07/28/06 The price of conservation part two

07/28/06 The price of conservation part two

The Price of Conservation II Conservation can be too costly. I'm Jeff Keane; I'll be back in one minute to tell you why I think that. Yesterday, I told you how five major conservation groups, The World Wide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, The Wildlife Conservation Society, The African Wildlife Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy used conservation to displace millions of African Tribesmen. These are groups with combined bankrolls of five billion dollars and annual revenue of more than one billion dollars. Money means power and with this power nations all over the world have been persuaded to create "conservation areas" that total over 12 per cent of the our planet. Now, just about any thinking human will agree that the world needs to practice conservation, but this is going too far  especially when you factor in the human inconvenience and suffering that has been caused by making conservation refugees out of any people who had the unfortunate luck to live on and with the lands designated to these "areas." What kind of results do we see from creating so many protected areas? Well as one Maasai leader tells the self-proclaimed environmentalists "Now, you have made us enemies of conservation." This "I know better than you" approach to conservation has not helped global biodiversity. In fact, the Convention of Biological Diversity documented that in Africa, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside protected areas. When will big money enviro groups realize humans can be good for the land? I'm Jeff Keane. Range  Summer 2006
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