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increasingly commoditised aesthetics of unpeopled wilderness came to reinvent
African environments and was mobilised to remove and displace indigenous
people.
The political ecologist submits that these discourses not only fi t comfortably with
the authoritarianism of (post)colonial wildlife conservation, but are problematic for
at least two additional reasons. First, a tragic irony was that the biogeophysical
complexity of the region depended on the very traditional human land uses which
were now terminated with reference to a 'purifi ed' nature discourse. The result
was that real natural processes sometimes contradicted lofty preservation efforts
(Neumann, 1998, p. 28). Second, indigenous peoples, such as the Meru peasant
society, did not share this dualistic environmental discourse. For them, Mount Meru
was both a vital material resource in everyday life and a physical manifestation of
their history and identity, not some aesthetic capital (p. 178). These discourses
underlie Meru interpretations of justice and morality and, by extension, rationalise
acts of peasant resistance against conservation laws.
It is evident that Neumann's approach to discourse analysis shares important
traits with, for instance, Braun's post-structuralism. One of the more obvious con-
gruities is that both view conservation as more than a question of control over
material resources. It is also a matter of politics in which privileged (post)colonial
ideals and naturalised discourses of nature are socially enforced and imposed upon
the material world. Indeed, Neumann's conclusion from an analysis of popular
texts and photographs, that 'discursive constructions have important material
consequences' in biodiversity conservation would readily be accepted by post-
structuralists or Marxists (Neumann, 2004, p. 833). Even so, Neumann presents an
approach to representation and discourse (epistemology) as selectively connected to
the material history of the environment - a history which Neumann's book lays
bare and denaturalises in an ontological realist manner that defi es any radical unde-
cidability of meaning. Quite unlike Braun's more undecided stance, Neumann
emphasises that he is 'not arguing that global biodiversity conservation constitutes
a discourse (although it may) or that the threat of biodiversity loss is not “real” but
some sort of linguistic fabrication', and he asserts in a footnote 'that biodiversity,
in all its forms, has been historically diminished by human activities, is presently
increasingly threatened, and that this is economically, culturally, and ecologically a
negative outcome' (ibid.: 823).
Another example from political ecology research on environmental discourses in
West Africa contrasts more sharply with Braun's approach, not only philosophically
but also methodologically. Instead of 'purer' forms of discourse analysis, Thomas
Bassett and Zuéli Koli Bi (2000) place it in a whole constellation of complementary
methods (cf. Batterbury et al., 1997). Field research and analytical techniques were
mobilised to collect information on land use and vegetation, while environmental
perceptions were elicited from farmers and pastoralists through focus group discus-
sions, interviews, and survey-research in a savanna landscape in northern Côte
d'Ivoire. Out of this impressive collection of data, Bassett and Koli Bi tease out the
disjunctions between two sets of environmental discourses.
The fi rst discourse comprised the global and national desertifi cation narratives
underlying, for instance, the Ivorian government's National Environmental Action
Plan (NEAP) and mandated by the World Bank as a condition for further loans. It
presents an alarming process of environmental degradation as the result of overgraz-
ing, bush fi res, and mismanagement by peasants and pastoralists. One of the pre-
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