Conservation's colonial roots still shape who benefits from protection

Conservation has a race problem, and it runs deeper than hiring diversity.

A new paper in Nature argues that the field's persistent blind spots trace back to the late 19th century, when protected areas were carved out of colonized landscapes through forced removals and restrictions on customary land use. Indigenous peoples and rural communities were pushed aside in the name of preserving "pristine" nature — a concept that only made sense if you didn't count the people already living there.

That's not ancient history. Those early patterns, what researchers call "path dependencies," still shape conservation today. Outside expertise is still privileged over local knowledge. Centralized control still wins over community-led approaches. And the costs of protection — restricted access to land, loss of livelihoods — still fall heaviest on the communities least involved in deciding what "success" looks like.

"A Framework for Addressing Racial and Related Inequities in Conservation," led by Moreangels Mbizah of Wildlife Conservation Action in Zimbabwe, doesn't claim conservation is uniquely broken or that injustice is universal. The argument is more precise: modern conservation emerged from a colonial context that treated land as empty and people as obstacles. Those underlying assumptions were never fully dismantled.

The research matters because it shifts how we should think about conservation's actual failures. When a protected area succeeds in keeping forests standing but fails the communities that depended on those forests for food and medicine, is that really success. When conservation decisions are made by outside organizations with better funding and credentials than local groups, whose interests actually get protected.

The paper traces how these inherited norms play out in real conservation work — in who gets hired for leadership roles, whose research gets funded, which communities are consulted (or aren't) when boundaries are drawn. It's not about malice. It's about systems that were built on exclusion and haven't been rebuilt from the ground up.

The authors aren't arguing that conservation should stop protecting land. They're arguing that protection without equity isn't just unfair — it's fragile. Communities that bear the costs without sharing the decision-making have little reason to support conservation long-term. And conservation that ignores the knowledge systems that have sustained ecosystems for centuries is leaving crucial expertise on the table.

The framework itself is a start: naming the problem explicitly, tracing its origins, and laying out what accountability and power-sharing might actually look like in practice. Some conservation organizations are already reckoning with this — shifting funding toward Indigenous-led land management, building genuine partnerships instead of consultation theater, hiring from the communities they work with.

It's slower work than setting a land protection target. But it's the kind that might actually hold.