While many of us relate the idea of colonialism to the past, most of the colonial practices still exist in the modern world. The Global North still exploits the resources, expertise, and sovereignty of the Global South in new forms, and environmental conservation is not an exception. Historically, environmental conservation has had a noble universal premise: to preserve nature against detrimental human activities. However, in the background, there is a sinister history involving expelling indigenous people and suppressing their eco-caretaking responsibility and valorizing Western ecological principles to the rest of the world.

From the establishment of Yellowstone National Park to current-day fortress conservation in Africa and Asia, the idea of environmental protection has had little cooperation with people but instead has been about the fortification of places against people. It is not a matter of chance in history; rather, it is an extension of colonial power where the Global North decides which landscapes are worth protecting, which people belong to them, and whether or not they have to be excluded.

The Myth of “Pristine” Wilderness & Colonial Erasure

The myth of a “pristine” wilderness where no people managed to live is one of the longest-standing and most devastating colonialist beliefs of conservation. When the European colonizers came to North America in the 1600s, they found themselves in the middle of expansive terrain that had been set under the care of the Native people for thousands of years of Indian stewardship, such as forests maintained by careful burning and grasslands managed by seasonally moving livestock.

To the Americans, however, these were not developed landscapes; they were rather the untamed wilderness, a representation of how they were failing to realize native land practices. Selecting these lands with the idea of remaking them through clearing forests, fencing pastures, killing buffalo, and yet lamenting at the kind of nature they were demolishing, settlers did so because they believed in their civilizing mission.

According to the American Invention of National Parks by Roderick Nash, the contradiction is recalled by the 19th-century artist George Catlin, who painted and claimed to have observed American Indian life. Further, in 1832, Catlin toured the lands of indigenous people, romanticizing what he referred to as the grace and beauty of nature, all the while he was demonizing native people as debauched by colonialism. His solution? The government secured the park to conserve the land and the Indigenous people living in it, but not the tribes, who had been occupying the land for generations.

Historian Roderick Nash argues that, as discussed in The American Invention of National Parks, Catlin provided the........

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