THE murder of “guardian of the forest” Paulo Paulino Guajajara by armed loggers in the Brazilian Amazon reserve he called home garnered headlines around the world last month. It threw a spotlight on the contribution of indigenous communities to conserving ecosystems and biodiversity.
Too often, that contribution is overlooked and even belittled by the wider conservation movement. A default assumption is that indigenous rights conflict with the demands of conservation – an attitude sometimes enforced at the barrel of a gun.
The past year, for example, saw evidence uncovered by Buzzfeed News that armed anti-poaching units working with the …