Over the past hundred years, around 20 million people have been ushered from their homelands due to conservation alone. Those displaced people are kicked off their ancestral lands, witness their homes being burned down and are left mostly without aid from governments. Those people are conservation refugees and their numbers are growing even today.

But sometimes, conservation refugees find the courage to fight back against the governments and the lobbies. They fight in court while their oppressors ruthlessly bend, break or rewrite laws to hamper their inconvenient voices. The fight is a modern day version of David against Goliath. It is the poor indigenous tribes against the salivating monarchy, the stereotyped famished African against the Harris Tweed-wearing oligarch, the mother with starving children against the people who are starving her children. And then sometimes, just sometimes, the oppressed win.

This is what happened last month in Botswana thanks to a landmark court ruling [PDF] which opposed the government's latest attempt to evict the Bushmen from their ancestral land. The Bushmen are an indigenous people of Southern Africa and have lived in the regions of Botswana, South Africa, Angola for tens of thousands of years. The 5,000 Bushmen living in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve however have for years been forcibly intimidated, violated and forced to decamp from their ancestral land. The official reason? Conservation. The Bushmen live in a region that falls right into a planned "wildlife corridor" [PDF]. Their presence would allegedly pose a threat to wildlife.

This, in itself, is absurd. The Bushmen, like other indigenous tribes around the world, respect and protect nature because nature, among other things, provides them with shelter and food. They live in peaceful cohabitation with their environment and have done so for aeons. They live sustainably on game and their carbon footprint is translucently small. They pose as much as a threat to wildlife as a pea would hamper a princess' sleep.

And yet the Botswanan government has the audacity to accuse the Bushmen of potentially wrecking that same nature, that same wildlife. It paints itself "green" and uses conservation, a humble scientific endeavour, as an excuse to get rid of extremely "green" people. But it gets more absurd. As it turns out, conservation was merely an excuse to get rid of the Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Because in the 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve.

Using conservation as a cover-front to displace people is not a new tactic. As I wrote last year, in 2009 the British government unscrupulously backed the erection of a marine protection zone, the world's largest, around the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean. Its motivation wasn't conservation but rather to squash the native Chagossians' attempts to return to the main island of Diego Garcia, currently occupied by an active US military base.

For the Botswanan government, the motivation was money. The lure of sparkling diamonds and dollars that come with them (Gem Diamonds publicly stated that it valued the region at $3.3 billion in 2010) ranked higher than the lives of the Bushmen. And so it was decided. The Bushmen would be displaced and diamond mining companies would start digging. The government began its newfound mission of clearing the Bushmen away in 1997. Two further clearances occurred in 2002 and 2005 by which time most Bushmen had effectively been evicted.

As Survival International, an organisation working for tribal peoples' rights worldwide, reports, the evicted Bushmen, stripped from their land, home and purpose found it hard to settle in the so-called modern world:

"Rarely able to hunt, and arrested and beaten when they do, they are dependent on government handouts. Many are now gripped by alcoholism, boredom, depression, and illnesses such as TB and HIV/AIDS."

In 2006, the Bushmen did win the right to go back and live on their land but although the Botswanan government rapidly announced that it would not appeal the ruling, behind the scenes, its machiavellian machinations were already in place. It kept the sole borehole used by the Bushmen as source of water effectively useless by removing its pump.

Lawsuits later, the Bushmen finally won the right to access their borehole as well the right to sink new ones in the reserve. A pledge by Gem Diamonds to sink more boreholes is also good news, although it remains to be seen if that's just sweet talk.

Undeterred though, the Botswanan government continued its wave of intimidation, but this time under the guise of conservation. Threatened with more-or-less spontaneous eviction, the Bushmen had to go to court yet again and it is this ruling, made last month, that they are now celebrating. The court rightfully granted more powers to the Bushmen, including the right to refuse entry into their compounds to government officials.

As for the "wildlife corridor," well, someone please tell President Obama that the genius idea was initially promoted by the US organization Conservation International (CI), whose proud motto is "people need nature to strive." (CI apparently distanced itself from the "wildlife corridor" last month. Read its statement here.) In his quest to befriend the African continent, maybe he can put a definitive end to this nonsense.

What is most saddening about this is that people are being displaced and mistreated and it's all being covered up by the need for conservation. The thing to keep in mind however is that even if conservation is indeed the primary reason for the displacement of people, removing indigenous populations from their ancestral lands cannot be condoned by conservationists. Conservation involves the preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment. People are most definitely part of the natural environment and as such, they too, must be taken care of.

