Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
heritage. For example, while international and global organisations may fi nance
much of the drive for biodiversity conservation, these efforts typically are enacted
through institutions and agencies at the national, regional, and local scales. The
latter group of institutions infl uences 'what gets understood as and comes to be
understood as biodiversity in a national context' (Lorimer, 2006, p. 540). The
largest of the World Bank-funded initiatives for biodiversity conservation, for
example, has required National Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs), while another
line of Bank-funded projects has established National Biodiversity Conservation
Areas (NBCAs) in many countries (Bassett and Zuéli, 2003). The international and
global biodiversity initiatives show tendencies that express an underlying politics of
nature (e.g., the environmentally and geographically skewed emphasis on tropical
rain forest conservation; Zimmerer, 2006). These global environmental politics may
run starkly counter to national politics and identity practices, which often emphasise
the utilitarian-type landscapes of agrarian ideals.
Ethics and moral geographies infuse the understanding of biodiversity in myriad
ways. The 'cultural valuation'
per se
of biodiversity (and, more commonly, biodi-
versity-incorporating attributes of nature) is embedded in a host of belief systems.
But ethics and morals may also be thought of in a broader sense, and thus acquire
still more wide-ranging relevance to biodiversity issues along with those of biotech-
nology (e.g., Greenhough, 2007). For example, ethics offers an appropriate frame-
work for understanding the beliefs and values associated with biodiversity-containing
landscapes that are also of vital cultural importance (e.g., ideas of ancestral domain
related to biodiversity issues in the Philippines; Bryant, 2000). Ethics also inform
beliefs concerning moral order, which is seen as a positive force in several relations
of humans to nature and biodiversity - such as in ideas of stewardship and the place
of people-in-nature. At the same time, however, the valence of moral order is not
inherently positive, and its infl uence may be manipulated in many ways. Rationali-
sation of the abuse of human rights of local residents and the justifi cation of deadly
violence against wildlife poachers in African national parks is the result of the
'radical [discursive] re-ordering of moral standing' (Neumann, 2004, p. 234). It
lowers these local people to a sub-human level of ethical status. Most recently, the
ethical dimension of biodiversity has mushroomed in the question of 'who owns
the human species'. Addressing this epochal question is sure to spawn a new phase
of biodiversity analysis within environmental geography.
Conclusion: Biodiversity and Environmental Geography
Entwining of the human and non-human in biodiversity is increasingly relevant not
only to biodiversity but to various aspects of human conditions and social dynamics.
Various powerful new developments in the economics, policy, and management of
biodiversity (e.g., biotechnology, conservation) have intensifi ed this entwining. In
response, perspectives in the social sciences and humanities use the ideas of 'hybrid'
and 'socionature hybridity' in order to describe those elements of nature, from
landscapes to organisms, which are deeply entwined with the human social world.
Biodiversity offers many illustrations of the inseparability of the non-human and
the human. One example is the biotechnology industry's coining of the 'small mol-
ecules' throughout nature as a so-called lexicon of biodiversity to be marshaled for
genetic engineering. The perspective of this hybridity is useful also since it reveals
the powerful tendency of modern belief systems, including in academic disciplines,
