Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Scientists estimate that between five and “tens of millions” of people have been displaced from their homes by conservationists since the creation of Yosemite National Park in California in 1864. A Cornell University sociologist estimated that Europeans created at least fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone.39 Displacing people from their lands wasn’t incidental to conservation but rather central to it. “The displacement of people who herded, gathered forest products, or cultivated land was a central feature of twentieth century nature conservation in southern and eastern Africa and India,” noted two scholars.40 The Ugandan government and conservationists expelled the Batwa from Uganda’s Bwindi Park in the early 1990s. Their poaching of wild animals for meat threatened the gorillas, conservationists believed.41 “Whole societies like the Batwa of Uganda,” writes Mark Dowie, the author of the 2009 book Conservation Refugees, have been “transformed from independent and self-sustaining to deeply dependent and poor communities.”42