Their approach to nature is rooted in colonialism to mask the destruction of capitalism.

The problem is, when governments try to mandate such sweeping changes from above, the most marginalized elements in society, and also non-human life that is excluded from personhood, get crushed. Top-down reforestation efforts frequently result in land grabs that dispossess Indigenous peoples and agricultural communities and frequently benefit logging, tourism, and other major industries. They are also inca pable of spreading actual forests, which are complex multigenerational habitats uniquely adapted to the local territory. So-called reforestation from above is designed by people who don’t even understand the difference between a monocrop tree plantation and a thriving ecosystem with trees, nor do they have a financial or spiritual interest in learning that difference.

Chile provides a key example of a neocolonial country with an extractivist economy: its main sectors are copper mining and logging. On paper, Chile is listed as a heavily forested country, and it uses these supposed forests to economic gain, in the form of carbon credits. In fact, the country has very few actual forests left. Much of the loss can be traced to when the brutal Pinochet dictatorship transferred huge swathes of Mapuche lands to the logging industry, which destroyed most of the remaining native forests and replaced them with monocrop plantations of non-native eucalyptus and pine. The plantations are killing the soil, lowering the water table, and depriving the Mapuche of the species they traditionally rely on for their food, ceremonies, and medicine.

The environmentalist pretensions of logging companies and government ministers is contradicted by a key activity in the Mapuche struggle: chopping down trees in forestry plantations in order to replant native trees or to sow crops and achieve food sovereignty.

Much Indigenous territory is also threatened by eco-tourism, another government-corporate scheme for domesticating and exploiting the land that masquerades as a solution to the ecological crisis. Selling a destination as pristine, in the Western imaginary, requires expelling the local inhabitants or converting them into guides, cleaning staff, and other invisibilized sidekicks to the conscientious tourist. The low quality of jobs in the tourism sector and the need to attract wealthy customers from the Global North reveal this as just another iteration of colonialism, and one fully integrated with the destructive airline and cruise industries. Economic recessions show how unsustainable the approach is: when we treat nature as a monetized resource, the shift from cameras back to chainsaws actually occurs quite quickly when the economy demands it. Even when the chainsaws can be kept at bay, the practice of conservation has generally meant roping off huge areas and evicting the human inhabitants. This is because the world’s dominant institutions continue to hold an aporophobic, aristocratic view of nature that excludes humans. Since, for the wealthy, food and survival appear automatically, their god-given entitlement, nature is something external, distant. It can be set aside for specifically delineated, upper-class enjoyments, whether hunting, sightseeing, or scientific research. They certainly don’t con- template humans as a necessary part of the ecosystem. It should be no surprise, then, that paramilitary park rangers paid for by major environ- mental NGOs like the WWF have been accused of genocidal practices and acts of violence against Indigenous people in the Congo, Cameroon, Botswana, and elsewhere.55 This includes the WWF’s expropriation of Baka lands in central Africa, which are then commercialized with con- cessions to logging companies and trophy hunters, paired with violent attacks by paramilitary “park rangers.” There are also cases of ex-soldiers from the US returning from neocolonial duties in Afghanistan and being recruited for the good cause of shooting alleged poachers in African forests; the prohibition of hunting by San peoples in the Kalahari Desert with the support of the British government; the execution of poor villag- ers gathering firewood in the Zambezi National Park; and the planting of high-powered weapons or elephant tusks next to executed Indigenous hunters in order to portray them as highly paid poachers.56 And all this in a context in which lucrative trophy hunting by wealthy white people from Eric and Donald Trump Jr. to the King of Spain is a part of the financial calculations of conservationism.