The WELL: inkwell.vue.362: Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees

#47: Steve Bjerklie (stevebj) Mon 16 Nov 09 04:09

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:09:00 PST

And on it goes...

November 15, 2009 Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MARASHONI, Kenya * With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya*s honey hunters may soon be homeless.

Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya*s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as *dorobo,* a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world/africa/15kenya.html?th&emc=th [Read entire topic]

#46: Gail Williams (gail) Wed 2 Sep 09 16:17

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:17:00 PDT

Anne, Mark and everybody who posted, thank you for sharing your insights and questions with us here! The two-week conversation is officially finished, but feel free to keep this going at whatever speed you want for as long as you want.

Other places to talk about similar issues are the ongoing WELL conferences on <wildlife.> and <see.> which is a sustainability conference, for those who wish to add them to your regular rounds.

Thanks! [Read entire topic]

#45: Gail Williams (gail) Tue 1 Sep 09 13:08

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:08:00 PDT

Wow, Houma is going to be great for food and music during your research stay! There's another set of advantages to looking at cultural contexts. I'm sure you've read the essay on Louisiana in John McPhee's "Control of Nature," must-read for lower-Mississippi River visitors.

And while we're mentioning books, let's be sure to get a link to your book on your publisher's site in here too: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11679 [Read entire topic]

#44: Steve Bjerklie (stevebj) Tue 1 Sep 09 11:49

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:49:00 PDT

Mark, this has been a terrific conversation, and I wish it could go on as it has for another month or two. In any event, it's been nice, too, to catch up a bit. Good luck on your next endeavor -- and I wait anxiously for the published result. [Read entire topic]

#43: Mark Dowie (markdowie) Tue 1 Sep 09 09:35

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:35:00 PDT

A lot of great commentary in the last few hours, but not much I really disagree with or need to respond to. So let me leave off by correcting an idea I am often accused of harboring.

I have been accused of opposing the preservation of wilderness. I am all for wilderness preservation. I supported the 1963 Wilderness Act when it was passed (at some risk to family relationships)and I still do. But the sentiment I support in the Act is that of preserving existing wilderness, roadless areas that remain pristine and, as the Act says, "untrammeled by man."

I also have no problem with the idea of natural restoration -- attempting to return a trammelled area to a relatively untramelled state. But attempting to turn human-occupied land, particularly land under cultivation, into wilderness is creating an artiface, a theme park of wilderness, which of course is exactly what has become of Yosemite Valley.

I think Ansel Adams was right to resign from the Sierra Club in protest over construction of the Tioga Road, as that road and all others like it end forever the potential for true wilderness. As the reprised Grinnell study recently demonstrated, once you turn wilderness into park you alter permanently the biological character and diversity of the local ecosystem.

So wilderness to wilderness I am all for. Native land to wilderness is artiface. And that's the most polite thing that can be said about evicting native people from traditional homelands in the interest of conservation or wilderness preservation.

What next? I'm headed down to the Bayous south of New Orleans where the Houma people have lived and fished since the mid 17th century. Like so many remote communities around the world the Houma are losing land and livelihood to chaotic climate changes that are overwhelming the impressive adaptive mechanisms they have developed over the centuries.

So I guess you could say I have made a subtle shift in interest from "Conservation Refugees" to "Ecological Refugees." [Read entire topic]

#42: Anne Boyd (nitpicker) Tue 1 Sep 09 08:57

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:57:00 PDT

Mark, we're drawing to a close soon on our discussion here and I want to thank you once again for participating. This book opens up a whole lot of really provocative questions and raises a lot of awareness of issues that I'm sure many people did not have much information about.

My final question to you (once you've struggled with the above!) will be to ask what your next upcoming project(s) are. Will you be researching the issue of conservation refugees further, or are you on to other topics? [Read entire topic]

#41: David Gans (tnf) Mon 31 Aug 09 23:15

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:15:00 PDT

I am very sorry to have been absent form this discussion, friends. I ran into a spot of trouble on the road last week and lost severeal days of reading and work.

Having been deeply affected by the Yosemite chapter of Mark's wonderful book, I got in touch with my friend Stu Levy, a photographer (and physician) who worked closely with Ansel Adams. I post the following with his permission:

I must confess that I haven't read of lot of Muir's original writings and I'm not an environmental history expert, but the historical context he lived in included three hundred years of removing indigenous people from their land, the deforestation of much of the Midwest, such as Minnesota, and the engineering capability of damming Hetch Hetchy. I think that the feared (and eventual) loss of the actual land forms, coupled with the greed of resource based industries (timber, mining) made the creation of sanctuaries of the land a better alternative than their destruction.

I do remember hearing stories of logging of Yosemite Valley floor by the native people before white men came. Their use was most likely sustainable, but they were not blasting huge rock forms out of existence. I do remember hearing about deforestation in the Himalayas and the environmental damage that caused.

What I've read about Anasazi groups in the Four Corners area a thousand years ago hypothesized that over-harvesting of the land used up the water table and perhaps contributed to severe drought years, the need for migrations and the collapse of their cultures.

Re: Ansel - his early photographs were influenced by his predecessors in Yosemite - Watkins, Muybridge and Fiske, as well as by painters such as Bierstadt. There were occasionally people in Ansel's photos of Yosemite, and these can be seen in some of his early publications, but they were neither his greatest photos nor the ones that sold. He did produce a book called Michael and Anna in Yosemite, a photo book of his two children's various adventures living in Yosemite Valley. Ansel's people pictures tended to be more formal portraits as opposed to anything resembling spontaneous or "street" photography. Photos in New Mexico (especially Taos Pueblo) and Manzanar are the two areas where he photographed daily activities. In Carmel, there is currently an Ansel show of his Portraits at the Center for Photographic Arts (closes August 30).

