NATURE UNDER CONTROL: When is 'wilderness' not wild? When indigenous people and animals are removed to create national parks for tourists, writes John Vidal
The vast Hluhluwe-Umfolozi national game refuge, four hours' drive from Durban, was once the hunting ground of both Zulu kings and colonialists and its rolling savannah is still home to the iconic mega-fauna that the west so loves and fears - lions, leop ards, elephants, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, baboons and others.
You can stay in fancy hotels and ride around in Land-Rovers, or for $150 a night - what a local might earn in two months - you can be taken in to Umfolozi's 25,000-hectare (62,000-acre) "wilderness". Here there are no roads or buildings, no telephone or electricity lines, no wells, wires, pumps, pipes, cultivation or development. No people may live here and no cars may enter by law.
Walk with the beasts in this part of the park and you must observe not just the laws of nature. You must follow a white man with a loaded bolt-action rifle, take your food in, carry out your waste. Your ranger guide expects you to be humble and, before going in, invites you to meditate or perform a ritual, such as asking permission of the land to enter. Above all, he wants you to show respect for a world without humans and pretend you were never there. You must bury your faeces, literally sweep the ground and leave no human trace. It is, in many ways, an awe-inspiring and humbling experience.
But it is a also a white lie. Although the park looks wild and complex, the land is as manipulated and controlled as London's Hyde Park. The whole park is surrounded by a high fence, the animals have been introduced from elsewhere, are culled if they breed too much, and are even traded for profit. The grasses are regularly burned off to encourage species. This people-less park is no more "wild" than the average suburban garden.
Most people who come to Umfolozi's wilderness are rich, white and unaware of this artifice. Many say their lives are improved by just being under the immense sky with the animals and without noisy, destructive humankind. The Umfolozi wilderness attracts people seeeking personal growth and modern rites of passage, wildlife lovers wanting dangerous encounters or "harmony with nature", and, especially, people influenced by the writings of romantic imperialists such as T.E. Lawrence and the late Laurens van der Post, who believed strongly that the spiritual impact of wild places brings better understanding of themselves and humanity's relationship with the earth.
Some 300 million hectares (740 million acres) of the world are now described by IUCN, the world conservation union, as wilderness and the push is on to designate far more with money from the World Bank and others.
But a fierce debate is taking place about how to define wilderness and make it relevant to people who are neither elite nor rich and to the people who always lived there. It draws in conservationists, philosophers, academics, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, historians, businessmen, the poorest people on earth and governments. At the recent Seventh World Wilderness Congress in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, more than 400 people from 40 countries came to discuss the issues.
If the main proponents of people-free wilderness areas say that the world must have places that are untouched and where the non-human world can prosper, the main charge against them is that excluding people from living there is morally repugnant, ecologically incoherent, intellectually indefensible and politically dubious. The whole wilderness concept, say the critics, is an elite European/American construction which is not applicable or desirable today.
It is thanks to 19th-century American romantic visonaries such as John Muir, Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Ralph Emerson, who fought to save Yosemite, Sequoia, the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest and other spectacular places in the US from development and human habitation, that the concept is still very much alive.
The Scottish-born Muir led the defence of America's wild places and is now hailed as the father of modern global conservation. With a vision as much poetic and spiritual as aesthetic, Muir regarded wild nature as fundamental for human physical and ps ychic survival. "In God's wildness lies the hope of the world, the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilisation drops off, and wounds heal", he said.
MUIR came to wilderness preservation via some of the fiercest religious training of the day. Born in 1838, he was brought up in a Scottish presbyterian sect that rejected orthodox Calvinism as too liberal. By 10 he could recite, without stopping, the whole New Testament. When he was 11, his tyrannical father uprooted the family and became a preacher with an Ohio-based community of Cambellites, a rigid, deeply bigoted sect of zealous Christian fundamentalists set up by another Scotsman and his son who sought a primitive church. Muir recalls being whipped and persecuted by his father in the name of God, but - inspired by secret readings of Wordsworth, Shelley and the English Romantic movement, and then by Humboldt and the scientists of the age - he rejected his father's crude belief that God had made nature for man's dominion.
Instead, following years spent exploring alone the mountains and Sierra of America, he developed a gospel of nature which is still prevalent today.
But his wilderness vision had a dark side which has filtered through to governments and conservationists everywhere. Says American philosopher Baird Callicott: "Wilderness is a legacy of American puritanism. It played a crucial role in masking colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is a powerful conceptual tool of colonialism." Muir and the pioneer wilderness romantics gave barely a thought to the native American people, some of whom had lived in these wild places since time immemorial. Many had been killed anyway in the push for new frontiers, but those still there were forced to flee or were killed to make way for national parks.
Yellowstone, the world's first, was created only by expelling the resident Shoshone and as many as 300 are believed to have been killed in clashes in 1872 when it was designated.
Muir's idea of people-free national parks "where man goes but does not stay" was picked up by the new breed of conservationists as well as British and other colonialists. After clearing great tracts of Australia, Africa, India and Latin America of people, they set about doing the same all over again in the name of preserving the wilds. Most of today's national parks and wilderness areas, argue some, have a history of genocide or brutal repression behind them.
Muir died in 1914. Since then, many millions of "tribals", "marginals" and indigenous peoples who had long lived successfully in forests, mountains, deserts and marginal areas - what the west today would call "wilderness" - have been ruthlessly thrown off the land on which they relied for their culture and existence. The World Bank estimates that between 1986 and 1996 alone, about three million people were forced to move from forests and other areas as a result of both development and conservation schemes.
Excluding people in the name of wilderness is still happening, says Dr Martin von Hildebrand, a former Colombian environment minister and anthropologist, who has spent 30 years fighting for landrights of the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. "The designation of these areas is mostly done at the expense of local communities," he says.
Recently, it was reported that communities in both Kenyan and Bangladeshi forests were to be moved out to make way for "eco-parks". The Chinese government, too, has announced it is setting aside a large portion of north-west Tibet as a wilderness area .
But the very word "wilderness" is flawed, say the ecological critics. No places, except perhaps parts of Antarctica, are entirely removed from man's influence. "There is no such thing as wilderness," says Hildebrand. "Almost everywhere has been significantly modified by tens of thousands of years of human presence. Many peoples do not even have a word for nature and do not see themselves in any way separate from the whole environment in which they live. The forests of Amazonia are only there because the indigenous peoples have kept them for generations. They are the custodians."
If wilderness is an alien concept for much of the world, the idea of protecting land "for nature" is bizarre and offensive. "There is no such thing as wilderness," says Indian ecologist Vandana Shiva. "Instead of this American worldview of places, which separates people from nature and defies evolutionary science as well as justifiying the destruction of species everywhere else, the need today is to encourage 'wildness'."
Shiva, a nuclear physicist who fought alongside the tree-hugging Chipko women trying to save their forests in Uttar Pradesh in the Himalayas is a leading critic of bio-technology, and argues that governments and conservationists should just let nature and people be. They should not seek to take the wildness out of it by trying to manipulate and control it, she argues. "In India all our learning has been based on the wild forest. [The poet] Tagore said that that it was from the wild forest that we learned democracy."
Wildness, she says, is what is most valuable in life. "It is the opposite to the cultivated, the captive and the controlled. In wildness, there is true diversity. It is somewhere where everything has a multiple function. In the wild, every species, including humans, is self-organised. In captivity it is centrally controlled."