Decolonizing Nature

Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era

William (Bill) Adams, Martin Mulligan, William Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136568619
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

British imperialism was almost unparalleled in its historical and geographical reach, leaving a legacy of entrenched social transformation in nations and cultures in every part of the globe. Colonial annexation and government were based on an all-encompassing system that integrated and controlled political, economic, social and ethnic relations, and required a similar annexation and control of natural resources and nature itself. Colonial ideologies were expressed not only in the progressive exploitation of nature but also in the emerging discourses of conservation.

At the start of the 21st century, the conservation of nature is of undiminished importance in post-colonial societies, yet the legacy of colonial thinking endures. What should conservation look like today, and what (indeed, whose) ideas should it be based upon?

Decolonizing Nature explores the influence of the colonial legacy on contemporary conservation and on ideas about the relationships between people, polities and nature in countries and cultures that were once part of the British Empire. It locates the historical development of the theory and practice of conservation - at both the periphery and the centre - firmly within the context of this legacy, and considers its significance today. It highlights the present and future challenges to conservationists of contemporary global neo-colonialism

The contributors to this volume include both academics and conservation practitioners. They provide wide-ranging and insightful perspectives on the need for, and practical ways to achieve new forms of informed ethical engagement between people and nature.

Chapter 1

Introduction

William M Adams and Martin Mulligan

Conservation And Decolonization

At its height, the British Empire was the most impressive example of colonialism ever constructed. Its global reach was unparalleled, its legacy enduring. It transformed political relations, economies, ethnicities and social relations, sometimes quickly and almost everywhere profoundly. It also transformed nature, creating new landscapes, new ecologies and new relations between humans and non-human nature; in the process, it created new ideologies of those relationships (Shiva, 1989).

In time, conservation also struck root in the colonial world, both in colonized territories and in industrializing metropolitan countries in Europe and North America. By the 19th century, ideas about nature, whether as an economic resource that needed conserving and exploiting, or as a precious reservoir of unchanged wildness, were an important element in colonial ideology, at home and abroad. Through the 20th century, those ideas flowered and seeded widely. Conservation became a global concern, the subject of major investment by states, and of urgent concern to growing environmental movements.

At the start of the third millennium, the British Empire has long since been swept away, but colonial conservation ideas remain. In some cases they have changed; but many are remarkably intact. Does decolonization have any significance for conservation? If so, how does conservation thinking and practice need to change to take account of a post-colonial world? Have ideas about nature been allowed to shift, or are they still the subject of some kind of neo-colonial domination by Northern urban environmentalists? What kind of conservation is needed in a post-colonial world? These are among the questions addressed by this book.

Origins of this Book

This book had its genesis in a meeting between the editors at Cambridge in July 1998. Martin Mulligan had already used Bill Adams’ book on conservation in the UK, Future Nature (1996), in teaching a subject related to environmental values and conservation strategies at the University of Western Sydney. He suggested the possibility of working together on a book that would develop some of the themes introduced in Future Nature with reference to both Australian and UK experiences. Having a long-standing interest in the postcolonial experiences of southern Africa, and knowing that Bill was involved in a range of conservation-oriented projects in the region, Martin decided to travel to the UK via Zimbabwe. By the time they met, Martin had gained a taste of ‘wild’ Africa and had spent a couple of days in the carefully manicured gardens of central London, noting in his travel diary that:

…all the monuments to the colonial era make me feel uneasy, more acutely because I have come here from Africa… [I]t strikes me even more strongly that highly structured gardens represent an attempt to control nature by making it into an ornament or trophy, and we have inherited that attitude in Australia… I look forward to visiting a part of England where nature is less subdued.

Reflecting on this ‘enhanced’ culture shock, Martin suggested the title Decolonizing Nature to Bill and we quickly agreed that we should draw on some African experiences, as well as those of Australia and the UK. Instead of simply building on ideas already outlined in Future Nature, we began to explore the common ground and contrasts involved in decolonizing attitudes towards nature in different parts of the old British Empire. The idea was born of seeking contributions to a book from writers and practitioners already engaged in trying to overcome the legacy of colonialism in thinking about nature conservation, or in conservation work.

It is important to stress that we come to this project with an active commitment to conservation. In highlighting a need to rethink conservation strategies, we have no desire to decry the important work of conservation pioneers and the movements they were able to build, or to dismiss conservationists’ present-day aspirations. We take it as self-evident that without the legacy of conservation work that has been built in countries such as the UK, Australia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, there would be little or no basis to work from – no thinking to be rethought. However, we do believe that the current discourse about nature conservation needs to become much more inclusive (particularly of the peoples who were colonized) and more dynamic in the face of complex global socio-political changes. Some of the contributions to this book (see, for example, Chapters 5 and 6 by Magome and Murombedzi on southern Africa; Chapter 9 by Figgis on Australia; or Chapter 11 by Colston on the UK) make it clear that there is broad agreement about the need to rethink conservation strategies, even if the debates about preferred strategies are, not surprisingly, vigorous and sometimes heated. It is also clear that many new strategies are already being implemented and refined. What this book attempts to do is bring to such strategic discussions a much stronger focus on the complex, contradictory and difficult processes of decolonization and, at the same time, create opportunities for a cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences between the UK, Australia and southern Africa. The book seeks both to discuss conservation in these three regions, and also to address more general themes.

