In the early 1990s, donors began to implement “integrated conservation and development projects” (ICDPs) in Madagascar to stem deforestation, develop ecotourism, and promote forest conservation practices in rural areas. ICDPs recruited agrarian labor to groom and police parks and disseminate rules. In this article, I present a Marxian analysis of biodiversity's value in the global north, focusing on the role of manual workers in a Biosphere Reserve. I argue that ICDP's reliance on cheap local labor has maintained the historical interdependency of “slash‐and‐burn” agriculture, wage work, and forest conservation. By facilitating the discovery of species while unintentionally perpetuating the conditions of habitat endangerment, the conservation labor process creates forms of rain forest value.

The article presents a microhistory of a work strike in an Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) located in a rain forest of eastern Madagascar. ICDPs in Madagascar, as in other rain forest countries, are instruments of "green" neoliberal policy, a dominant development paradigm in Africa since the late 1980s. International donors and the Malagasy state are expanding the number of protected areas in Madagascar, and foreign NGOs typically manage the start-up phase of projects aimed at lessening slash-and-burn horticulture (called tavy) in the forest and to developing ecological tourism. The article traces the roles and narratives of low-wage, locally-hired ICDP workers, who perform the menial tasks of forest conservation. Details of a work strike by lower-tier ICDP workers in 1996 reveal dynamics of environmental interventions that have been neglected in analyses and evaluations. To understand conservation’s recurrent failures, one must investigate not only the sources of tension between agrarian populations and park representatives but also those arising from conservation’s historical division of labor. Key Words: conservation, labor, capitalism, development, parks, Madagascar

This article centers on labor in Madagascar and the ways in which colonial labor regimes have shaped forest conservation efforts. During the interwar period, the French colonial state launched two initiatives: it reinvigorated forest conservation measures and it conscripted male youths for public works. I analyze the effects on Malagasy subjects of the state's two-pronged effort to valorize Malagasy labor through compulsory road and rail works and to valorize Malagasy forests through conservation and commodification. I argue that these initiatives sent contradictory messages to Malagasy people about the proper land-labor relationship. One entailed a combative relationship to land, rock, and trees, while the other stressed the protection of forests. State officials maintained the contradictions of their “civilizing mission” by conceptually and administratively separating public works from forest conservation, or labor from the preservation of nature. However,in light of their physical relationship to the land and the organization of their labor relations in compulsory work camps and in the forest service,young men from eastern Malagasy villages have not conceptually distinguished these colonial practices in the same manner.

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Since the early twentieth century, the practice of slash-and-burn agriculture by Betsimisaraka subsistence farmers of eastern Madagascar, and their reluctance to engage in wage labor processes, have been interpreted by French and other Malagasy people as symptoms Betsimisaraka laziness. Colonial officials' idea of remedying Betsimisaraka laziness justified the imposition of wage work and forest conservation. The paper argues that colonial settlers, by conflating their vision of lazy labor and a victimized landscape, did not apprehend the coexistence of an alternative work ethic which entailed a different time-space orientation and social relationship to land. While scholars have analyzed the "laziness" of colonial subjects as a form of subaltern resistance to colonial domination, resistance alone does not account for the fact that under certain conditions Betsimisaraka people have also willingly partaken in wage labor. This article reveals how the labor and land ethics of Betsimisaraka farmers have actively contributed to the social and natural environments of capitalism.