Michael Painter put Indigenous land rights at the center of conservation

Michael Painter, an ecological anthropologist who died February 11, 2026, spent his career arguing that conservation succeeds when Indigenous organizations hold real authority, not just a seat at the consultation table. Working with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bolivia's Chaco and later the Amazon, he helped Indigenous groups like CABI secure land titles — 273,000 hectares for the Ayoreode, 560,000 for the Isoceño Guaraní, and hundreds of thousands more around Madidi National Park.

Painter's academic work, including a 1995 book he co-edited rejecting population-growth explanations for environmental destruction, argued that unequal land access and power, not overcrowding, drove ecological harm. He later pushed WCS itself to adopt a human-rights-based approach, helping create its Institutional Review Board and arguing in a 2017 essay that biodiversity loss was a 'double injustice' harming both ecosystems and the people who depend on them.

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