on long before 200 years passes. Of course, as he says, it is ridiculous to cover the Earth with solar panels, so we need something else.

Something else will include efficiency: our technology will continue to become more efficient, but Mr. Bezos acknowledges that growth in energy use will far outstrip energy efficiency. This relationship between greater efficiency and greater resource use is known as Jevons’ Paradox, discovered by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Energy efficiency never reduces the amount of energy we use, because the more efficient our devices and cars and lighting and heating become, the cheaper they get, and the more we use. One example Mr. Bezos uses is air transportation: 50 years ago it took 109 gallons of fuel to fly one person from LA to NYC; today it takes only 24 gallons. And indeed, air travel is growing faster than any other transportation sector and is expected to double in the next 20 years, far outstripping the gains in efficiency made by airline companies. Efficiency gains just lead to more growth.

So, yet again, we need something else. Mr. Bezos never questions that growth is bad. He never suggests that maybe we should de-grow our population, our economy, our consumption, anything. He never contemplates that growth might not always be a good thing if it leads to the suffering of multitudes. No, he charges on assuming that growth is what’s best for everyone. Of course he does. As the CEO of amazon.com he is the embodiment of growth at all costs, including the lives of his own employees.

Does he even for a second think about the lives of non-humans at all? I don’t think so.

Unlimited demand + limited resources = rationing. This is the equation Mr. Bezos shows the audience, and he is correct. But rather than suggest we limit our demand, he focuses on how awful the rationing will be. According to him, that rationing means our children’s lives will be worse than our parent’s lives, and our grandparent’s lives. Again, I am blown away by the human supremacy of this thinking. It assumes that our lives have indeed, until now, been getting better. Which assumes that “our” means humans, because it surely cannot mean non-humans, whose lives have been getting demonstrably worse. Much worse. And which humans is he talking about? Clearly only the humans in the so-called Western developed world, because most humans on this planet have more recently been stripped of their land and livelihoods by colonization and “sustainable development”, and forced into menial, poverty-level jobs in factories, mines, and oil fields where their lives are demonstrably worse than they were before. For proof of this, simply imagine (or better yet, read the stories about) the life of a Native American Indigenous person who lived free on the land before white colonization and genocide and compare that with the life of a Native American relegated to living in poverty on a reservation with no access to land for traditional use, clean water, clean air, or cultural sites and activities. Mr. Bezos is arguing, as all techno-utopians do, that progress is always good. Only for people like you, Mr. Bezos.

And what is wrong with rationing? Well, god-forbid, it means we’d have to use less of everything we’re accustomed to using now. (Rich) Americans — 5% of the global population — would have to stop using the 25% of the resources on this planet that we use now. The horror! Cutting back and using less is fundamentally anathema to the American Dream(TM) — the idea that if we just work hard enough we can all achieve that fantasy of progress: having more money, owning more stuff, and of course, the unarticulated implication of using more energy that goes with that. “More” is the stuff American Dreams are made of.

The choice Mr. Bezos presents us with is between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”. For Mr. Bezos, the choice is easy: we want dynamism and growth.

And here’s the good news: if we move out into space, we’ll have access to more! To unlimited resources!

Mr. Bezos’ solution to continued dynamism and growth is O’Neill colonies: giant tubes in space filled with a million people each. Here’s what he envisions this would look like:

[see photo here]

These will be easy to get to from Earth, easy to move amongst so we can visit our friends and neighbors. We can have the atmosphere of the best day on Hawai’i, the best cities, the best recreational spaces (complete with a deer and a bird flying over!). We can have it all, if we are willing to leave the planet behind, willing to forgo our “planetary chauvinism” as he (and a clip from Isaac Asimov) says.

Earth will, according to Bezos, be zoned for “residential”, “light industry” and people going to college. That’s weird. Why would people want to go to college on the planet, but not on the colony? He never says why. He also doesn’t mention “other species” in his zoning plans for Earth… at all. Or forests, rivers, mountains, glaciers, prairies, or wild places of any kind. Or how we’ll go about cleaning up the pollution and what will be no longer needed nuclear power plants, roads, buildings, and so much more we’ve left in our wake. He just says Earth “will be a beautiful place that people will visit.”

