In ‘The Invention of Green Colonialism’, Guillaume Blanc has laid bare the colonial roots of the West’s drive to ‘save’ African wildlife and landscapes from the people of Africa. Such policies today often come in the guise of ‘sustainable development’ and the like. The bottom line, in Blanc’s view, is that as the West often lays waste to its own environment it imagines an ‘African Eden’ that never existed. The rural poor bear the brunt of this fantasy, which often seems to place the welfare of animals above the people of Africa.