Conservation efforts get framed as colonial threats to national sovereignty

Evidence

The Amazon rain forest is being clear-cut and burned at a fast pace to create farmland. This valuable ecological resource is being converted from a carbon absorber to a carbon emitter. International environmental groups have made efforts to save the rain forest by funding the creation of protected natural reserves. These conservation projects have aroused vigorous opposition by powerful business and political groups (Rohter, 2007). Business interests want to open up the rain forest to mining, logging, and agricultural projects supported by a network of highways, dams, and ports. Political extremists on both sides branded the conservation effort as a new form of colonialism organized by a “Green Mafia.” In the fight for public opinion, they claimed that the environmental movement was a pretext for a plot by the “hegemonic powers” to take over the Amazon rain forest “to maintain and augment their domination” (Rohter, 2007). Convinced that the environmental initiative by outsiders was a threat to Brazilian sovereignty, a major share of the Brazilian general public sided with the opposition forces. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2533

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the Grafting & Growth piece on trees as infrastructure — this is the political-economics counter-swing to trees-as-infrastructure idealism, showing how environmental protections provoke sovereign-backlash framing.
• XREF: The moral disengagement of framing altruistic external help as colonial domination echoes Bandura’s euphemistic labeling and diffusion of responsibility themes elsewhere; also parallels postcolonial critiques of Western NGOs. — connects to: Sovereignty resistance blocks international environmental coordination just as it blocks federal — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 651; Colonial conservation legacies made anticolonial leaders justifiably hostile to environmentalism — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 798