Aires protégées : Perseverare diabolicum. Remettre en cause les impensés de la gestion forestière publique en Afrique

Abstract

This text is an analysis of the centuries-old injustice done throughout the world to indigenous peoples and forest communities, whose historical rights and traditional knowledge and practices remain unknown, ignored, falsified or manipulated. The conservation of nature is based on the notion of wilderness, the protection from all human influence, that is to say the preservation of natural spaces. But conservation is an ambiguous word in both French and English, which masks this a priori of preservation. From the beginning, the creation of protected areas has been criticized for its ineffectiveness, confirmed by many examples, because it confiscates the lands and well-preserved natural areas of the resident populations of indigenous peoples and excludes them. The criticism of protected areas, states and global conservation NGOs contrasts with the sustainable, centuries-old conservation management of natural areas by forest communities. Indigenous peoples live in areas that contain 80% of the planet’s biodiversity and are being dispossessed by the creation of protected areas. Their customary management methods that have preserved these resources for centuries (even millennial) are ignored, denied and flouted by the ethnocentric and hegemonic logic of the creators of protected areas. We must reconsider the public management of forest areas and challenge the unanimity and unthinkable forest regulations. We must take into account the other unanimity, opposite and diverse, that of the customary rules of forest communities and indigenous peoples that have demonstrated their sustainability.

Keywords

• protected areas
• indigenous peoples
• public forest management
• forest communities
• traditional rights and knowledge