In this episode of Breaking Green, investigative journalist and Global Justice Ecology Project board member Zahra Moloo talks about her reporting on “fortress conservation” in Southeast Cameroon, where the Baka people have been forcibly separated from forests they have lived in and stewarded for thousands of years.
Fortress conservation, Moloo explains, is the model of protecting “pristine wilderness” by removing the people who actually live there — and in Cameroon it has produced a landscape where national parks and trophy-hunting concessions are expanding, while the Baka who once called that land home are pushed to the roadside.
“People who live [in these national parks] and who've lived there for thousands of years have to be removed, often forcibly, in order to create these pristine areas for other people to consume and enjoy.”
Moloo traces this dispossession back to French colonial policies of forced resettlement and state land seizure, arrangements that independent Cameroonian governments largely preserved. Today most Baka live along roads, cut off from the forest and its resources, watching logging trucks haul away timber from land they can no longer freely enter. A limited 2019 access agreement allows brief, permission-only forest visits with spears rather than firearms — nowhere near what’s needed to sustain traditional life — even as conservation guards, financed in part by trophy-hunting operators charging tens of thousands of dollars per hunt, have been documented committing torture, arson, and killings against the very communities the forests are being protected from.
A particularly striking thread in the conversation is Moloo’s comparison to England’s enclosure movement: while displaced English peasants were absorbed into industrial cities as a new working class, the Baka have been left in a kind of limbo, unable to return to forest life or find real footing in a cash economy, often working Bantu farms for as little as $1–2 a day. Moloo also discusses the fallout from a 2019 BuzzFeed investigation into WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature), which prompted an independent panel to conclude the organization “had not done enough to protect human rights” — a finding she describes as a watered-down way of avoiding direct accountability.
The episode closes on what a genuinely just conservation model could look like: one centered on Baka knowledge and cosmology, in which the forest is understood as a place of abundance and ancestral presence rather than a resource to be fenced off or extracted. With the UN’s 30x30 pledge to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 now underway, Moloo raises the urgent question of whether this new wave of conservation will repeat the same exclusionary violence or finally put indigenous stewardship at its center.
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