Nature reserves and people's homes

This is an NYT article about local people trying to reclaim land in Harris Neck, Georgia. A number of families that had lived in a wetland area for generations were forced to leave the area in the 1940s. The land was later declared a nature reserve, so now these people and their descendants are having a hard time trying to reclaim their right to live their. The article correctly describes it as "a conflict about two ways of life — one that tries to protect natural resources from human encroachment, the other demonstrating that humans can live in harmony with nature."

I find this case very interesting, because it has much in common with the debates raging around rainforest communities in other countries. Many nature preserves are designed to exclude human activity, but this is often at the expense of people who have lived in relative harmony with the natural environment. The people concerned in the Georgia case are of Gullah descent, about as close as that part of the country has to an indigenous population. The Gullah are descendants of early black slaves that developed a unique, relatively isolated culture on the southeastern US seaboard. It seems that in Harris Neck, Georgia (and I would imagine in other Gullah areas), the way of life was largely based on harvesting of natural resources like game and seafood. So there are lots of parallels with tropical country governments that institute laws to "protect" the rainforest, which exclude sustainable indigenous resource use and consequently open up natural areas (or at least the areas bordering natural reserves) to unsustainable uses.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see how this situation develops.