Possessing America’s paradise: Conservation and colonialism in St. John,US Virgin Islands

Abstract

Advocates for protecting the earth’s natural resources have not always agreed on the form, extent, goal, nor even reason for such protection as the future use of such land has largely been dictated by nature’s construction as a racialized, classed, and otherwise restricted space. As a result, many mainstream conservation projects have occured at the expense of marginalized groups. In response to this trend, emerging scholarship on “decolonizing conservation” argues that Eurocentric resource ideologies and environmental epistemes have long been supported by a colonial-capitalist logic that undermines their purported goals. In this article, I argue that this logic is predicated on four key colonial strategies: (a) the political disenfranchisement of a native/indigenous community; (b) the hoarding of the natural resources belonging to that community; (c) the erasure of that native/indigenous community’s ecological epistemologies; and (d) the displacement of the members of that native/indigenous community. Through an examination of the Virgin Islands National Park (VINP), a conservation site on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the Caribbean, I attempt to codify these strategies and introduce the concept of possessive conservation as a distinct branch of colonial conservation (conservation colonialism). Possessive conservation moves beyond simply characterizing a way of doing conservation to describe the entanglement of territorial status, the discursive legacy of the Caribbean, and what is commonly understood as domineering, exclusive, and even violent approaches to environmental conservation. Through St. John we witness how one of the most enduring expressions of colonialism—territorial status—entangles with Eurocentric imaginaries of nature and its inhabitants to concretize racialized domination on the island.