A trillion humans in space means a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts, according to Bezos. He doesn’t mention a thousand white rhinos, or a thousand passenger pigeons, or a thousand great auks. Of course not, because — oops! — we already killed off those species with our insatiable greed and inability to set limits on ourselves. As if a beautiful sunset isn’t as valuable as a Mozart concerto, and a thousand physics geniuses is somehow better than an entire species. Mr. Bezos claims this would be a great civilization. Only for people who care only about people, Mr. Bezos. Yes, there are a still a few of us who care about more than that.

Mr. Bezos says it won’t be up to him to build this future; it will be up to the (presumably younger) people he points to in the front row. It will be those people and their children and grandchildren, those people who will need to create the companies and the infrastructure to move to space… well they’d better hurry because we have only a couple of decades to get our CO2 emissions down to zero to avoid catastrophic climate change, and I’m not sure you can build a million colonies in space each big enough to hold a million people in two decades. Perhaps Mr. Bezos envisions that all of Earth’s remaining resources will be used up in this process? In which case it is unlikely that Earth will be a “beautiful place to visit” once we’re done building these big metal tubes in space.

The rest of the presentation is an advertisement for Blue Origin and how the company is putting all the basic infrastructure — the road to space — into place so that future generations can take it from there, with gratuitous phallic images of rockets launching into space accompanied by rousing movie music. Jeff Bezos’ childhood fantasy come true.

At no time in this entire presentation does Mr. Bezos mention non-human species, except implicitly when he mentions (and shows fantastical pictures of) “recreational opportunities” and “agriculture” in the colonies. It is as if, for Bezos, “nature” doesn’t exist except for recreation and food. Who, I want to ask him, is going to be responsible for building the web of life on these colonies so his deer and his bird and the pollinators (not shown) in the colonies will actually exist for more than a few weeks, days, or hours? Unfortunately, knowing what we know about Jeff Bezos, it is entirely possible that the graphical rendering of the colonies shows a robotic deer and a robotic bird, and that pollination occurs entirely via miniature drones. And what about the soil in which the plants in the “agriculture” areas and the trees shown in the “recreational” spaces grow? It is likely that the soil, too, is artificial, and artificially fertilized… oops! Synthetic fertilizer is made from petroleum products, which implies that either we find fossil fuels out in space somewhere (where we’ll be putting all the “heavy industry” of the future, according to Bezos), or that we continue mining the Earth for fossil fuels so we can grow food in space. Or maybe once established, we’ll all be pooping out the fertilizer in these closed-circuit biospheres in space. Because that’s been so successful in the past.

Who knows what is in Bezos’ addled mind. I do know one thing that isn’t there: a fundamental respect for nature, for billions of years of evolution, for the intricacy of the web of life that supports us here on planet Earth, a web of life we know virtually nothing about in comparison to what there is to know. He very obviously sees humans as separate from nature; anyone who imagines we can live in space must believe that to some degree. What Mr. Bezos fails to understand is that we are completely, utterly, inextricably part of nature; that we are human animals, and that our attempts to pretend otherwise will last only as long as the planetary ecosystem here on Earth, the ecosystem that continues to function at some diminished capacity, despite the damages we keep inflicting on the one and only planet we know of that supports life.

To fantasize that it is somehow better to try to recreate in space what we once had on Earth, than it is to contemplate limiting our demand just a bit so we can continue to live on this beautiful blue planet is human supremacy in the extreme. This won’t be a popular position, I know. Humans, especially Americans, love a new frontier to explore, and almost everyone I know gets excited about new technology and launching things into space.

But launching ourselves into space with the idea that we can somehow live without the planet to whom we are tethered with blood, guts, bacteria, cells, water, phytoplankton, oxygen, breath, fish, birds, trees, … every living thing on Earth… is the insane hallucination of someone who’s been “successful” as measured by little bits of green paper and numbers on a computer screen, but who has absolutely no idea that his fantasy, like the paper and the numbers, is a delusion.

Geo-engineering: A wétiko experiment on the planet

Geo-engineering: A wétiko experiment on the planet

By Elizabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change

In the preface to Columbus and Other Cannibals, Derrick Jensen asks: “why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” [1]

The author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack D. Forbes, goes on to answer Derrick’s question in the chapters of his remarkable book, pinning the main cause of our suicidal destruction on a virus of the mind, wétiko. Wétiko was first identified by Native Americans and other indigenous people, when they saw how white colonizers so disrespected the natural world, women, and all people who were not yet colonized, they needed a name for the sickness in the colonizers’ minds that allowed them to commit such acts of aggression, hate, and conquest.

