Biodiversity: 90% are outside nature reservations

Since long time I came down with a serious flu again. The flu is currently spreading epidemically in Germany. Many of you may acccuse the mild winter that made it easy for the viruses to spread. And they may be right. This argument is nowadays consequently followed by the discussion on global warming that is dominating media reports for months now. I don’t want to comment on this because this is a tricky complex issue. And regulars’ table discussions do not lead anywhere except eating time or kill time.

Back to what I really wanted to comment on today. Because of being sick, I used my time to read an article from ORION MAGAZINE, USA about biodiversity, very interesting. I want to give you some figures that will jolt you!

During the last decades nature protection movements all over the world achieved a lot. Nature reservations larger than the size of Africa got established, just to give you an idea that is more than 19 million sqkm worldwide.
But there is another very shocking figure that goes along with these accomplishments. A minimum of 5 million refugees, some sources even talk about several tenth of millions of people who have been deprived of their land. The people expelled from their territories are nature tribes that were intergral part of these areas. Their knowledge about nature was indispensable. To them we primarily owed the maintenance of biodiversity. They knew how cultivate the soil. It was never their intention to destroy what they were living on. People like the Massai, the Aborigines, tribes in India or Thailand have been driven into misery and came close to extinction to protect nature. Those tribes never saw themselves apart from nature. They never made this absurd difference between man and nature as we did.

And the irony of the whole story is that 90% of biodiversity are anyway found outside nature reservation areas.

Thus, it is not only Shell or Chevron-Texaco etc. occupying land all over the world to exploit nature’s resources incurring misery on people, it is also Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, World Wild Life Fund etc.. Very sad. We need to learn our lessons fast. Or is it too late already?

Source: Courrier International, Orion Magazine