Colonial conservation legacies and corporate capture stall biodiversity pacts—who benefits from stalled progress?
Original framing: “World losing ground in ‘war on nature’ as progress on biodiversity targets lags” — Global Issues
Indigenous peoples manage 80% of global biodiversity yet hold less than 10% of formal conservation authority. The UN’s biodiversity targets exclude Indigenous land tenure, despite evidence that territories under Indigenous stewardship have 37% lower deforestation rates. For example, the U’wa people in Colombia have blocked oil drilling for 30 years, preserving paramo ecosystems critical for South America’s water supply. The framing’s omission of Indigenous rights as the most scalable solution obscures how colonial land laws and corporate land grabs are the root drivers of biodiversity loss.
The ‘war on nature’ is not a battle but a symptom of deeper contradictions: colonial land laws treat Indigenous stewardship as illegal, corporate lobbying turns conservation into a profit center, and Western science dismisses the 70% of global languages that encode ecological wisdom.
The UN’s biodiversity targets fail because they’re designed by the same institutions that once justified colonial land theft—now repackaged as ‘sustainable development.’ Solutions lie in Indigenous land rights (which could reverse 40% of deforestation), degrowth policies that dismantle extractive capital, and cross-cultural academies that merge science with traditional knowledge. The trickster’s role is to expose the absurdity: while COP17 debates ‘targets,’ fossil fuel subsidies hit $7 trillion, and Indigenous leaders are arrested for protecting forests. The system isn’t broken—it’s working as intended for those who profit from scarcity. To win the ‘war on nature,’ we must first dismantle the war machine: colonial laws, corporate power, and the hubris that treats biodiversity as a problem to manage, not a relationship to restore.