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Stentor Danielson has an interesting post at debitage, Humans Improving the Environment, and Relativism in Practice.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of political ecology that has been produced thus far is the work of James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, who challenge some prevailing notions of environmental degradation in Africa. Along the border between the Sahelian savanna and the tropical rain forests in west Africa, we find numerous patches of forest amid grassland. The prevailing notion among government and development agency personnel was that human activity had destroyed large swaths of forest, turning it into savanna through indiscriminate burning, farming, and overgrazing. They rushed to slap restrictions on the use of the remaining bits of forest, hoping to preserve them from destruction by limiting human activity.See Webs of power: forest loss in Guinea by James Fairhead and Melissa Leach for more detail.Through some careful use of historical sources, Fairhead and Leach found that just the opposite was true. The areas in question were "naturally" pure savanna, and human activity had created the forest patches.
Stentor's focus is on the impact this work had on ecology.
This research launched a major new school of political ecology, superseding the older Marxist-structuralist variety. However, from my perspective the second wave of political ecology focused on the wrong parts of Fairhead and Leach's work. This new school (well represented in The Lie of the Land, edited by Leach and Robin Mearns) was drawn to Fairhead and Leach's analysis of why the powers that be had gotten the story of the African savanna-forest mosaic so wrong. They drew on a variety of constructivist, poststructural, and postmodern theories to critique other prevailing environmental narratives. . .I think it is important to understand why things have gone so wrong since this gives us insight into how to reform the system. Fairhead and Leach seem to have a similar goal.What we need is a philosophy that can recognize how societies might construct accurate answers, thus properly merging constructivist insights about how knowledge is produced with the realist goal of producing accurate knowledge.
This paper examines the contrast between the formulation of problems in development policy, and the perspectives of villagers whose views have been subjugated and everyday activities criminalised, within this formulation. We attempt to identify the conditions in which certain demonstrably false ideas about environmental change have come to acquire validity in policy circles, while others, more correct and espoused by inhabitants, have been excluded from consideration and investigation.Fairhead and Leach point out how the false narrative evolved, beginning with the narrow interests of colonizers in selected exportable resources such as rubber, followed by a series of poor governance and education practices that were also urban based and driven primarily by the needs of those urban people for power, prestige and money. Once that system developed it was self-perpetuating, a classic example of the destructive combination of consensus and the sunk cost fallacy. They were wrong but all in agreement, and so incapable of thinking contrary thoughts that threatened their existence.
. . .the rhetoric of shared environmental crisis, made so apparent in the 1992 UNCED conference in Rio, appeals far more powerfully to local officials than the statements of the villagers supposedly experiencing these problems. This was made evident in the 1993 ‘Journées de l’Environnement’ conference designed to raise awareness of Kissidougou prefecture’s environmental problems, where both the Prefect and Kissidougou’s urban based environmental NGO’s framed their speeches in terms of global concern with biodiversity loss and the common West African struggle against desertification. . .This echoes some of the ideas discussed here previously, most recently in Habitat Management but also a central issue in Ologies and Urgies and Cargo Cults. I could probably list most of the posts here since so many deal with aspects of the failure of paleo-environmentalism, much of which is rooted in the issues Fairhead and Leach identify in Guinea.The emergence of local, urban based environmental NGOs such as Kissidougou’s Friends of Nature Society has also been encouraged by recent donor interest, not only in environmental issues but also in the claimed capacity of NGOs to achieve ‘participatory’ development. In short, presenting a degrading or threatened environment has become an imperative to gain access to donors’ funds. In this respect, our own findings were often considered subversive: threatening to the prefecture’s future financial and development interests, and to the continued employment and material privileges of environmental project administrators and extension workers.
Considering the environment as degrading and threatened is equally crucial to the solvency of state environmental institutions when they do not receive donor support. Since their inception, Francophone West African forestry services have derived revenues from the sale of permits and licences for timber and wildlife exploitation, and fines for what became environmental crimes in breaking state environmental laws. In Guinea, setting bush fires actually carried the death penalty during the 1970s (Law 08/AN/72 of 14 September 1972). Environmental services have been able to gain such revenues only by taking control over the management of natural resources (e.g. fire and trees), and this through deeming villagers to be incapable and destructive resource custodians.
The ideas of that old school are plainly wrong and harmful to the environment. It isn't that better information isn't available to them, it's that truth doesn't fit with their ideologies and they are afraid that their whole constructed edifice will come crashing down if they allow their basic premises to be questioned. That this is harmful to the environment doesn't greatly concern them since they see their loss of power as a far greater problem. That it is unfair to rural populations doesn't concern them since, well, they are rednecks - even if they are black or brown or yellow.
This isn't just a developing world issue. It is the same everywhere. The deep ignorance of urban experts about natural reality coupled with their intellectually dishonest intentions focused more on the maintenance of their perquisites than doing useful ecological management is quite literally destroying the environment. A clear example from Conservation In Practice, Burned, by William deBuys is one of many that could be cited.
