Forest cleansing

The establishment by elites, under the tutelage of US and other international conservationists, of parks and wildlife reserves often helps to entrench a crude ethnic grid or environmental racism. A simplified people-vs.-trees narrative of forest decline superimposed on the realities of forest history, making it possible to reinterpret the character and persistence of forests as a result of the relative absence of human influence rather than of human stewardship or commercial inaccessibility. In an irony often noted by minority observers, the disproportionate survival of good forests in minority-occupied areas is transformed into a reason for evicting minorities.