It’s been a few weeks since what was described as a “historic” agreement was reached at the Montreal Conservation Conference. Among other things, almost all participating states signed a target agreement to increase the proportion of land areas under protection worldwide to 30 percent by 2030.
How it is with goals and the achievement of them has not only been known since it has become increasingly clear that the 1.5 degree target of the Paris climate conference will certainly be missed. Man and his immediate needs are in ironic conflict with nature and thus with the long-term chances of survival.
native people
Perhaps one should have started much earlier with large-scale nature conservation. Because it would have been easier. But the popular thesis that there were hardly any people living and causing problems where it happened is often not true either. In the case of the early national parks in the USA, for example, the white settlers tended to be left alone and the indigenous people resettled – if they had not been moved to reservations long before that.
That was also the situation today 108 years ago, on January 26, 1915, when US President Woodrow Wilson signed the “Rocky Mountain National Park” into being. the arapaho, those who had previously inhabited parts of its area had already been resettled in the 1970s.
The Ninth Park
In 1914, in preparation for the founding of the national park, two old Arapaho men were carted in from the Wind River Reservation northwest of Denver, Colorado, in order to be able to name certain landmarks, mountains, lakes and rivers as they were called by the native people . It was deliberately overlooked that these places, if at all, had only borne these names for a few decades. As far as is known, the Arapaho had driven the Ute people out of the area at the beginning of the 19th century, in some cases in the most cruel of ways.
“Rocky Mountain” was the ninth national park in the USA, there are now 63. But even in this large country, which is sparsely populated compared to Germany, only 13 percent of the land area is still in the form of national parks, national monuments, state parks and the like under protection.
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