Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 95

transgression of environmental and criminal laws. Again, this is not
a new phenomenon. Those living and working in the Adirondack
Mountains in the late 1880s held to a common-rights ideology that
maintained that undeveloped lands, whether private or public, were
open to hunting and foraging (Jacoby, 2001). As with many people
living in or visiting the bush today (in Australia, for example, there is a
longstanding 'shack culture' involving regular trips to wilderness and
semi-wilderness areas), certain informal rules guide what is allowable
and what is not when it comes to the natural surrounds. This could
be in the order of 'Never kill anything that you do not need' through
to not disturbing fish, fowl or forest creatures when in the midst of
breeding season (see Jacoby, 2001: 24). In colloquial terms, the directive
to 'not poo in your own nest' eloquently reflects a conservation ethic to
which many who live in such areas already and always have subscribed.
Important moral distinctions are sometimes made in regards to how
to interpret activities such as the cutting down of trees. For example,
Jacoby (2001) describes how taking wood from a state forest was
not necessarily seen by local residents as a 'crime' but rather as quite
legitimate if done for the purposes of subsistence (such as for firewood,
buildings materials and the like). This 'theft' of trees from state forests
(that is, protected conservation areas) was seen to be perfectly OK if not
done for the purposes of future market gain (as with selling firewood).
Moreover, local people in the Adirondacks also distinguished between
different types of wood according to subsistence and market activities,
only taking the more acceptable nonmarketable hardwoods for their
own personal uses. Interestingly, a study of the role and attitudes of
the United States Forest Service police toward tree theft in the 1990s
showed an active accommodation to this deviance. It was observed that
patterns of accommodation on the part of the police preserved the
cultural closeness between the Forest Service and the forest community
by withholding the formal label of crime. The accommodation of
tree theft thus served to preserve the image of the forest community
as a desirable place, frequented by honest people, requiring minimal
policing (Pendleton, 1997).
The question of subsistence use is highlighted as well when
considering contemporary policy initiatives such as the forest
conservation and REDD programme of the UN, an international policy
mechanism whose purpose is to mitigate climate change by reducing
emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing
countries, and to enhance forest carbon stocks through activities
such as forest conservation and sustainable forest management. The
programme involves paying developing countries to conserve forests.