Save the Tigers (kill the people)

Not my headlines: This is from AlJ, who has an article on how people are hurt by the conservationist push to "save the tiger".

Today, as conservation efforts become more and more militarised, state-sponsored actors are not only evicting and restricting the movements of indigenous community members, but also killing them for allegedly trespassing on their own ancestral lands. In India, conservation violence seems to be on the rise.

the gov't pushes the local indigenous people off their ancestral land to make it into reserves for the endangered tiger... and those trespassing or protesting sometimes are killed.

 For decades, India's Forest Department officials - aided and abetted by the omnipotent National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) - have been implementing a violent policy of "people-less conservation" resulting in human rights violations. But, of course, people-less conservation is not a problem specific to India. Across the world, governments have long been using the need for the conservation of land and wildlife as an excuse to remove Indigenous communities from their homes, sometimes with the support of large international conservation groups. 

such as the WWF: World Wildlife Federation.

the indigenuos are at risk all over the world, caught in the middle of a fight to use their resources (oil, timber), the wish of others to move into their forests to farm, and of course, the wish of the animal rights type to save the rain forest and either chase out the people or insist that no one help these people to cope with modernity by improving their lives.

Not an easy subject.

Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, or assimilation?

A lot depends on what locals want.

on the other hand, a lot of times "what locals want" means what those who left and got educated into marxism/liberation theology decide they want, or the wishes of the elders, some of whom prefer to be the boss over a group of people who they can control instead of looking for what is best for their people.