Consider for a moment the present condition of the east slope of the Jemez range: the Dome Fire (1996) adjoins the La Mesa Fire (1977), which adjoins the Cerro Grande Fire (2000), which adjoins the Oso Complex Fire (1998). The cumulative effect of these powerful fires, amplified by additional stand-changing burns on the southern slopes of the Jemez in the 1970s, has been to incinerate most of the continuous belt of ponderosa pine that used to wrap around the mountains.The increasingly obvious failure of paleo-environmentalism has become too great to deny. All the talk about the death of environmentalism, as even their urban supporters find it too difficult to ignore the stench, is a symptom of a greater failure of a larger world view. But like failed societies that preceded them they continue to resist change, even when faced with disaster. Like Easter Islanders that persisted in their destructive behaviors rather than risk the double loss of ideology and hard won consensus, paleo-environmentalists continue to prop up the urban-authoritarian approach to environmental management, relying on the advice of educated fools who know their litany well but have no clue how natural systems actually work.Those who feed on irony can fatten here: the lumber-rich pine zone was the most economically valuable ecosystem in the range, and so it received the lion’s share of management attention and resources. In fact, the central goal of a century of intentional forest management in the Jemez Mountains was to protect and enhance the pine zone—yet the result of management has been to destroy it...
Still, Stentor is right that what "we need is a philosophy that can recognize how societies might construct accurate answers, thus properly merging constructivist insights about how knowledge is produced with the realist goal of producing accurate knowledge". We can't escape the need for the educated fools to advise policy makers. But we do need them to be better educated and slightly less foolish so that their advice becomes useful rather than destructive. A lot of sacred cows need a good goosing starting with the realization that rural people have superior knowledge about some of the most important issues. Rather than dismissing their insights because they don't fit with received wisdom, and aren't expressed in ways that fit with the canon, urban experts need to improve the canon to include that knowledge, translate it if need be into the artificial languages they speak.
Update
Another example of false narrative driven by urban myth involves the great plains of the Americas. The dominant deforestation narrative is that the plains were once forested in the ice age and post ice age period before humans arrived, and that humans burned them down to make a hunting park. The prairie and bison biome Eurasians saw when they arrived was a created environment.
This view was supported by analysis of lake sediments that showed large quantities of pine pollen from that era. The deforestation myth was supported. But there was too much pine pollen, a greater percentage than we find in a real pine forest since there are other forest floor species that contribute pollen too. This was ignored since the dominant deforestation narrative was served, just as the data from Guinea was ignored about that biome.
Later work grappled with the broken data, trying to answer the open questions, and found that pine pollen persists well due to a waxy coating while pollen from grasses and forbs does not. Digging in unweathered places revealed that there were few pine trees and that the great plains was a sagebrush grassland in ice age times. The prairie evolved from that grassland, and though there are different species now they are similar grassland species.
The problem noted by Fairhead and Leach is the same one that hampered analysis of the great plains.
We attempt to identify the conditions in which certain demonstrably false ideas about environmental change have come to acquire validity in policy circles, while others, more correct and espoused by inhabitants, have been excluded from consideration and investigation.If we respected the views of native inhabitants we might not be so blinded by our dominant narrative that we fail to do good science. The questionable pollen data coupled with the claims of natives is far more than sufficient cause to dig deeper and resolve those open questions.
Update:
The dominant deforestation myth is a companion for the megafauna extinction myth. Early humans are blamed not only for destroying forests, they are also blamed for the demise of large animals. This myth is being unraveled bit by bit as better evidence is unearthed.
Australia's large prehistoric animals, called megafauna, were as bizarre as anything that lives there today. King of them all was the marsupial lion, a 130-kilogram meat-eater who lived alongside giant kangaroos, huge lizards called goannas, and Diprotodon, which resembled a three-tonne wombat.It's a bit worrisome that a new dominant myth is replacing the old ones. Now climate change is responsible for everything. As many have pointed out we would do well to mature a bit and give up on the myth of single causes. It wasn't human hunters and it wasn't climate change that caused ecological evolution. It was neither, and both and other things as well. Single causes are useful for myths but little else.After the arrival of humans on the continent, at least 45,000 years ago, these weird and wonderful creatures began to die out. Experts blamed the colonizers, arguing that they launched a hunting 'blitzkrieg' that wiped out the megafauna within a few generations.
But the animals may have survived for a lot longer than people thought, argues Judith Field of the University of Sydney, who has analysed fossil remains. Her excavations seem to show that man and beast lived side by side for as long as 15,000 years.
She suspects that as Australia approached the most recent ice age, the growing cold and aridity turned much of the continent into a place where these large animals simply could not survive. Although man probably did hunt the large animals, the fact that they survived for so long argues against the blitzkrieg model, she adds.