ONE of the most damning charges made against environmentalists is that they destroy the lives of poor people in rainforests and other wild areas by taking over their land in the name of conservation. Nonsense, says new research.
“The vast majority of the world’s poor people live in extremely urban areas… only a small percentage live in areas that are somewhat or extremely wild,” says Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York, the author of a study mapping poverty and human environmental impact around the world. Even the rural poor mostly live in grasslands, Redford says, while biodiverse forests are largely empty (…
