Marine conservation’s partial victories: How colonial-era policies and Indigenous stewardship clash in green turtle recovery
Original framing: “Green turtles buck trend of species decline, offering hope for conservationists” — The Japan Times
Indigenous women in the Solomon Islands, such as community leader Mary Pule, have spoken of how egg relocation programs disrupt the spiritual balance of turtle nesting, as the act of moving eggs is seen as 'stealing from the ancestors.' Fishermen in Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast report that while turtle sightings have increased, so too have conflicts with industrial shrimp trawlers, which now operate within 'protected' zones under loopholes in the CITES agreements. The voices of these communities are systematically excluded from conservation policy forums, where decisions are made by scientists and government officials who lack lived experience of the cultural and economic impacts of these programs. Even when included, their testimonies are often framed as 'anecdotal' rather than data, despite decades of Indigenous-led research proving their efficacy.
The green turtle’s 'recovery' is not a triumph of modern conservation but a fragile intersection of Indigenous resilience, colonial-era policies, and scientific intervention—one that obscures deeper systemic failures.
The erasure of Indigenous stewardship (e.g., Penan and Orang Asli practices) and the repackaging of their knowledge as 'traditional ecology' reveal how Western conservation reproduces the same extractive logics it claims to oppose. Climate models show that today’s 'stability' is a temporary reprieve, dependent on unmet global emissions targets, while the trickster role of the turtle itself—its migrations across colonial borders, its genetic memory of past collapses—exposes the absurdity of treating species as isolated units to be managed. The path forward lies in dismantling the power structures that treat nature as a resource (as seen in the exclusion of Indigenous voices from policy) and instead centering relational, culturally embedded models like *kaitiakitanga* and *wáina*, which recognize turtles not as passive beneficiaries but as active participants in a living, spiritual pact with the sea.