National parks, wildlife sanctuaries and the compatibility of human rights with environmentalist and non-anthropocentric ideas
Since early childhood I have heard so many stories about India’s nature and wildlife from my father. One of my dreams has always been to visit the magnificent Himalayas and the tropical forests and see the beautiful creatures that inhabit them, especially the Bengal tiger. Much later on I became aware of the extremely precarious situation of all non-human life due to human exploitative activities. Around seven years ago I became convinced that a non-anthropocentric and antispeciesist perspective needed to prevail if true justice and equality is ever to be achieved. In short, it means that we should no longer believe that humans are the most important animals on the planet and have the right to exploit other species as they please. Interestingly enough, after visiting a few national parks in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, I found that my fascination with nature is in conflict with my beliefs and values.
The last park I visited was the famous Jim Corbett National Park in north India, at the foothills of the Himalayas. Corbett is the first national park in the country, established during the British colonial era in 1936. I went on a safari there with my uncle, my father and my cousin last Sunday and had plenty of mixed feelings afterwards which motivated me to write this text. During the three hour jeep ride through the park we could see a few deers and several rhesus macaques, perhaps the only animals which were not afraid of humans. The extreme density of the jungle made it very difficult to spot animals and the route of the safari did not help either as we didn’t go through open grasslands and didn’t approach the Ramganga river or the Ramganga reservoir. I didn’t expect to spot the elusive tigers or leopards but had some hopes of seeing elephants or crocodiles. Altogether the experience was slightly disappointing and made me wonder if it’s worth repeating in other national parks.
From an antispeciesist perspective my presence in the park in a motorised vehicle was nothing more than a disruption. While the jeep’s engine was rather quiet, it surely made enough noise to scare away most animals around us. Most importantly however, the very expectation of making “sightings” of free-living animals and the whole concept of national park is anthropocentric and speciesist. The areas, along with the plants and animals inside it, are protected because they represent a high value to us, humans, and not because the non-human lives are recognised as intrinsically valuable. The scientific communities dedicated to preservation of nature have been influential in the process of declaring certain areas protected, however my feeling is that nowadays the commercial value of such places is decisive, like almost everything in capitalist logic: As long as they bring profit, they will exist.
I agree with my friend Iqbal in the rejection of national parks as protected areas for the affluent urban visitors with the consequent expulsion of rural and tribal communities to make space for the natural amusement park. I reject this idea both because I share Iqbal’s human rights concerns and because of my own non-anthropocentric point of view. I believe that if a community is affected by the creation of a national park or a wildlife sanctuary, it needs to be adequately compensated and offered a suitable alternative. Unfortunately this is rarely the case in India (and perhaps other countries too). Also, the main motivation to preserve such natural spaces should not be commercial interest but the survival of non-human animals and, in the long run, also humans. The main threat to both is the prevailing neoliberal ideology.
The logic of extractivism, so pervasive in neoliberal capitalism, is obviously anthropocentric. Anthropocentrism and capitalism both enable the notion of nature as a place from which humans can extract resources freely and without any limit. It seems universally accepted across the globe that nature “provides” resources for humans and that non-human animals can be exploited for our benefit. I must add that I do not include subsistence farming and hunting by communities such as the earlier mentioned Adivasis in what I consider harmful extractivism and exploitation. The consumerism and wasteful use of resources by industries in the urban centres of power are most at fault when it comes to damage to the environment rather than rural communities in the vicinity of protected areas.
When I asked my friend Iqbal if he saw any possibilities of reaching a peaceful coexistence of local communities with nature in protected areas such as Corbett, he wasn’t very optimistic about it. As he told me, the Adivasi and other local communities might also want development in the form of electricity and other infrastructure projects in their areas, which will inevitably lead to the destruction of the protected lands. It seems obvious to me that there is nothing wrong with demanding better infrastructure and access to basic services. I strongly believe that everyone deserves equal access to healthcare and education.
However, I refuse to accept that such projects are bound to lay waste to the natural environment. The main problem is that the very notions of progress and development which are promoted within capitalist logic are extremely destructive, especially the myth of eternal growth. Taking for granted that nature has to inevitably give way to human development favours this ideology which I know my friend Iqbal is not fond of, to say the least. There are plenty of alternatives available which do not involve a complete isolation from the outside world and the local authorities should explore such possibilities. A human rights perspective is perfectly compatible with an environmentalist one and actually both applied together benefit humans greatly. I am not even mentioning the non-anthropocentric perspective as it is still far from the mainstream discourse, unlike environmentalism.
Unfortunately, today protected areas like Corbett are only a reminder of what the world used to be like decades and centuries ago. The animals we are sometimes lucky to see are only ghosts of that different past in which we humans lived alongside other species (not necessarily in peace). We breed them, transport them from one place to another, count them and limit their space: A kind of “Truman Show” for animals. There are no free animals anymore, all of them exist because they are somehow important to us or they are still inaccessible for us, like the creatures inhabiting the deepest seas of the planet.
Even from the anthropocentric point of view the destruction of natural environments due to our human obsession with growth and expansion will inevitably bring about more natural disasters and human suffering: Landslides and water shortages provoked by deforestation, deadly floods and hurricanes, food shortages, etc. In such events those who suffer the most are the most vulnerable of us. Even if we do not value non-human lives, we desperately need to protect what is often collectively described as “nature” for the sake of human survival. In the long run, however, the only way to mitigate the negative effects of our dominance might be adapting a view in which humans are not at the centre of everything, and which does not equate “progress” to extractivism and shallow consumerism at the cost of the obliteration of all non-human life and landscape.
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