Conservation: Difference between revisions

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== Current state of conservation ==
== Current state of conservation ==
"Western [conservation] organisations (especially larger NGOs) and governments with the support of well-known celebrities, pursue approaches (in this case both for and against) that play well with sectors of the home audience but which only very rarely feature indigenous voices from the regions directly affected (e.g. McCubbin 2019). The portrayal of other overseas conservation narratives in Western media tend to be similarly biased towards Western commentators, and this bias can extend to the scientists and practitioners who contribute to the public debate. The ‘intrepid naturalist’, ‘explorer’ or ‘explorer-naturalist’ stereotypes prevalent on television, featuring typically lone white men ‘discovering’ nature in far-flung countries, further feeds this biased representation. The overall impression on western audiences is that conservation is the preserve of predominantly ‘white saviours’ from Western nations, regardless of the reality of the situation. ...<Ref>Hart, A. G., Leather, S. R., & Sharma, M. V. (2020). Overseas Conservation Education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 1–6. doi:10.1080/00219266.2020.1739117</Ref>
"Western [conservation] organisations (especially larger NGOs) and governments with the support of well-known celebrities, pursue approaches (in this case both for and against) that play well with sectors of the home audience but which only very rarely feature indigenous voices from the regions directly affected (e.g. McCubbin 2019). The portrayal of other overseas conservation narratives in Western media tend to be similarly biased towards Western commentators, and this bias can extend to the scientists and practitioners who contribute to the public debate. The ‘intrepid naturalist’, ‘explorer’ or ‘explorer-naturalist’ stereotypes prevalent on television, featuring typically lone white men ‘discovering’ nature in far-flung countries, further feeds this biased representation. The overall impression on western audiences is that conservation is the preserve of predominantly ‘white saviours’ from Western nations, regardless of the reality of the situation. ...<Ref>Hart, A. G., Leather, S. R., & Sharma, M. V. (2020). Overseas Conservation Education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 1–6. doi:10.1080/00219266.2020.1739117</Ref>
== Parachute Science ==
<Blockquote>‘Parachute science’ is a term that has been used to describe the practice whereby Western scientists drop into, collect data and leave without training or investing in the region, an approach that ‘cripples conservation’ and is ‘patronising’. Researchers might be carrying out research while on holiday or while teaching on overseas field trips without appropriate permissions and visas and, crucially, without collaboration locally, subsequent sharing of data, dissemination or implementation of any beneficial findings. In a cut-and-dried case of neo-colonialism, ‘parachute scientists’ are benefitting from the resources of a country, and often the efforts of local people, without putting anything back. Much of the overseas conservation science is focused on ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ and it is obvious from the social media pages of many of those involved in overseas research that there is a distinct ‘on holiday being a tourist’ attitude to their field work. Renowned institutions such as the Zoological Society of London whose scientists have worked overseas for many decades, sadly, also sometimes reflect this lack of acknowledgement to the indigenous communities that they work among.<Ref>Hart, A. G., Leather, S. R., & Sharma, M. V. (2020). Overseas Conservation Education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 1–6. doi:10.1080/00219266.2020.1739117</Ref></Blockquote>


= Yellowstone =
= Yellowstone =

Revision as of 23:25, 3 June 2023

"While the concept of Wilderness can be traced back to eighteenth-century European Romanticism, the concept came to the fore during the late nineteenth century, where preserving nature in its so-called wild and ‘natural’ state became the cornerstone of American environmental approaches. Leading advocates and architects of wilderness preservation and the Wilderness Movement in America were the writers and activists John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Emerson and Leopold. In particular, the power of Muir’s emotive and sentimental prose, along with other writers of the time, cannot be underestimated. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, whose manifesto was built on the call to ‘Save the Wilderness’ from the increasing encroachment of infrastructure and industrial tourism. Paradoxically, tourism and the availability of ‘wild nature’ for the masses to enjoy was a driving factor in the political development of the preservationist movement in America."[1]