Colonizers are still colonizing today, now more than ever. Colonizers take whatever they think they need from the natural world to feed the global machine of capitalism and consumerism, without a care for the living beings who need what is now destroyed, and so the living beings themselves are now destroyed, too. These colonizers know the destruction they are causing–the loss of life, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of habitat, the loss of a stable climate–and yet they continue taking and destroying anyway. This is pure arrogance.

We in the early 21st century are the most arrogant humans to ever have walked the face of the Earth. Mr. Forbes identified this arrogance as one of the major traits of wétikoism:

“There are many psychological traits that help form the wétiko personality. Greed, lust, inordinate ambition, materialism, the lack of a true ‘face,’ a schizoid (split) personality, and so on are all terms which can be used to describe most wétikos. But one of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of wétikoism is arrogance.”

This is not new, and it’s not news. Mr. Forbes argues wétikoism first originated in Egypt, and over time infected all peoples who reigned via colonialism and imperialism, including of course the Romans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Europeans, and the Anglo-Americans in the United States.

The wétiko virus is now more virulent than ever; we become more arrogant by the day, as we use science and technology to discover and invent whole new ways to pollute and destroy our one and only home. Mr. Forbes writes:

“Scientists in many fields recognize no societal obligations restraining their experimentation, least of all any restraints imposed by ‘the lower classes’ or less powerful nationalities. … Many modern scientists are the precise counterparts of Christopher Columbus, and not merely by way of analogy. They will pave the way for new imperialism and new systems of coercion and will themselves economically, participate in the fruits of the new ‘discoveries.’”

I cannot think of a more perfect example of wétikoism than the emerging research field of geo-engineering. Scientists working in this field are hoping to invent and understand ways to reduce the impacts of climate change via chemical and technological means. One of these research areas, solar radiation management, also known as albedo modification, is proceeding to the experimental phase at Harvard University, where scientist David Keith heads up an experiment named SCoPEx, a powered balloon that will release chemical particles into the stratosphere, and measure how those particles affect the reflection of sunlight away from the planet. Solar radiation management is widely regarded as the cheapest and easiest way to cool the planet in case we do so much damage to the climate, we find ourselves in need of such extreme and drastic measures. Inspired by volcanoes–which release reflective particles when they erupt–solar radiation management would, in theory, cool the planet with just a few applications a year, costing in the millions or low billions of dollars. Of course, we have no idea what this would do to the temperature or the weather on a planetary scale, but, scientists argue, it’s better to have a fallback idea that’s already been researched and tested, than not have one at all.

Do you or I or anyone but the scientists at Harvard have a say in whether the SCoPEx experiment goes forward? Does it matter?

Scientists tend to use the argument that it’s better to know, than not to know. Maybe. But research can lead us down a path that, in hindsight, we might wish we’d never taken. Some of the scientists who developed the hydrogen bomb, which has led us into a nuclear arms race that threatens all life on earth, regretted their participation in creating that weapon of mass destruction. Without the benefit of hindsight, how might we feel about inventing new ways to change the atmosphere of the Earth?

Of course, we already are changing the atmosphere of the Earth, so perhaps one might argue that more experiments are necessary to counteract the planetary-wide experiment we are currently running with CO2 in our atmosphere.

The thing is, these scientists at Harvard aren’t asking you, or me, or anyone else if they should go forward with their research and their experiments. They aren’t asking the millions of other species on this planet if they want more experiments on the only planet we know of that sustains life. In other words, as Jack Forbes put it, these scientists “recognize no societal obligations restraining their experimentation.”

What do the scientists get out of this research, other than satisfying their need to know? Are the scientists paving the way for “new imperialism and new systems of coercion” as Mr. Forbes writes? Are these scientists participating in the fruits of their discoveries? Are these scientists wétikos?

David Keith, the main researcher on the SCoPEx experiment at Harvard founded a company in 2009 named Carbon Engineering, of which he is executive chairman. Carbon Engineering creates technology that captures CO2 from the air. The company announced partnerships with the fossil fuel companies Chevron and Occidental in January 2019.

