When not shooting the 'natives' is not acceptable

Ansel Adams's photographs of Yosemite National Park are well-known: striking, ethereal prints of streams, rock-faces, flowers, waterfalls, and trees.

But there's something missing from these photos. Or rather, someone.

I mean the people who called Yosemite home. The people who had lived there for at least 4000 years. The indigenous Miwok.

Adams deliberately avoiding photographing them, even though they were rarely out of his sight when he was in Yosemite valley and he knew they had lived there for a long, long time. The reason? According to a new book by American journalist Mark Dowie, called Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, it was because he didn't think they belonged there. For Adams, Yosemite should be a 'pristine', unspoilt 'wilderness': no room for any people.

Why does this matter? Principally because this view of 'wilderness' has led to at least 5 million, and probably millions more, indigenous people around the world being driven off their land to make way for parks and reserves in the name of 'conservation'. Ergo: 'conservation refugees.'

How could this have happened? According to Dowie, Adams's view of 'wilderness', a 'fiction' he 'fed' by shooting Yosemite in the way he did, was shared by many American conservationists and later exported globally so there are now 110,000 'protected areas' worldwide.

Time and time again, people lost their land and homes. Sometimes it was to conserve 'megafauna' like lions, tigers and gorillas. Sometimes conservation served as an excuse for other, more nefarious reasons.

Some of these 'protected areas' are very famous. Yosemite is just one. The Serengeti and Maasai Mara national parks, on traditional Maasai land, are others.

The last Miwok left Yosemite in 1969, but the evictions started 100 years before that. Their crops were destroyed. 'Paramilitary' forces shot at and killed them.

'So few of us know what 'had to be done',' writes Dowie, with heavy irony, 'to create the national parks and wildlife refuges we truly believe are ours to enjoy.'

The irony is important. One of Dowie's central arguments is that the conservationists laboured under a misapprehension: saving the 'megafauna' did not, and still does not, require removing the people who live in the 'wilderness' with them.

Worse, Dowie writes, it is still happening today. It is still 'having to be done.' Let's make sure that if we visit a park we're not increasing the number of the world's refugees, or no one's being shot so we can shoot our own photos, like Adams, with no one in them.