Researchers at the Australian Catholic University, Australia; Columbia University, New York; and the University of Massachusetts teamed up to investigate secondary forest growth in previously deforested areas. In their paper, "Collective property rights lead to secondary forest growth in the Brazilian Amazon," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that collective property rights with local stakeholders in Indigenous territories lead to higher reforestation rates.
One of the lesser-known scandalous from American history (there’s many to choose from) is John Muir’s campaigning for the National Park Service, which is often celebrated as a great victory of environmentalism. What they don’t tell you is that Muir saw the indigenous people of California and the Pacific Northwest as ‘savages’. The NPS meant that thousands of people lost their lands, lands which they had tended for centuries, but which appeared to White observers as merely ‘virgin forest’.