Why are Chevron and Occidental partnering with Carbon Engineering? Because, as Occidental stated, “the deal would complement the company’s enhanced oil recovery business, where CO2 is pumped in fields to release more fuel.”[2]

In other words, the oil companies use the captured CO2 to get more oil out of the ground.

So think about it: David Keith is the founder of and receives direct monetary benefit from a company that sucks CO2 from the air. And he is the primary researcher behind the Harvard solar radiation management experiment that would reflect more sun in our atmosphere, cooling the planet and thus allowing us to burn more fossil fuels and continue creating CO2 emissions, that his company can then capture and sell to oil companies to “enhance” oil recovery.

Yes, these geo-engineers are wétikos.

One can easily imagine the day that humanity realizes it has so utterly failed to stop the relentless and insane extraction and burning of fossil fuels, that in order to survive, in order to keep this ecocidal, genocidal culture going so that the rich and powerful can maintain their positions of power for just a little while longer, someone somewhere decides to spray reflective chemicals into the stratosphere. Will you or I or anyone who is not rich and powerful have a say in that decision? It is highly unlikely.

Will any of the other millions of species on this one planet we all call home have a say in that decision? Of course not. Wétikos forgot how to listen to the Earth a long, long time ago.

And so what is geo-engineering if not a wétiko system of planetary imperialism and coercion?

[1] Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Jack D. Forbes, 1979, 1992, 2008
[2] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060111481

All Oppression is Connected

All Oppression is Connected

By Elisabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change

All oppression is connected.

All oppression is related to resource extraction.

Whether that resource is black Africans forced into slavery, a massive energy resource that powered settler-colonial America….

or the resource is women’s reproductive power, exploited by men who restrict women’s bodily autonomy and oppress women in the process….

or the resource is land taken from indigenous cultures and from wild animals for colonial settlers to farm….

or the resource is land taken from indigenous cultures and from wild animals for wind farms and solar farms

or the resource is iron ore, copper, gold, coal, oil, gas, or sand taken from the land, taken from indigenous cultures and the poor for corporations and the rich people who run them…

or the resource is fresh clean water and fresh clean air, taken from us all by corporations to use as the dumping ground for their pollution, as commerce reigns supreme and supreme courts grant corporations more rights than people.

All Oppression is Connected. All Oppression is Related to Resource Extraction.


Image: All Oppression is Connected is a wall painting by Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu, inspired by the poetry of Jamaican artist Staceyann Chin. Labeled for noncommerical reuse on baldiri Flickr.


About Deep Green Resistance

DGR is a political movement for liberation and revolution. We aim for nothing less than total liberation from extractive economics, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, industrialism, and the culture of empire that we call civilization. This is a war for survival, and we’re losing. We aim to turn the tide. We mean to win.

And we’re recruiting. DGR is building an international movement dedicated to grassroots revolutionary change. Anyone can contribute: we need warriors, poets, writers, organizers, workers, mothers, thinkers, students, farmers. We need you.

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UK’s Charity Commission Launches Investigation into WWF

UK’s Charity Commission Launches Investigation into WWF

Featured image: A major investigation by news site Buzzfeed, released March 4, 2019, exposed a shocking level of violent abuse by ecoguards and rangers funded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). © Buzzfeed

    by Survival International

Britain’s charity regulator has launched an official investigation into WWF, in a major blow to the embattled organization.

The inquiry follows an explosive report by Buzzfeed News that revealed that WWF funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people.

WWF’s main response to the Buzzfeed exposé has been to commission a law firm specializing in “reputation management” to conduct an “independent review.”

The investigation will examine whether WWF UK conducts proper due diligence to ensure that the grant money it sends overseas does not contribute to violence.

In a statement, the commission said the “atrocities and human rights abuses that were alleged are at odds with everything we associate with charity.”

The news comes just a day before the launch of the new Netflix-WWF series Our Planet, narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “It’s a step forward that the Charity Commission is finally launching an investigation, but we’re not holding our breath. The Commission is only concerned with WWFUK, and has no ability to judge its complicity in human rights violations.

“The most that will happen is that it will require WWF to investigate, which WWF has already said it’ll do. We’ll then have a long wait, ending in a bucket of whitewash.

