Why Conservation-Induced Displacement is Wrong

Even if state-led biodiversity conservation projects can result in the displacement, exclusion, and impoverishment of former reserve residents, they are often presented as responding to the public interest. The core idea of these projects, I argue in this paper, is that nature and people should be separated, because people are too dangerous to be part of the landscape. However, this narrow perspective fails to acknowledge the numerous wrongs caused by conservation-induced displacement. That is, considering the interdependent relationships between human and non-human entities at the core of several Indigenous approaches to biodiversity conservation, I show that the conservation-induced displacement of some Indigenous groups can cause three interconnected wrongs: territorial, epistemic, and identity-based.