September 8th: History, Conservation and politics, the example of Australia

Nik Petek, Reflection 08.09.2014

Ecology and Empire – Libby Robin

Today’s seminar was really interesting and was a reminder of the work written by Gunnel Cederlöf, the seminar of which I unfortunately missed. People do not usually combine the terms ecology and empire, but as a quote Libby mentioned said: “Biodiversity is a white man’s word” (slightly paraphrasing). The dominance is already evident from that quote, which comes from an Australian context, but is equally applicable in Kenya, where I work, and in other formerly colonised countries. In fact, even though Kenya has the preservation of the environment as one of its top priorities, with several institutions looking after it and environmental programs being strong at many universities, the great majority of the research which requires lab equipment and expensive fieldwork is done by researchers from developed countries. These are also the researchers that publish in “high-end” journals, whereas the research done by Kenyans is hidden in institutional libraries.

How conservation and biodiversity are white men’s terms is particularly visible in the history of Baringo, the region I am working in. Since the colonial government was established in the early 20th century, the region has been subject to a great number of conservation and landscape-rehabilitation projects due to the extreme erosion, common droughts and low soil fertility. The government blamed the local people, saying that their herding practices and the high number of livestock (particularly goat) destroyed the landscape. The officials in the government considered the landscape once a breadbasket, because whole trading caravans could be fed. These conservation projects have not stopped with Kenya’s independence, but continue to the present day. Conservation stopped being the white man’s word, but became the word of the rich government officials and the NGOs (national and international).

Even though a lot of money has been pumped into conservation projects in the region, literally all of them failed, and the region is no better off than before. Moreover, the conservation projects used one-size-fits-all templates, although in the late 18th century the locals managed to have a thriving agricultural centre in a landscape that was already eroding. But how the locals managed that was ignored by the conservationists and government officials. People in Baringo are aware that the sediment is eroding extremely quickly, the evidence literally surrounds them on every step of the way, but can do very little about it.

However, even though the people are blamed to have caused this great degradation of the landscape in the past 150 years or less, research has shown that it has been happening for at least the past 400 years (so it is highly likely that it has been happening for longer) and the type of sediment there is naturally loose. This means the erosion could be natural and the human factor is just accelerating it.

That conservation is a white man’s word is also visible in other spheres of life, like the supermarket, where food labelled “organic” or “bio” is significantly more expensive and the general audience cannot afford it. So in countries like Slovenia, where 99,9999999% people are white (slightly exaggerating the number), conservation and biodiversity also become the rich man’s word. That is not to say that they are not concerned with the environment and do not want to/cannot participate in actions and organisations that take care of the environment. But you become excluded from certain spheres of society. Moreover, the cynical folk that we are, we think that “organic” and “bio” are just marketing schemes. That the conservation and biodiversity markers are organised under a market economy, like Michael is researching, does not help it.

Reflection by Yongliang Gao

Today’s session is a must-have one for environmental history students, whatever field you are studying in. Personally, I am writing a thesis about cultural heritage management and tourism development on the Silk Road in China. Although I haven’t chosen a specific region/site to conduct the research, the term ‘local community’ and ‘national state’ always haunt me while proceeding my project.

The literatures I’ve read so far on cultural heritage management are highly centered on national or international scale, very few scholars managed to concentrate their research on a local scale, though some have outlined the dilemma between the two. I do acknowledge the national administration of a cultural heritage site considering the financial and bureaucratic vantages that a nation possesses. But neglecting the local community would not harmonize the managerial work for the site, but trigger conflicts between the local and nation state as the local people are the owners of the landscape and have indigenous knowledge about the landscape. To exclude the local would very likely cause social chaos and with a lack of local knowledge remained.

To study cultural heritage management in China is tricky as the land is all controlled and regulated by the state, even if one owns a land, the property right is limited to 70 years. In fact, the state can do whatever necessary to a land, even though someone legally owns it. That is to say, the cultural heritage study in China should be first viewed from the national perspective. As for the local, to what extent can they participate in the management depends on the attributes of the local site (population, social status, position, etc.). This is a pretty daunting truth for people doing this kind of research in China because we have to raise the national interest above the others.

