Conservation and the Maasai

As threats to the environment grow in number and severity, we tend to view conservation as an urgent imperative and an unmitigated good. But, as Anuradha Mittal has discovered, what’s being done to the indigenous Maasai people in Tanzania in the name of conservation is horrific. Mittal describes how foreign conservation and tourism companies, often backed by Tanzanian security forces, are targeting and displacing the Maasai and depriving them of their means of subsistence.