I think Ansel resigned from the board of the Sierra Club when the new Tioga Road was built because he didn't like how the land was being destroyed (again, blasting out rock forms). He did rejoin later.

An analogous failure to preserve land occurred in the late 1950's - early 1960's when the Glen Canyon was flooded by the creation of Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam as part of political deals which set aside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah to "satisfy the conservationists". Again, resource greed trumped any consideration of Native Peoples, much less preserving unique land forms filled with cultural artifacts. A good account of this appears in Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

That's my humble perspective.

Hope all is well.

Stu <http://www.stulevyphoto.com/> [Read entire topic]

#40: Gail Williams (gail) Mon 31 Aug 09 14:48

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:48:00 PDT

Yeah, the choices are not binary, that's for sure. [Read entire topic]

#39: Anne Boyd (nitpicker) Mon 31 Aug 09 13:19

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:19:00 PDT

Well, I think the idea of nature as separate from man, as Mark points out throughout the book, stands in the way of real understanding of the nuances of our relationship with the natural world.

We don't face a binary choice between an unspoiled, untouched, "wilderness" that we can somehow keep under a glass bubble to admire forever, and a totally cultural artifact called a "garden" or a "city" that is not inhabited by any authentic nature. We have, instead, a whole series of negotiations between culture and nature, which are taking place in the furthest "wilderness" just as surely as they're taking place on our street corners.

Here's a quote from William Cronon's essay "The Trouble with Wilderness," which Mark also quotes in his book. It comes after a discussion of a tree in the wilderness and the same tree planted in a garden, where "both trees stand apart from us; both trees share our common world":

"Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the non-human, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others...In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word 'home.' Home, after all...is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what it best in it (and in ourselves) to our children."

I did a project recently where I studied the natural lore of the Tongva (Gabrielino) people who originally inhabited the Los Angeles basin, in an attempt to understand how they related to their landscape and used its natural resources. Although members of this tribe still survive, most of their cultural knowledge was wiped out when their way of life was obliterated by the Spanish missions; the source material that survives is pretty thin and vague, written down second-hand by people who didn't begin to understand the complexity of what they were being told. Europeans didn't hesitate, for instance, to apply the names of plants they knew to the local plants, and so much of the time you can't even tell what native plant is being discussed in the documentation.

People think of the natural condition of Los Angeles as a barren desert, inhospitable to life, but it was once rich and abundant and diverse and supported its human population very well, so well they never developed agriculture, but had a pretty high population density for hunter-gatherers. (Of course many orders of magnitude less than the population density of today's megalopolis, but still.)

It's heartbreaking to think of the knowledge base that was lost when the native culture was wiped out; and worth thinking about on a day like today, when we're all cowering under the massive clouds of another destructive wildfire ... which, my geographer and natural restoration specialist friends remind me, is not reflective of our "natural condition" at all, but of our altered terrain and hydrology, invasive plants, building patterns, history of fire suppression, etc.

Back a few posts ago, Mark quoted an Inuit leader describing a person who understands and uses both traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western science as 'strong like two people.' I suppose the epilogue to Mark's book inspired me to think that traditional ecological knowledge could be a very powerful contributor, not just to the preservation of areas that are already biodiverse and functioning well ecologically, but to the restoration of areas that have been damaged and degraded. And that would be across the whole spectrum of culturally influenced landscapes: in some places, restoring more 'natural' landscapes that have been damaged; in others, reimagining our suburbs and parks and cities and even our own backyards to play a more functional role in larger ecological systems.

I sure do wish that so much of what the Tongva knew had not been lost. Those moving descriptions of traditional ecological knowledge in Mark's book really made me think about those scarce and vague records that I looked at so hard, trying to learn what they were really talking about. Even paving over the Los Angeles Basin isn't as irrevocable an act as losing that knowledge. [Read entire topic]

#38: Gail Williams (gail) Mon 31 Aug 09 12:16

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:16:00 PDT

Anne, when you posted:

>In my field we have a concept called "regenerative design," which is meant to go beyond mere "sustainability."

I remembered a topic on The WELL way back in the early 90s which was called something like "Terraforming planet Earth." It was a great phrase, borrowed from science fiction where some harsh far world would be sculpted, planted and warmed or cooled for human habitation with the use of bacteria, plants, animals and energy. There the term was, oddly applied back onto this place, Terra, that was supposed to be the model environment. There was a lot I liked about the idea of re-greening our own planet as science fiction, but there was also something troubling.

I like the Mojave, and I cringe to see residents try to terraform a little bite of the desert into a slice of midwest suburbia with a lawn. But then again, the Anasazi practiced corn and squash farming where there was water. Humans have been trying to terraform for many thousands of years.

Humans like to apply both sentimental and survival contexts in working the land. It may be the myth of Shangri-La, or the desire for a grassy golf course, or the traditional imperative for more open meadows for grazing lands. Garden-making! So old and so human that it got attributed to God and Eden.

Whatever we do to preserve biodiversity and wild places, we will be balancing those garden-making values, traits and trends with science, demand for land and our current sense of justice. Hopefully we can preserve traditional ways of life and do a better job for all the reasons this book details, but I hope we don't stop trying to give other species besides humans top priority in some habitats. I sure hope you can see some smart choices on the horizon that can keep some of those magical places where people are not primary gardeners, but just visitors. Places where that idea of a garden not touched by the hands of man can still inspire, and the species we might not like as pets or in our garden plots can thrive. [Read entire topic]