What's Wrong With Tanzanian National Parks?:
To Balance Out the Voices Surrounding Arusha National Park
Environmental awareness has been ascending, with so many appeals implying the dichotomy between human and the nature. Human's influence on the nature is an established fact, but a complete separation seems to go to the other end of extreme.
Experiencing colonial control and the later independence, the area surrounding Mount Meru has developed to become a national park, one of the 16 national parks in Tanzania. Due to the adoption of a western ideology and the largely unchanging government-citizen relation, local villagers residing near the national park have experienced oppression and unjust treatment.
Excluding people for preservation exemplifies the western preconception of the African land, an open area with no human trace; in other words, "naturalizing" the land's state in a way it had never experienced. People report traditional symbiosis with the animals and vegetation, and the forceful separation has driven people into a state they could never adapt to. A fundamental re-imagination of the nature-human relationship should be accompanied by an equally profound political restructuring.
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