ENVIRONMENTAL GULAG

How to best protect the planet? Simple, get rid of the people:

At first glance, so much protected land seems undeniably positive, an enormous achievement of very good people doing the right thing for our planet. But the record is less impressive when the impact upon native people is considered. For example, during the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which o[ffi]cially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.

The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like "eviction," "displacement," and "refugee," over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more di[ffi]cult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Jeez, lefties sure like pushing people around.