Protected Areas and Conservation Geography

Core Idea

National parks, nature reserves, and protected areas represent attempts to conserve biodiversity and preserve 'wild' nature, often by removing indigenous peoples. Conservation geographies reveal tensions between preservation, development, and indigenous land rights. Understanding these geographies exposes how conservation is both necessary and contested, reflecting power asymmetries in environmental governance.

Explainer

Resource geography taught you that natural resources are not simply physical objects waiting to be used — they are socially defined, politically contested, and embedded in power relations. Protected areas conservation is a case study in exactly that: the "wilderness" that national parks preserve is itself a cultural and political construction, and the creation of protected areas has consistently involved the displacement of people who had long relationships with those landscapes.

The conventional narrative of conservation presents national parks and nature reserves as preserving pristine nature from human degradation. But most landscapes designated as wilderness were not empty before colonization — they were actively managed by indigenous peoples through practices like controlled burning, selective harvesting, and seasonal movement. When Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872, the Shoshone, Bannock, and other peoples who had lived there for millennia were removed by force. The "wilderness" that tourists visit is not nature untouched by humans; it is nature with its human inhabitants erased and replaced by a particular Western aesthetic of what wild nature should look like.

This pattern — termed fortress conservation or green grabbing — has been replicated globally. Conservation organizations and colonial governments in Africa, Asia, and the Americas established reserves that displaced local communities in the name of protecting nature from human impact, while often making exceptions for resource extraction and tourism that funded conservation institutions. The people removed were disproportionately indigenous, poor, and politically marginal. The result is a deep tension: conservation genuinely matters for biodiversity, but the institutions and practices through which it has been implemented have often been instruments of dispossession.

Contemporary conservation geography is grappling with alternatives. Community-based conservation and indigenous co-management models try to integrate local tenure rights and ecological knowledge into protected area governance. Evidence increasingly suggests that indigenous-managed territories often show biodiversity outcomes comparable to or better than formally protected areas, while avoiding the justice costs of displacement. The governance of protected areas thus becomes a question not just of ecological science but of political economy: who defines what counts as "nature," who bears the costs of conservation, and who benefits from it.