“WWF has known about these atrocities for years. Let’s not forget that, at this moment, WWF is calling for a new protected area, Messok Dja, which is stealing Baka “Pygmy” land in Congo. What we need is a public outcry against fortress conservation which is so damaging to the planet and its peoples.”

WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them

WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them

Featured image: The collusion between officials and poachers was exposed in India’s Down to Earth magazine. © Down to Earth

     by Survival International

Park officials in India’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve colluded with poachers in the killing of endangered leopards, tigers and pangolin, according to an investigation by a senior wildlife officer.

The accused officials range from the park director to junior guards. WWF-India boasts that it trained “all Rajaji frontline staff in skills that were vital for protection,” including law-enforcement. It also provided vehicles, uniforms and essential anti-poaching equipment to the guards.

The investigation, reported in India’s Down to Earth magazine, found that not only were officials helping to hunt down and kill wildlife, they also beat and tortured a man named Amit – an innocent villager who was trying to stop the poaching.

Officials are reported to have arrested Amit under false charges, resulting in him being detained for up to a month. He was also beaten and given electric shocks by a wildlife warden and two range officers.

These revelations of serious human rights abuses by guards trained and supported by WWF follow the recent Buzzfeed exposés that WWF funds guards who kill and torture people.

The involvement of those supposed to protect wildlife in hunting is common. A UN report in 2016 confirmed that corrupt officials are at the heart of wildlife crime in many parts of the world, rather than tribal peoples who hunt to feed their families.

Stephen Corry, Survival International’s Director, said today: “Rangers who poach as well as violate human rights won’t surprise those environmentalists who’ve been speaking against fortress conservation for years. Corrupt rangers often collude with poachers, while tribal people, the best conservationists, bear the brunt of conservation abuses.”

The Baka Peoples Don’t Want To Be Sacrificed for Conservation

The Baka Peoples Don’t Want To Be Sacrificed for Conservation

Featured image: A man from a village near the proposed Messok Dja national park shows scars from a beating he received at the hands of ecoguards supported and funded by World Wildlife Fund. © Fiore Longo/Survival International

     by , Survival International / Intercontinental Cry

The dense Messok Dja rainforest has been home to the Baka Peoples since time immemorial. But now the forest is being closed off to them to make way for a new national park. Although the park hasn’t been formally established, the Baka are being driven from their homes and deprived of their vital lifeline of forest resources—with devastating results.

For nearly a decade, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has been working with the Congolese government to set up the Messok Dja National Park with the help of funding bodies like the European Commission (EC), the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

During this time, WWF-funded park rangers have actively patrolled the area. The Baka, who are vehemently opposed to the national park, have routinely denounced the rangers, whom they accuse of violence, discrimination and torture.

One Baka woman described how “The wildlife guards just want to kill us. Once, I had just gone to do some dam-fishing. I was coming back with some fish to grill in packages made of leaves, to eat with my husband and children. I’m coming back with the pot of fish, I put it down. Just like that, the ecoguards grab me: Bam, bam, bam. For no reason. I hadn’t provoked them, I didn’t owe them anything. They just beat me and I don’t even know what for.”

Another man reported, “We just suffer these terrible beatings here for nothing. If they see us, they just beat us with machetes. Bam, bam, bam [on your body].”

In 2011, park rangers operating in the area were involved in a string of events that led to the death of 10-year old Christine Mayi.

In the face of such persecution, many Baka have retreated from the forests to live in road-side camps. Already they are being forced to abandon their age-old tradition of “molongo” – going deep into the forest for extended periods to hunt and gather. This is now impossible as one Baka woman explained:

“How can I go into the forest?…I just go round in circles here. At this time of year I gather wild mangos, [but] now I just stay close to the road. I just gather the mangoes that are near here.. that’s their forest – they’ve taken it.”

Confronted with an alien way of life outside of the forest, the Baka face the very real possibility of food scarcity. “We live from the Lipolo forest: wild mangoes, fish, meat, wild honey and yams, everything… but it’s now blocked off and we’re left to suffer. We don’t know how we can live.”

Conservation-related malnutrition among tribal peoples in the Congo is already a well-documented problem. In 2017, a Congolese organization raised concerns that conservation had contributed to the deaths of several dozen Bayaka children during an epidemic in 2016. The deaths were attributed by a medical expert to malaria, pneumonia and dysentery, aggravated by severe malnutrition.

