Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and sometimes as prospectors. Thus, the idea of wilderness as nature was as ripe
for exploitation as it was supposedly devoid of human existence, and this notion
has dominated public consciousness for years even though it is totally unhistorical
and totally false. For environmental historian William Cronon (1996) this conception
of wilderness, and by extension conservation, places humanity outside nature,
representing an escape from human beings' real responsibility to respect it and use
it reflectively and wisely now and in the future. It also leads to a clear disrespect
for the rights, cultures and knowledge of many of the peoples who actually do, and
have done this, for millennia. Cronon writes: 'If we set too higher a stock on
wilderness, too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too
many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to
care much about their suffering or their fate' (1996: 84-5).
This social construction of wilderness, and by extension nature (Escobar, 1996),
has been in large part responsible for both distracting attention from environmental
predicaments and supporting these predicaments (Crist, 2004). When this idea of a
nature and conservation model was adopted by colonial and then independent
governments in Africa and other 'developing countries', local people were systematic-
ally displaced too, because the dominant belief among Western conservation scientists
and the big conservation organizations that dominated the late and post-colonial
period was that human beings harmed the environment (Brockington, 2002; Dowie,
2009). Hunting game or wildlife in these protected areas or national parks by local
indigenous people was labelled 'poaching', although licensed big game hunting by
colonial whites continued in many cases and still exists today. In 2012 the news
that King Juan Carlos of Spain was on safari in Botswana shooting elephants hit
the news with photographs of the monarch posing proudly by his kill in the pages
of many newspapers. In contrast, local Kalahari bushmen are forbidden to kill game
on the same reserve.
Western conservationists have felt that the indigenous human presence was
actually a disturbance to the natural equilibrium, not really appreciating that these
areas, including such 'unspoiled' places as the Serengeti, were actually created by a
continuous interaction of empathetic human beings with the landscape over centuries.
Indeed, the whole field of human ecology and environmental history is a rich
exploration of how human communities and the natural environment shape each
other (Crosby, 1986; Merchant, 1989; Cronon, 1996; Diamond, 1998). In excluding
humans, essentially the rural poor, in the creation, establishment and management
of national parks in Tanzania, Kenya and elsewhere was tantamount to a denial of
African history. Adams writes:
Wildlife and people were to be kept apart, the animals confined to reserves and
shot as 'problem animals' when they transgressed invisible administrative
boundaries and raided crops, and people kept at bay by the policing of protected
area boundaries and the control of incursions through paramilitary anti-poaching
patrols. The plight of people evicted from protected areas is directly comparable
to that of reservoir evacuees and the economic impact of such evictions can be
considerable. . . .
Fortress conservation therefore involved the suppression of resource use by
local people.
(2001: 272)
