Green Colonialism: Evict to Preserve?

Le Monde, August 22, 2025: “In Kenya, hunter-gatherers evicted from their ancestral forests.”
 
The Ogiek have lived in harmony with nature for centuries. They are hunter-gatherers, dependent on the forest for food, medicine, and their livelihood.  In the name of ecology, they have been evicted from their homes.
 
Late 2023. Equipped with axes and hammers, forest rangers evicted hundreds of people in a matter of days. Without any clear reason given, or prior notice. Homes were burned. Crops trampled. State-led ecology The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights ruled these evictions illegal and ordered the Kenyan state to pay them financial compensation. The Ogiek won their cases. On paper. But on the ground, the government continues to ignore them.
 
Their crime? Living in a forest that suddenly became lucrative, profitable in the eyes of industrialists. Why evict them? Two possibilities.
 
The first would be a silviculture project: as everywhere in the techno-world, forests are cleared for timber monoculture. Less wild. More profitable.
 
Second possibility: green finance. Under the guise of “protecting biodiversity,” the Kenyan state sells these natural areas to foreign industrialists. In exchange? Carbon credits.
 
“Preserve” here, pollute there. Colonialism rebranded green. But the lands themselves are indeed stolen. This new form of colonialism relies on a civilizing discourse, according to which nature should remain a sanctuary completely preserved from humans. As if some forgot humanity's belonging to this very nature. “Africans would have no place on their own continent. They would rather be intruders disturbing the balance of a green planet,” writes historian Guillaume Blanc. State-led ecology always takes the same form: repressive
and authoritarian.
 
Behind climate rhetoric and global summits, the same logic prevails: stolen lands, dispossessed populations, privatized resources. Behind the COPs, bulldozers. The Ogiek are not an exception. They are the rule of the industrial world. Everywhere, indigenous people pay the price of accounting ecology.
 
Will you remain complicit? Or will you join the resistance?