Except the issues above, I think Libby Robin also accentuated her talk on how culture influences people’s perceptions toward the environment, like how British shaped the way Australian understand their environment. For the literatures that I have read, I found a very common argument almost in every landscape management research, that is “culture has/play a/some sort of role in shaping a landscape”. An argument like this sounds like a crab to me. Whenever I see it, I get sick of it because literally no landscape can be built without culture involved. To avoid arguing culture like this, I am building up a model that could quantify the cultural impact on landscape shaping and management. My purpose for constructing the model is to identify and compare the cultural impacts on the landscape by demographic characteristics (like age, gender, education, income, marriage, number of children, etc.) in order to grasp how different groups view culture on the landscape they dwell. By comparing statistics generated from the model, I will hopefully get to know how should I represent different opinions for different groups. This is really hard to explain so far as everything about the model is ongoing and nothing is settled, but I believe it might work.

Libby Robin Reflection- Morag Ramsey

I found while reading Libby Robin and her husband’s contributions to Environmental History that I continually stumbled upon issues that I will soon face when I begin thesis writing. In particular I was struck by how the history of power and history of ideas must have interacted and what that will reveal. It made me want to search for the “biodiversity” in my own area of interest. I am hoping to look into conservation in Sweden, in particular when it comes to the wolf. I already suspect that there are emotional, psychological and social elements which combine to make decisions based around this animal, but now I am curious to see how science has been used to justify policy surrounding this particular effort at conservation. I was also interested in the idea that “a crisis itself frames its own solutions.” (25) and I will now try and apply this lens to my work.

I also found this morning’s discussion about indigenous versus settler Australian’s identification with their country very interesting. While I have not concretely connected such ideas to my own thesis yet, I feel they are bound to surface. This idea of land ownership, land use and ancestry being tied to national identity is a difficult idea to navigate successfully. I think better understandings of the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘community’ and how they are connected to the environment can only strengthen the way we negotiate solutions for environmental degradation.

I agree with Libby that a closer examination of those who suffer the most from climate change may bring about more positive change than continuously blaming the ‘developed’ world with no following positive action in return. I am reminded again and again of the complicated relation between individuals and their actions and larger institutions and global connections that dictate certain standards. Libby was speaking about how policy makers are just people with the same emotional response to certain issues as others. At times it seems that dealing with such large international problems that come along with environmental concerns creates faceless actors. I grapple with how to understand such faceless actors in terms of agency and global responsibility. Perhaps later on in life everything will be illuminated?

I was intrigued by the question of whether a successful environmental history can be written using the nation as the preferred scale.

I feel that trying to understand environmental history, or issues of biodiversity must almost always involve a level of awareness of the nation-state(s). Libby makes the point that ‘responses to environmental crises are not necessarily scientific, but are just as likely to be political or provided by management or policy framework 26’. She goes on to say that achieving the goal of conservation (a healthy ecosystem) demands amongst other things ‘a good measure of political will’ 26. Libby also makes the point that research itself is often dictated by funding from national governments, and journals have nationalist biases. Certainly restricting ones scope to the nation level and not incorporating other scales of analysis is not ideal blanket advice for all research endeavors. However, it is good to be aware of the political frameworks that impact environmental history, many of which are cast at the nation-state level. In addition, the manner in which research is conducted and results disseminated also have nationalist biases and casting ones gaze on those mechanisms can be very informative. Certainly the nation can be the main scale of examination when writing an environmental history, and while situating this discourse within global and regional contexts can add to the process it isn’t necessary.
But on the topic of scales of examination, one thing I did think about while listening to Libby was the whole nature vs people dichotomy that we have been discussing throughout this course. At the end of the lecture that Libby gave this afternoon she said “sometimes the nature is different because people are in it but sometimes humanity is just nature.” I thought that was actually a really elegant way to express the dialectic phenomena that is the nature and society construct, which are two sorts of lenses for viewing issues of biodiversity conservation. I wish the Libby would have elaborated on that statement. I believe that addressing the nature/human dichotomy is critical for achieving goals of global resilience enhancment. The individuals most qualified to expound on this issue are probably not climatologists or ecologists but social scientists who Libby recognizes are needed to complement traditional scientific expertise to combat the successive waves of identified environmental crises.
To sum, just as Libby finds that ‘ecology is a necessary, but no longer sufficient expertise for biodiversity in the crisis of the sixth mass extinction’ so too should we not limit our scope of analysis to any one scale be it regional, national, global, scientific, or sociological. Of course no one person can be an expert in all of these topics so it is totally legitimate to focus on one area in a piece of work, yet relevancy is multiplied when effort is made to explore and connect the interstices.

