Review of Green Wars by Megan Ybarra

Nygren, Anja | from Multimedia Library Collection:
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Nygren, Anja. Review of Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest by Megan Ybarra. Conservation & Society 17, no. 1 (2019): 120-21. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_18_50.

Ybarra, Megan. Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Global conservation efforts have come under increased academic and activist scrutiny in recent years. The nature protection agendas formulated by big international conservation organisations at conflictive forest frontiers in the global South—and their ambiguous links to neoliberal agendas of payment for environmental services and market-based ecotourism—have figured prominently in academic and public discussion. Conservation through enclosure and green grabbing by primitive accumulation in different parts of Latin America has also been widely investigated in recent political-ecological and critical conservation studies. Megan Ybarra’s book, Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest, focuses on international conservation efforts to protect the 1.6 million ha Maya Forest in northern Guatemala as a hotspot of global biodiversity. Through her careful ethnographic analysis, she contributes significantly to contemporary debates, convincingly showing that global conservation efforts have turned lowland Maya Indians into immigrants on their own land. (Excerpt from the book review)

© Anja Nygren 2019. Conservation & Society is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.5).