Conservation – The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist

Conservation in the Himalayas, an ABST example

December 14, 2020December 15, 2020 erasmussen93Leave a comment

I keep a running annotated list of books and articles that I read, which I call my Annotated Bibliography of Salient Texts, or ABST. Sometimes, in the margins of my books, I’ll scribble these four letters to remind myself to add this quote to the annotation for this book. I have over 150 ABST entries to date, and am always adding more. I wanted to give you an example of what an entry looks like, so I’ll share what I wrote about the article “Keep Out… Come Again,” in Earth Island Journal‘s Winter 2021 publication.

Why do I keep this ABST? Although I am no longer in school, I like to have quick access to books that I’ve read and their most profound moments. I’m not sure if I’ll ever use this information, but what can I say, I’m highly attached to my books and the knowledge they bring me. I like to know that this information is easily accessible just in case I need it someday. Futhermore, writing an ABST entry is a way for me to interact with the text on another level. I get to practice my writing and my critical thinking; it is a personal methodology I use in order to deepen my understanding of what I read. Many of my posts on this blog are just edited versions of my ABST entries.

So here it is, my ABST entry for “Keep Out… Come Again.” Note that this entry is a medium length entry. Entries for books can be 3-10 pages of notes and quotes from the text. Just a few notation notes: normally on this blog I like to center quotes from the text, so I put them in bold, however in my ABST I underline all quotes and put in bold the most salient findings of the text. I also put personal thoughts in brackets [like this].

Amron, Yardain. 2021. Keep Out… Come Again: The Underbelly of American-Styled Conservation in the Indian Himalayas. Earth Island Journal 35 (4), pp. 49-53.

Discussion of Western top-down conservation practices brought to the Himalayas and how they affect local communities. The park focused on is the Great Himalayan National Park or GHNP in the Tirthan Valley. “In the two decades since it was formed, the park has displaced over 300 people from their land, disrupted the traditional livelihoods of several thousand more, and forced yet more into dependence on a risky (eco)tourism industry run in large part by outside ‘experts.’ In many ways, the GNHP is a poster child of how the American national park model — conceived at Yellowstone and exported to the Global South by a transnational nexus of state and nonstate actors, continues to ignore the sociopolitical and cultural realities of a place” (50). The mountainous areas in and around the park were traditionally used for grazing sheep and goats, as well as medicinal herb collection. American funded research claims that the presence of herders in the area harms the biodiversity, but local research from the Centre for Pastoralism claims the opposite, and say that these grazing practices were necessary for the maintenance of herb biodiversity in the area.

Has eco-tourism actually helped the region? “Eco-development, of course, is the current cool idea for making exclusionary conservation acceptable” (51-2). The park was named a UNESCO world heritage site despite protests from locals. An international nonprofit called Friends of the GNHP wrote the application for UNESCO. Organizations and the government claimed the new status would raise revenue for locals in the eco-tourism industry, “but on the whole, locals are losing opportunities to outside entrepreneurs who come with deeper pockets, digital marketing savvy, and already established networks of potential clientele” (52). [Check out book: Kullu: The Valley of the Gods]. Families are stuck with one of the only livelihood options being to serve tourists in the accommodation business, as their former livelihoods have become inaccessible. “Many youths are so ashamed to work as servants on their own land that they’re fleeing the valley altogether” (52).

Governments and western organizations/ideals are also making these livelihood options difficult for locals. Amron calls a romanticized outsider vision of the area, “a consultant’s fantasy” (53), because “rather than provide support to help locals become owners in the tourism industry, the government and World Bank offered them tour guide, portering and cooking training” (53). This funding doesn’t help with development, but pressures locals to become servants to first world, western, white, visitors. [Reminds me of quote from Naomi Klein in The Battle for Paradise: “At the core of this battle is a very simple question: Who is Puerto Rico for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders?”]

(other )References:

Klein, Naomi. 2018. The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Haymarket Books.

Shabab, Dilram. 2019. Kullu: Valley of the Gods. Hay House India.

Anutan Conservation

December 7, 2019December 7, 2019 erasmussen93Leave a comment

“Anutans might well disappoint the most extreme romantics. They are not preoccupied with conservation for its own sake and are willing to put up with a degree of litter and environmental damage in the interest of short-term convenience and safety, or to fill their stomachs. They, unlike the western conservationist, would gladly see the elimination of all crocodiles and great white sharks. But they are concerned about the long-term productivity of their fishing grounds and gardens, are willing to take forceful measures to protect them, and have a sufficiently centralized political system to enforce those measures…. In short, they recognize that they are living in a complex world where trade-offs are inevitable. They are struggling to understand the trade-offs and to find a balance that will help them meet the challenges of years to come” (Feinberg 2010, p. 52)

Anuta is a small outlying island within the Solomon islands, and has a population of roughly 300 people. This quote from Feinberg (2010) reminds us not to romanticize people who live closely with nature as ‘the noble savage.’ Instead, we must realize that their conservation efforts likely reflect efforts to maintain human well-being. As the world changes around us in many ways, we must learn to adapt our lifestyles to fit unobtrusively into the ecosystems we inhabit while also maintaining high levels human well-being. This indeed can be a complex problem, for small islands and large cities alike.