Reflection by Yaqi Fu

The topic of empire and ecology is interesting. There are many things that we would memorize in speaking of an empire, the people, the land, the government and what more. Ecology exists simultaneously with empire. In Tom Griffiths’ article, he tried to combine these two large factors in the explaining of Australian History, where he posed the idea of ecological imperialism. It seems that ecological imperialism emphasized the history that presented before and beyond the living of human in such a continent, where human’s history was more based on the settlers and the colonization by the British people. Tom illustrated that the history of ecology can also be written into imperial history, and the scale of environmental history in most of the cases is well beyond nation.

Biodiversity and the idea of biodiversity would be two quite different things, of which the complex relation is just as history and the idea of history. Biodiversity, a complicated name for nature, caused wide range of attention when the environmental crisis showed up, and unexpectedly became one of the measurements for such crisis. People get to know biodiversity, and love it, and try to build it as beautiful as imagined. Simultaneously, the hard work of biodiversity in human’s affairs gives itself grand reputation, as showed in Libby Robin’s article, wilderness, became an important part of national identity in the US at the age of building national park. Crisis of desertification get connected with crisis of civilization. On the other side, biodiversity also has an influence individually on human’s healthy. No matter in malignity, in fact or in flattery, biodiversity as I see will have more influence on human, where global scales and international collaborations would be more necessary in dealing with such big ecology.

Reply to Nik Petek by Kristina Berglund

Nik, are you always this cynical? 🙂
Indeed ‘the white man’s burden’ is a sad reflection of our colonizing legacies and history of cruel dominance. Your experience from Kenya is very interesting, and the history of conservation projects in Baringo does not seem very cheerful. I have myself similar experiences from a short visit in Kenya last spring, even though I think I am leaning towards the more romanticizing type. Maybe call it naivety to some extent but I think this wicked world also needs some stubborn faith in the ‘good’. Conservation is indeed a problematic (and very political) phenomenon, and even though many so called community based initiatives have been launched in recent years, the risk is often impending that the visions of local participation remains on a piece of paper. Or that it becomes yet another panacea for healthy ecosystems. We have discussed this a lot in a conservation reading course I am part of, and sometime it feels tricky how to approach this in my own thesis work later on. However I believe there are also many positive sides of conservation, it all depends on how it is carried out. Hopefully more of these initiatives can be steered into a more positive direction with more agency and power to ‘locals’ and less to rich high-ups and greedy capitalists.

In response to Ellen Lindblom:

I really like the phrase you use “communication with other levels”. I also wrote my response about what Robin said about scales of research and levels of perspective. I think it is such a good idea for you to read about and follow the research theme of climate shocks, also to read about other forms of societal shocks and how climatic shocks are unique/similar.
There is a really interesting body of literature dealing with so-called catastrophic climate change events, resilience theory etc, and I think that is a perfect way to plug your research into communication with other levels.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that you have to be careful to not be blunt about distinctions and let the contemporary climate debate affect you in your work. I think that trying to remain impartial to contemporary issues of climate change and climate politics may be problematic. Whatever your views on the issues, they will affect the way you conduct and write about your research. I think it is a good idea to formalize your own perspectives and lay them out clearly in your thesis. Presumably your perspectives will also be influenced by your research, so you can discuss what phenomena conform to your beliefs and what has made you change them. It is just as interesting to discuss how our hypothesis are unsupported by the evidence as it is to discuss the opposite. Furthermore, it is far more engaging to examine how our expectations differ from reality, and why that may be, than it is to not discuss the discrepancies.
I am a big fan of relativistic writing/research. I believe that all researchers write their work around their own frame of reference, and that being so, we should be explicit about our backgrounds, and how our perspectives have changed or been enforced during the research process. I think this can be particularly difficult for early-stage researchers because it can feel a lot safer to not situate ourselves in our writing but instead stick to discussing the thoughts of more established colleagues. But the payoff comes when you can formulate original arguments, and it is so much more fun to write about things that you believe in than to cut and paste a narrative from what other people are saying. I guess I am encouraging you in your quest to communicate with other levels, but make sure to include your own voice, it’s interesting!! I want to hear what you think!