Western Colonial Origins

The Romantic notions of Wilderness Muir inspired, as pristine and uninhabited spaces, assumes a virgin land before European conquest as well as unacknowledging the thousands of years of impact that pre-Columbian cultures had on the American landscape. This has the effect of valorising a mythical ‘pristine’ Wilderness and removes ownership and agency over the land from indigenous peoples. The Yellowstone model – inscribed with particular cultural politics and moralities that have the potential to violently erase the history of indigenous people from the land, both materially and culturally – was subsequently rolled out on the colonial map. Kruger National Park, the oldest National Park in Africa, was designated in 1898 as part of the broader appropriation of land and natural resources and named after Paul Kruger, an important military figure and statesman in Afrikaner history. Indigenous people living within the boundaries of Kruger National Park were dispossessed and dislocated from their homeland under colonial conservation laws, such as the criminalisation of traditional hunting, wood collection, and cattle grazing on National Park land as part of a wider move to secure the land for tourist and recreational activities. Not only did the expansion of the National Park movement into South Africa dramatically restructure property relations, but it also alienated indigenous people from the historically available resources to support their livelihoods as well as the gradual erosion of traditional knowledge (regarding hunting and grazing). More recently within and beyond academia, indigenous efforts to reclaim territories and rights have been both highly visible and controversial, especially when they come into conflict with state/corporate interests (see Standing Rock). As Neumann (1998) notes, ‘[r]epresentations of a harmonious, untouched space of nature, [which] mask the colonial dislocations and obliterate the history of these dislocations, along with the history of those spaces that existed previously’.[2]


Current state of conservation

"Western [conservation] organisations (especially larger NGOs) and governments with the support of well-known celebrities, pursue approaches (in this case both for and against) that play well with sectors of the home audience but which only very rarely feature indigenous voices from the regions directly affected (e.g. McCubbin 2019). The portrayal of other overseas conservation narratives in Western media tend to be similarly biased towards Western commentators, and this bias can extend to the scientists and practitioners who contribute to the public debate. The ‘intrepid naturalist’, ‘explorer’ or ‘explorer-naturalist’ stereotypes prevalent on television, featuring typically lone white men ‘discovering’ nature in far-flung countries, further feeds this biased representation. The overall impression on western audiences is that conservation is the preserve of predominantly ‘white saviours’ from Western nations, regardless of the reality of the situation. ...[3]

Parachute Science

‘Parachute science’ is a term that has been used to describe the practice whereby Western scientists drop into, collect data and leave without training or investing in the region, an approach that ‘cripples conservation’ and is ‘patronising’. Researchers might be carrying out research while on holiday or while teaching on overseas field trips without appropriate permissions and visas and, crucially, without collaboration locally, subsequent sharing of data, dissemination or implementation of any beneficial findings. In a cut-and-dried case of neo-colonialism, ‘parachute scientists’ are benefitting from the resources of a country, and often the efforts of local people, without putting anything back. Much of the overseas conservation science is focused on ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ and it is obvious from the social media pages of many of those involved in overseas research that there is a distinct ‘on holiday being a tourist’ attitude to their field work. Renowned institutions such as the Zoological Society of London whose scientists have worked overseas for many decades, sadly, also sometimes reflect this lack of acknowledgement to the indigenous communities that they work among.[4]

Yellowstone

"Yellowstone, and what became known as the ‘Yellowstone Model’, was characterised by an exclusionary nature emanating from Euro-American ideas on property rights, colonialism, and Nature. Rather than a move purely to protect an undisturbed wilderness, scholars note that Yellowstone was established with a political concern for establishing federally owned lands in a protectivist move from the private exploitation of land seen under America’s Gilded Age (Germic, 2001). This move was underlined by a profit motive, to create a ‘wilderness experience’ to be enjoyed by American society through tourism and the beginnings of private–federal partnerships that fostered nature-based tourism based on romantic Wilderness imaginaries."[5]


One of the central features of Yellowstone National Park at the time of inception was erasure of the indigenous cultural landscapes, as well as now infamous instances of removal of indigenous Americans themselves . Spence (1999) details the political backdrop of the Park Act, situated among heightened concerns that land be protected against potentially violent indigenous claims of ‘ownership’, which, in Yellowstone’s case, would impact upon and frighten tourists. Consequently, in a move to prevent indigenous Americans entering the Park, a military post was installed at Yellowstone’s western boundary in 1879. In this sense the Wilderness sold to tourists through the imagery of Yellowstone as a pristine and uninhabited space of nature is a politicised imaginary that erases the historical presence of indigenous people on such land for centuries prior to European colonisation. Consequently, wilderness preservation narratives within the National Park Model have the potential to negate the association of (indigenous) people from the landscape. Indeed, beyond Yellowstone, attempts to own, protect, and preserve wilderness have often been accompanied by historical exclusion and dispossession from the land of indigenous people and accompanied by the profit motivation for nature-based tourism, recreation, and resource management.[6]


Western Study-Abroad Programs

Sources

  1. ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
  2. ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
  3. ↑ Hart, A. G., Leather, S. R., & Sharma, M. V. (2020). Overseas Conservation Education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 1–6. doi:10.1080/00219266.2020.1739117
  4. ↑ Hart, A. G., Leather, S. R., & Sharma, M. V. (2020). Overseas Conservation Education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 1–6. doi:10.1080/00219266.2020.1739117
  5. ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
  6. ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
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