References:

Feinberg, R. 2010. Marine resource conservation and prospects for environmental sustainability in Anuta, Solomon Islands. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31(1), pp. 41-54.

Managing Dynamic Environments

August 24, 2019August 23, 2019 erasmussen93Leave a comment

“We claim that, despite the general conception of a changing planet, the contemporary and local environment and biota too often is regarded as stable or as having a natural baseline. The world’s bestselling single of all time, Crosby’s ‘White Christmans’, is a good and visual example: ‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas. Just like the ones I used to know.’ In other words, it refers to an assumed stable state of winters and how they really should be, irrespectively of the fact that it stems from a period in time during which global temperatures were low, compared to most other post-glacial periods” (Lennet & Berge 2019).

Authors Ann Lennet and Jorgen Berge look to Greenland’s Inuit populations to reevaluate conservation management practices. The Greenlandic word Pinngortitaq refers to “a place of becoming,” acknowledging how environments are dynamic and fluctuate across time. They discuss preservationist management strategies and how they are “as unnatural as it is impossible” (Lennet & Berge 2019). In fact, preservationist strategies aim to preserve natural worlds that we have already meddled with. No creature can exist in this world without affecting the environments they inhabit. The authors ask, “What is the actual baseline or natural state of an environment?”

In terms of managing environments in face of problems such as climate change and pollution, it is important to look to communities that have been closely studying their environments for generations, and those that understand the importance of flexibility in a life that can be full of surprises. The authors of this article propose three steps into bettering the conservation of our ecosystems: 1) we must bridge the gap between preservationist and subsistence worldviews; 2) we must view our environments as dynamic instead of static;. 3) we must acknowledge the role of people in their local environments and include an understanding of these relationships in our management strategies.

References:

Lennert, A. and Berge, J. 2019. “Pinngortitaq – A Place of Becoming.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 20(1).

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

June 27, 2019June 27, 2019 erasmussen93Leave a comment

“Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) represents experience acquired over thousands of years of direct human contact with the environment. Although the term TEK came into widespread use in the 1980s, the practice of TEK is as old as ancient hunter-gatherer cultures” (Berkes 1993: 1).

Traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, is a common term used among anthropologists who study indigenous peoples. As Fikret Berkes has described, it is a system of human knowledge relating to the natural environment that has been passed down over many generations. This type of knowledge is gained through intimate experience and observation within the natural world, and is often strongest in places where people depend directly on natural resources. Hunters, fishers, gatherers, agriculturalists, pastoralists, all spend their lives outdoors in communion with the earth’s natural rhythms, and thus it is beneficial to their cultures and lineages to pass down knowledge learned about the environment from parent to child, grandparent to grandchild, aunt and uncle to niece and nephew, or even peer to peer.

Although TEK is essentially situated in time (all TEK is linked to the past), that does not mean it does not change. As Puri (2013) and Ingold (2011) note, knowledge is never copied directly from one person to another. Instead, it is dependent on the individual and how they understand it, experience it, and choose to pass it down.

TEK has important implications for biodiversity. Gagdil, Berkes and Folke (1993), among others, push for higher recognition of indigenous knowledge in fields such as ecology, biology and conservation. Indigenous peoples have been studying their environments for generations, and their observations of recent changes to the world provides vital information about how unpredictable forces such as climate change and pollution are affecting people and their natural environments. Thus, as these three scholars write, “Just as important as it is to conserve biodiversity for sustainability, it is as urgent to conserve the diversity of local cultures and the indigenous knowledge that they hold” (Gagdil, Berkes & Folke 1993: 156).

In Tanzania, as part of a biology class during my Study Abroad in 2013, a Maasai man guides us through the bush teaching us about animal tracks and the useful qualities of native plants.

References

Berkes, F. 1993. Traditional Ecological Knowledge In Perspective. In J.T. Inglis (ed.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Concepts and Cases (pp. 1-6). Ottowa, ON: International Program on Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Gagdil, M., Berkes, F. & Folke, C. 1993. Indigenous Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Ambio, 22(2/3) pp. 151-156.

Ingold, T. 2011. Stories against classification: transport, wayfaring and the integration of knowledge. In Being Alive: Essays on movement knowledge and description (pp. 156-179). London: Taylor and Francis.

Puri, Rajindra. 2013. “Transmitting Penan Basketry Knowledge and Practice.” In R. Ellen, S.J. Lycett, and S.E. Johns (eds), Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis, pp. 266–99. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.