Global Headlines Express | The First Liquid Water Lake Found on Mars, and Foreign Policy on How Conservation Became Ecological Colonialism

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What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About

Foreign Policy: How Conservation Became Ecological Colonialism

At dawn one day in February, a group of A'i — an indigenous people who live in Ecuador's northeastern province of Sucumbíos and in the Amazon rainforest of southern Colombia, pictured in the cover image — set out on their own to patrol Cayambe-Coca National Park in Ecuador. The park is a protected area covering more than 3,885 square kilometers of rainforest, wetland, and glacial lagoons. The group belongs to an organization called La Guardia, which the A'i set up to push back against outsiders, the government included, who encroach on the land they live on.

"The state took control of this land in 1970 and told us how to live on our own territory," said a 25-year-old land guard with La Guardia. "But the government has done nothing to protect the park or enforce its own rules." He added that the people who come here to mine gold have polluted the environment. To protect the area and their own food supply, the A'i built a fish pond, and officials ordered it torn down. The A'i refused.

The clash between indigenous residents and the government in this Ecuadorian park is a small version of what is happening in thousands of protected areas around the world. States create reserves in the name of conservation, then ignore the indigenous people already living there, and end up in something close to a landlord-tenant relationship with them. Taking away indigenous people's control over their own land is a form of ecological colonialism, and it pulls protected areas away from the "conservation" they were meant to serve.

The conservationist worldview that has long prevailed draws a hard line between nature and human activity. Governments and conservation advocates treat isolating or relocating indigenous people as an unavoidable sacrifice. In the eyes of indigenous people, though, the government does not really care about the environment. In Cayambe-Coca, the government permits gold mining around the park's edges and looks the other way at some of the miners working inside it. It wants miners and indigenous people to settle on cash compensation — which, to the A'i, is a sign that money is what drives it.

The conservationist ideas behind the conflict took shape during the North American Indian Wars, and given that origin, their content is not hard to understand. John Muir, an early leader of American environmentalism, and President Theodore Roosevelt held that wilderness should be stripped of human interference; Yellowstone and Yosemite were founded on that belief.

Not until the 1990s did criticism of how protected areas ignore indigenous people appear on any scale. The 2003 World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, was a turning point: a formal framework there wrote in indigenous people's right to live on and manage these lands. In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirmed that indigenous peoples have the right to keep and strengthen their existing systems, cultures, and traditions, and to pursue development that matches their own needs and wishes.

Protests by indigenous people were only one reason for the shift. More and more people also came to see what ignoring them costs — some indigenous people, out of desperation, join the ranks of those who treat land as a commodity.

More than one study has found that indigenous people look after protected areas better than local governments do. Governments in Guatemala, Senegal, India, Australia, and elsewhere have begun bringing indigenous people into the work of maintaining these reserves.

Working together has produced results, but doing it at scale is hard. Some conservation groups think that more indigenous involvement means fewer jobs for their own staff, and some doubt that indigenous communities are up to the task. In some countries, development policy runs straight against conservation: Ecuador drills for oil on a large scale in Yasuní National Park, the land many indigenous people depend on to survive.

Indigenous people and their allies want more protected areas that recognize indigenous rights. Land Rights Now, a global advocacy group, has launched a campaign to double the number of them by 2020.

The 24-Hour Newsmakers

The First Liquid Water Lake Found on Mars

Researchers with the European Space Agency (ESA) say they have found the first liquid underground lake on Mars, which raises the odds that the planet holds more water, and perhaps life.

Radar detectors picked up the first concrete evidence of liquid water on Mars: a large lake about 20 kilometers across, sitting beneath the planet's polar ice cap.

Lead researcher Roberto Orosei said this is the closest his team has come to confirming that the lake really is water, and it did not require drilling through the ice to sample the reservoir.

Alan Duffy, an associate professor at Swinburne University in Australia, said the find shows that water on Mars is not a passing presence on the surface but something that has lasted: "That gives you the conditions for life to arise and develop." Other scientists countered that because the liquid water lies very deep under the ice sheet, its setting is bitterly cold and harsh, and unfit for microbial life.

What Else Happened in the World

CNN releases audio of US President Donald Trump discussing paying for the story of his affair with his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. On the recording, the two discuss buying the story of Trump's affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal about 10 years earlier. During the 2016 campaign, The National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for the story of her affair with Trump, and never published it. On the recording, Cohen proposes setting up a company and buying the rights to the story. Trump later said on Twitter that a lawyer recording a client's conversation is "a bad thing."

The EU and the US call a temporary truce in their trade war. The EU agreed to import more soybeans, cut industrial tariffs, and do more about importing US liquefied natural gas, but the deal includes no easing on autos. Trump said EU-US relations had entered a new phase on trade and other issues. Outside the auto industry, the two sides will work toward zero tariffs, zero trade barriers, and zero subsidies.