Images' credit: Dietmar Temps (all from Flickr).

More information about the Bushmen's plight by Survival International:

• Court reprieve for Bushmen threatened with eviction

• Trucks arrive to evict Botswana Bushmen despite government denials

• Tribes: The Bushmen

• Video: Visiting the well

Researchers use laser technology to rediscover an ancient city that dates more than a millenium in a dense Cambodian jungle. The city was one of Khmer Empire's, a civilisation that grew to dominate that part of the world once.

As opposed to submerged Mauritia or sunken Thonis, which are deep in the abyss of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea respectively, the ancient city of Mahendraparvata was completely hidden by a thick jungle—that of mountain Phnom Kulen in Cambodia. It was so concealed that even villagers who live in the nearby region had absolutely no clue they had the ruins of the largest low-density, pre-industrial urban complex on Earth as neighbour.

Rise and fall of Mahendraparvata

This may be so but researchers long suspected that the Cambodian mountain of Phnom Kulen was potentially garding one great secret. Indeed since 1936, an expedition led by French archaeologist and historian Philippe Stern discovered temples and statues of the Hindu god Vishnu on the mountain. He described Phnom Kulen as the first true temple mountain.

Stern's description was also backed by history. The Khmer Empire, which would go on to dominate the region both by virtue of its political and military powers, is known to have begun on Phnom Kulen when founder Jayavarman II went through his consecration ritual on the mountain. That was where he also began the foundation of the first of his new empire in 802 AD. That city would kickstart it all and was named "Mahendraparvata."

But Mahendraparvata would eventually lose its status to newer ones, especially Angkor which was built about 350 years later as the Khmer empire spread its domination and influence. Angkor is now widely known for housing the largest religious monument in the world. Built in the 11th century in just 37 years, Angkor Wat, "City of Temples," was erected and dedicated to god Vishnu. The remains of Angkor Wat is today the most touristic attraction in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is also featured prominently on the Cambodian flag.

Mahendraparvata faded in the shadow of new cities and eventually into the greenness of the jungle. It was slowly swallowed and engulfed by a dense forest on a prominent mountain. But, contrarily to many lost lands or cities, it was never forgotten, merely lost.

Rediscovery of Mahendraparvata

Now, more than a millenium later, Australian researchers have finally found the lost city again. Using a sophisticated sensing technology called Lidar, which uses lasers to map given terrains, the researchers discovered almost thirty temples as well as evidence of a vast urban structure such as canals, dykes and roads.

Talking to Australian Fairfax Media, which broke the news about the discovery earlier this week on its affiliated publications, Dr. Damian Evans, co-leader of the expedition said:

"With this instrument—bang—all of a sudden we saw an immediate picture of an entire city that no one knew existed, which is just remarkable."

And it is indeed remarkable. The researchers attached their quarter-million dollar Lidar to a red helicopter and painstakingly criss-crossed 370 square kilometres in a week as they attempted to pierce through the Phnom Kulen jungle. As reported by Fairfax Media, Lidar "collected billions of data points and about 5,000 digital aerial photographs." It took years to analyse the data, check them and have them peer-reviewed—years before the team was finally able to announce the discovery of the long-lost city of Mahendraparvata.

Importantly, the researchers believe that at least two of the newly-discovered temples may never have been looted as they could find no evidence of ancient bricks or rocks scattered around. Analyses of those temples, especially, could provide valuable information about this old city as well as its people.

How it all went wrong

But what led to the disappearance of the Khmer civilisation? The idea that Dr. Evans and his team are currently exploring is chilling because it hits close to home. The researchers believe that the impact of severe deforestation, deduced by data from Lidar, and an over-dependence on water management led to the civilisation's demise. Could this be a message from the past to us, recounting the terrible potential of unsustainable development?

Regardless, the fall of Mahendraparvata signified the demise of the Khmer empire just like its founding corresponded to its rise. So what will its rediscovery now conjure for the descendants of the Khmers, the locals of the region? Well for a start, the influx of activity that will accompany intensified archaeological works can provide jobs. Many of the 1,200 villagers who live in the region are malnourished so work can hopefully afford them food. But the work may be dangerous. The region is plagued with landmines dispersed across the mountain during the war.

This notwithstanding, here's to hoping that the secrets Mahendraparvata, protected by forests and landmines, are further uncovered soon. Dr. Evans and co will officially publish their discovery in a future issue of the journal PNAS soon. One has to wonder what secrets they will reveal about the long-lost city of Mahendraparvata then.