Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
geography. In the 1960s and 1970s concern over deteriorating environmental condi-
tions grew, as oil spills, industrial accidents, and worsening air and water quality
made plain the ecological effects of unchecked industry and resource extraction,
and fueled a fl orescence of environmental activism and scholarship (Lean et al.
1990). The growing focus on environmental issues in turn led to a period of insti-
tutional reorganisation in Europe, the USA and Canada, as governments established
agencies and legislation regulating,
inter alia
, air and water quality, pesticides appli-
cation, industrial waste remediation, and resource-extraction activities.
During this period, neo-Malthusian alarmism about rapid population growth in
the developing world and its assumed negative impacts on natural environments
held sway among many ecologists and environmental activists (e.g., Ehrlich, 1972;
Hardin, 1968; 1974). Deforestation, desertifi cation, soil erosion and declines in
wildlife populations were among the environmental problems blamed on 'over-
population' and the mismanagement of natural resources which were commonly
believed to characterise Third World societies. Such concerns became widespread
among environmental NGOs and bilateral development agencies in Europe and
North America, and by the mid-1970s were becoming increasingly linked to lending
practices and development programmes. As the international lending boom of the
1970s turned into the debt crisis of the 1980s, the establishment of protected areas
and other environmental programmes commonly became conditions for continued
lending by the World Bank and other multilateral lending institutions. The 'green-
ing' of the World Bank continued apace (Goldman, 2005). By 1992, when the
World Bank focused its annual development report on the theme of development
and environment to coincide with the UN's World Conference on Environment and
Development, it could be said that environmental concerns had secured a place in
mainstream development thinking (World Bank, 1992). By adopting the rhetoric of
sustainable development and insisting that environmental conservation and eco-
nomic growth could be made to complement one another, however, the World Bank
and the UN only raised further questions about how these agencies conceived of
development and nature, and their relationship to social justice.
In part as a result of the growing infl uence of the institutions of international
development and Northern environmentalism, the 1970s and 1980s saw a dramatic
upsurge in the number of national parks, wildlife reserves and other protected areas
established in the developing world. Currently, some 6.9 percent of the earth's
surface falls under protected area designation, a fi gure that jumps to over 10 percent
if the IUCN's least-restrictive categories of protected areas are included (Wilhusen
et al., 2003). While the oldest (and some of the largest) protected areas in the world
are in the temperate countries of the 'First World' (the USA, Canada, New Zealand,
Great Britain), international conservation efforts have, since the 1970s, focused
especially on the biodiversity 'hotspots' found in the tropics regions of Latin America,
Africa and Asia. Ecologist Norman Myers suggests that some 25 such hotspots may
contain as much as 44 percent of vascular plant species and 35 percent of vertebrate
species, but cover just 1.4 percent of earth's surface (Myers et al., 2000). The goals
of protecting biodiversity hotspots has concentrated many protected areas and other
conservation efforts in countries of the global South, many of which have relatively
large resource-dependent rural populations, high levels of poverty and political-
economic instability. These conditions pose a distinct set of conservation problems,
which set them apart from most protected areas in the global North (Wilhusen
et al., 2003).