An explosion near a polling station in Pakistan kills 31. A suicide attack struck outside a polling station in the western city of Quetta on the day of Pakistan's general election. The terrorist group Islamic State claimed responsibility. The bombing killed 31 people and injured at least 35 to varying degrees.

Sergio Marchionne, former CEO of Fiat Chrysler, dies at 66. The auto industry's most talked-about figure stepped down as CEO last week because of a malignant tumor. He became CEO of Fiat Chrysler in 2004, and during his tenure the company's market value grew more than tenfold. He drove Ferraris, smoked cigars, and drank strong espresso, and his life was something of a legend. A poster hung in his office that read: "Every innovation begins with destruction."

China's #MeToo movement escalates, with several media figures, public-interest workers, and writers accused of sexual harassment. An anonymous woman published an essay titled 《章文，停止你的侵害！！！》 ("Zhang Wen, Stop Your Abuse!!!"), accusing Zhang Wen — former lead writer at Oriental Outlook, now an editorial board member at China Newsweek — of raping her while she was drunk; the young writers Jiang Fangzhou and Yi Xiaohe also accused him of sexual harassment in the past. Zhang Wen's response drew heavy criticism for slut-shaming. Separately, the young writer Chun Shu came forward to say the writer Zhang Chi and New Weekly founder Sun Mian had sexually assaulted her, having sex with her against her will. Zhao Sile, a feminist activist, writer, and journalist, accused the well-known public intellectual Xiong Peiyun in a post to her WeChat Moments of having sexually harassed her. The journalist He Man accused Xin Lijian, founder and former chairman of the Xinfu Education Group, on Facebook of having sexually harassed her. A former female employee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) publicly accused Zhou Fei, a manager at the foundation, on Weibo of sexually harassing her and forcibly kissing her in 2016.

Someone Said

We are millionaires, but we are poor.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned this week that Venezuela is deep in a financial crisis, and that by the end of this year the country's inflation rate is expected to reach 1,000,000 percent. That would put Venezuela in the company of Germany after World War I, or Zimbabwe in the late 2000s.

The IMF also pointed out that shortages of electricity, running water, and public transportation are plaguing millions of Venezuelans. With oil output falling sharply, the economy is set to shrink 18% this year, which would be the country's third straight year of double-digit contraction.

For ordinary Venezuelans, life has become extremely hard.

"We are millionaires, but we are poor," said Maigualida Oronoz, a 43-year-old nurse. She earns a minimum guaranteed wage of 5 million bolivars a month, about $41. "That money is barely enough to feed us. If there's a medical emergency, all we can do is wait to die, because medicine costs too much, and the price goes up every day."

Prices are soaring and hundreds of thousands of people are scrambling to leave, yet Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro insists the crisis is an "economic war" launched by the opposition with US backing. The government keeps printing money, though economists doubt that will solve anything.

Some analysts believe runaway inflation will bring Maduro down. Asdrúbal Oliveros, who heads an economic consultancy in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, said: "History tells us that the government that causes inflation is usually not the one that leads people out of the crisis. Sadly, Venezuela is struggling with economic and political instability and may even become ungovernable — but that is when a change of government could happen. It would be messy, of course, but in the end a change of power really is possible."

Something You Might Also Find Interesting

Is Online Aggression an Expression of Humanity's Crude Nature?

Anonymous social networks have become the worst-hit ground for verbal aggression. Writing in National Geographic, the anthropologist Agustín Fuentes takes up the question above and answers no.

In his view, the worsening problem of online aggression has more to do with people's ever-growing social activity, the development of social media itself, and a particular political and economic backdrop.

"You are what you eat" is a nutritional saying that, with a small change, still holds in life: you are what the people you meet are like. It means our behavior and beliefs are shaped in large part by the people around us — family, friends, colleagues.

The internet has changed who we meet and how we meet them. The people we now have most contact with are not those beside us but those on social networks, and more of the information we take in comes from the mixed bag of Twitter or Facebook than from firsthand experience or real conversation. The real world is divided enough already; the internet widens the cracks, and that produces bias and blind spots in how people think. Add the anonymity the internet offers, which lets people say whatever they like without restraint. That is how online hostility erupts.

The internet and social media also offer a way out of bullying, though, in appeals and organizing that take a collective form. Hollywood's #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns for equality are examples worth following. The article argues that curbing online aggression requires people to speak up more, both offline and online.

On This Day

July 26, 1788: New York ratifies the US Constitution, becoming the 11th state.

July 26, 1830: France's Charles X dissolves parliament, and the July Revolution breaks out.

July 26, 1894: The British writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, is born.

July 26, 1908: The Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, is founded.

July 26, 1945: The leaders of the United States, China, and Britain — Harry Truman, Chiang Kai-shek, and Winston Churchill — jointly issue the Potsdam Declaration, urging Japan to surrender unconditionally.

July 26, 2011: Shanghai merges its former Huangpu and Luwan districts into a new Huangpu District.

Cover image from: iconoadnspain08.blogspot.com