"Poignant, disturbing, and not easily refuted"

That's the verdict on Mark Dowie's book Conservation Refugees by Peter Kareiva. Kareiva is the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and his thoughts appear on the Conservancy's blog, Cool Green Science. What makes his judgment more interesting than the average review is that Dowie's book - which he outlines in this Boston Globe piece - focuses on how efforts to establish protected areas for conservation has led to the displacement of millions of indigenous peoples. And many of those areas have been so designated at the urging of NGOs  like the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and...the Nature Conservancy itself.
So Kareiva's engagement with the book amounts to a sort of institutional self-reckoning. Indeed, he begins his post by stating that he is "going to commit conservation heresy and ask out loud: Should the conservation movement be proud of the 108,000 protected areas around the world it has thus far helped establish?"

Not surprisingly, he doesn't recommend blowing up the entire conservation movement or calling a halt to the Nature Conservancy's work, and Dowie - who calls the book "a good guy vs. good guy story" - would hardly advocate that. Indeed, Kareiva thinks that in coming decades, the importance of protected areas will only grow as the earth becomes more crowded in future decades. But he does think that a serious reexamination is warranted. Here's the money quote:

However, for me at least, the rights of people for self-determination take supremacy over any species or biodiversity tally. It is my job as a conservation scientist to find the ways that people can indeed come first and while biodiversity can also be protected.  The traditional protected areas strategy has all too often trampled on people’s rights — which is why that strategy warrants a critical reexamination.

Read the whole thing - it's an admirably honest work of institutional self-assessment, something that always seems, unfortunately, to be in short supply.