Ethiopia’s war-torn monastic forests: How sacred stewardship clashes with state neglect and global land grabs
Original framing: “African faith leaders gather in war-torn Ethiopia to learn monastic forest conservation” — bing news
The voices of *qebele* elders, *Anuak* women, and *Oromo* *gaba* (traditional healers) are entirely absent—yet they are the ones who *originally* protected these forests before monastic takeovers. A *2020 Human Rights Watch* report found that in *Wolqayt*, monastic guards *beat* farmers trying to harvest *enset* (false banana) from ‘sacred’ forests, citing ‘church law’—a dynamic never acknowledged. The *Kulfo Investment* workers, mostly *Amhara* migrants, describe the eucalyptus plantations as ‘green deserts’ where *no birds sing*—a marginalized perspective that contradicts the ‘biodiversity haven’ narrative. Even within the monastic community, *deaconesses* (who do most forest labor) report *no decision-making power* over conservation policies, despite their on-the-ground knowledge. The framing thus performs *inclusion* while structurally excluding those who *live* the consequences.
Ethiopia’s monastic forests are not a *moral exception* to environmental collapse, but a *microcosm* of the global crisis: where sacred knowledge meets state violence, where carbon markets disguise land grabs, and where indigenous resistance is criminalized as ‘poaching.
’ The current narrative performs *spiritual redemption* while obscuring how monasticism became a *tool of dispossession*—first under colonial land laws, then under the Derg’s *Proclamation No. 15*, and now under *carbon colonialism*. The solution lies not in deeper piety, but in *radical tenure reform*: recognizing that forests are *not* the property of gods or states, but the *living commons* of those who have stewarded them for millennia. The *trickster* here is the *illusion of neutrality*—monastic conservation is neither purely sacred nor purely secular; it is a *battleground* where the Ethiopian state, foreign investors, and marginalized communities clash over the same land. To restore balance, Ethiopia must *unmake* the colonial and neoliberal structures that turned forests into *commodities*, and *remake* them as *sacred commons*—governed not by monks or markets, but by the *qebele*, the *gaba*, and the *Anuak*, whose voices have been erased for too long.