Exporting ideology
D Southgate and H L Clark pointed out that "the present conservation paradigm, was "an attempt to transplant national parks, a rich country institution, to an alien setting", and that 'traditionally, defined, a park is a natural area where no people ... live or work". Using the example of the Brazilian Amazon, they suggested that nowhere, aside from a few permanent swamps, was It truly uninhabited, and that practically any attempt to establish a that problems arose from the hasty imposition of Imported conservation ideology and techniques based on Western models, and that this imposition undermined traditional resource management practices. (Society and Natural Resources, I " 1, Vol 4, p 151-163)
As an example of a major conservation Initiative. the Global Environmental Facility fGEF) of the World Bank is culpable over the issue of resettlement of rural communities. It has informed the Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service that GEF resources can be used to finance Ovoluhtary or involuntary resettlement' of people from reserves.
A recent statement ofthe International Union for the Conservation of Nature OUCN) on forest conservation suggested that the safest way to ensure maximum protection of blodiversity In tropical forests was to allocate significant forest areas to national parks and reserves, where human Interference is minimised. 7he same paper noted that in 1980, the lowland tropical moist forest blome included 669 reserves over a total of 66 million ha, failing within 1UCN categories I-IV, of which nosigrilficant human use Is permitted. The intention was to achieve.the "modest" target of 10 per cent total protection of all the moist tropical forest by 1990.
Even for the limited use "buffer zones" that surround protected areas, T C Whitmore and J A Sayer have suggested that "the optimal form of land use outside parks and reseves is near-natural forests under sustainable management for timber or non-timber products".