World conservation and genocidal frontiers: Global environmentalism, settler colonialism, and indigenous humanity in the early twentieth century

Abstract

In 1913, government representatives from around the world gathered in Berne, Switzerland, to attend the First World Conservation Conference. Its convenor, the anthropologist Paul Sarasin, called for new global protocols that would govern the world’s evident capacity for inhumanity, greed, and destruction. The urgency of such an intervention, he advised, was no more evident than in the settler world where human and non-human faced new industrialised forms of extinction. Integral to Sarasin’s argument was a series of recent scandals regarding the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. This chapter sets out to interrogate Sarasin’s intention that world conservation should include the just and humane treatment of Indigenous peoples and its illustration in the case he made against the Australian government. Sarasin would go on to advocate conservation under the auspices of the League of Nations, but by then the conditions of Indigenous peoples were understood as the domain of imperial reformers or colonial critics not conservationists. Over these same years, Indigenous leaders aimed to mobilise the new internationalism towards their own agendas.