“We’re suffering here. We don’t know how we’re going to survive. There is nowhere for us to live. It’s as though any value we have is gone.”

And of course, when the Baka now fall ill, they are unable to collect the medicinal plants they need from the forest.

To make matters worse, the Baka communities have never given their consent for the national park, with one local Baka chief explaining, “We can’t agree to it. Everything is there: food, life, health all come from that forest. If we were to give up the forest, we’d be sacrificing our children’s lives, our parents’ lives, our own lives. It would be as if someone were committing suicide.”

The Baka remain resolute in their opposition to the project. The forest is not only key to their survival, it lies at the heart of their sense of community and identity. Life outside it is simply inconceivable to them.

“We Baka, we’re not the type of people who just stay in the village. We’re forest people… Our life, our future is out in the forest. For us and for our children. I know the forest from A-Z. Every root, every tree.”

Many Baka communities have written signed letters of complaint which they asked Survival International to forward to the funders of the proposed park. One letter reads, “If the park is established in our forest, it will be very serious. Instead of working with us, the park rangers have made us suffer so much: they beat us, they whip us with their belts. If that carries on, how will our children live? We are told that according to international law, before starting a project in our forest they need to ask our consent. So we ask you to come here, listen to us and see our suffering, and make sure the law is respected.”

The Baka’s understanding of their legal rights is sound: international law indeed dictates that the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of local communities must be obtained for major projects undertaken on their land. Without their consent, Messok Dja National Park is illegal.

In spite of this, WWF is pushing ahead with its plans for Messok Dja and the project continues to enjoy the support of the EC and USFWS as major donors. Neither of these funding bodies or the conservation giant show any signs of pulling the millions of dollars they have committed to the project.

The Baka–who are excellent conservationists in their own right–are adamant that this must change, and reproach those funding the project for their lack of financial responsibility: “[We] want those funding the park to take action. We’ve never seen a white person come to see where their money is going.”

Despite the considerable body of evidence of terrible human rights violations committed against the Baka, WWF has thus far denied any allegations of wrongdoing. A recent tweet read: “As if WWF would allow local communities to be systematically abused, that really is too crazy for words!”

“[We] want those funding the park to take action. We’ve never seen a white person come to see where their money is going.”

In an article written last year, a WWF coordinator described how its ranger team in northern Congo was “fully supported by WWF, and therefore well supervised and equipped.” He went on to praise the team for their efforts to stabilize elephant numbers in the region.

The conservation organization insists that it “takes the allegations seriously.” However it has not replied to any of the community complaints submitted via their whistle-blowing mechanism in July last year regarding the Messok Dja project.

The organization says it aims to respond to complaints made within two weeks.

The European Commission has defended its involvement in the conservation initiative, stressing that Messok Dja “ought to contribute to the improvement of the living conditions of the communities around the park as well as upholding conservation objectives.”

The USFWS was made aware of the situation facing the Baka in Messok Dja in November last year. Survival International has no record of any reply.

The case of Messok Dja National Park and the fate of the Baka tribe is far from an isolated case. Survival International has already reported extensively on the conservation-related human rights abuses in the context of the Congo Basin, Africa and India; it is truly a global problem.

The tribal peoples’ rights organization says that up to 14 million people worldwide have been evicted from their lands in the name of conservation. One study even calculated that the number could be as high 136 million people. In India alone, a recent ruling by the Supreme Court means that some 8 million tribal and other forest-dwelling people could be evicted from their forests due to pressure from conservation groups.

It is clear that neither the scope nor the serious nature of conservation-related problems faced by indigenous and tribal peoples worldwide can be overlooked. Survival International says that the Baka now face “existential threat as a hunter-gatherer tribe” as a result of the Messok Dja conservation initiative.

There are reasons for optimism however.

Survival’s conservation campaign continues to gain momentum and with a damning indictment of WWF’s human rights record published this week by the news platform Buzzfeed, the pressure is now very much on the WWF, and the conservation industry at large, to dramatically change the way it operates and respect tribal peoples’ rights.

Editor’s note: Read more at Cover up: Buzzfeed reveals WWF KNEW locals opposed its flagship park – but hid this from funders.

Learn more about Survival International’s campaign to prevent the illegal eviction of the Baka from their forests here.