Decolonized nature protection? Huh?

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Dec 22

RE: COP15: a final chance to preserve biodiversity.  Op-ed by Lagi Toribau, acting executive director of Greenpeace Canada.  The Hamilton Spectator 15 Dec 22.

Greenpeace long ago lost its moral authority, the by-product of having previously lost its collective mind.  It became simply hostile to western civilization.  In the exhortations of this nonsensical piece on biodiversity, we hear repeated the exhausted cry that the end is near; a tipping point approaches; and everything must be accomplished by the year of doom, 2030.

The article contains this precious morsel, “[A Nature and Biodiversity Act] would recognize that we are living on stolen Indigenous land and fundamentally decolonize our approach to protecting nature,” an odd concoction of political jibe in a bill about biology. 

That we are living on land ‘stolen’ from the Indigenous might have force but for the fact that the Indigenous kept stealing it from each other, and the Crown paid in cash for rights to the land.  The Crown paid again a decade ago when upon review the money paid over two hundred years ago was deemed insufficient.  The monies went to the Mississaugas because they occupied the land after the Huron nation was annihilated by the Iroquois, who afterwards returned to their territory in present-day New York.

But how does one “decolonize” concern for biodiversity?  How did it get colonized in the first place?  Biodiversity is an abstraction, while it is territory, a concrete that gets colonized.  It’s all poetry and nonsense.

Greenpeace despises western civilization, and their diatribe on biodiversity is simply another expression of it.

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