Empire and Nature

The importance of empire to the shape of modern conservation cannot be in doubt. British imperialism grew with the emergence of capitalism. As capitalism grew most strongly in Britain, the British Empire came to overshadow the empires of other European powers, and many British scientists were recruited to the service of empire in order to improve the technologies of ‘resource utilization’ and trade (Mackay, 1985). However, alongside this mercantile agenda, the British imperial project also reflected the values of the broader European Enlightenment that had unfolded during the 18th century. Ushering in the Age of Reason, with its direct challenge to religious dogmatism, the European Enlightenment placed faith in the capacity of the rational human mind to order and conquer all – suggesting a superiority of mind over matter and of humans over ‘non-rational’ nature. In its imperialist vision, ‘civilized’ Europe, bearing the torch of reason, had a duty to enlighten the rest of the world, conquering wildness and bringing order and rationality to ‘uncivilized’ peoples and nature. The mission of British colonialism was not only to enrich the imperial metropole, but also, in so doing, to ‘improve’ the world. In the name of the imperial endeavour, peoples and nature were subjected to conquest and control, harnessed and transformed to serve projects of agricultural improvement, industrialization and trade (MacKenzie, 1990a; Grove, 1995; Drayton, 2000).

During the 19th century, European colonialism became intertwined with the international growth of capitalism. By the end of that century, Britain was being challenged in its industrial might and its domination of world trade by both Germany and the US, a recently colonized land whose settlers had achieved independence from Britain a century earlier. At the dawning of the 20th century, Victorian Britain’s faith in bureaucracy as a measure of stability was proving to be cumbersome for the administration of the colonies, and simmering resistance grew into more overt anti-colonial revolts. Although it was a war against Britain by non-British European settlers in southern Africa, the Boer War of 1899–1902 ushered in a century in which direct and indirect forms of colonial rule would be overtly challenged. If the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) marked the height of British imperial power, it also marked the end of one era of colonialism and its replacement with a more complex interplay between neocolonialism and decolonization that continued throughout the 20th century. However, the legacy of 19th-century British colonialism would not simply fade away with the ending of direct and indirect rule from London. If European colonialism had begun in the 17th century with the extraction of ‘surplus’ commodities (such as gold, ivory, skins, spices and slaves), the version of colonialism that was taken furthest by Britain in the 19th century meant that the economies of the colonies were captured and re-ordered to serve the interests of the colonial power. European colonizers had moved from trade to territorial annexation, and they dug in for a long stay.

In some places (for example North America, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand), the Europeans created settler societies. These were stocked with various cadres of European society, from convicts to yeoman farmers, who brought with them an array of diseases and economically productive organisms that formed the basis for ‘neo-Europes’ (Crosby, 1986). In others (for example, West Africa or India) the colonial powers inserted political managers into preexisting, or merely imagined, indigenous governance systems, and exerted control by indirect rule (see, for example, Shenton, 1986). Colonized peoples were variously coerced and taxed into engagement in the formal economy, often as migrant labourers in mines or plantations.

As Val Plumwood explains in Chapter 3, European colonial power came to be based upon a series of separations and exclusions that cast colonized peoples and nature as being outside the ‘ideals’ of ‘civilized’ Europe and, therefore, inferior. The colonized were denied their individuality and diversity and treated as belonging to stereotyped classes; they were both marginalized by, and incorporated within, the colonial project, which was, in turn, driven by an overriding desire for order and control. Increasingly, the biological sciences were recruited to the task of rationalizing nature to make it more amenable to human exploitation. Not surprisingly, the experience of colonialism abroad entrenched the separation between people and nature at home, and further undermined the possibility of diverse development paths within the UK itself. Despite the diversity of colonial experiences, colonialism – a precursor to globalization – created the illusion that a particular model of development could be recreated in all parts of the world, and the powerful (and so often destructive) homogenization of ‘Modernism’ began. As the chain of events initiated by the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 have reminded us so painfully, efforts to impose uniform models of development across natural and cultural diversity have failed to deliver peace and prosperity, or freedom from tension, conflict and insecurity.

The engagements between colonizer and colonized, between metropolitan and peripheral economies, and between modern technology and nature, were not only direct and material, but also discursive. Knowledge of the colonized world, and its increasingly transformed nature, was intrinsic to colonial domination (Pratt, 1992; Drayton, 2000). The production of knowledge was an integral part of the exercise of colonial power (Loomba, 1998). The ‘Orientalist’ discourses of colonialism (Said, 1978; Moore-Gilbert, 1997) took as their subjects both people and nature. Indeed, the two were commonly linked in loosely theorized (and deeply racist) discourses that dismissed as unordered, undisciplined, worthless and uncivilized the ‘wildness’ of exotic and remote peoples and landscapes. For indigenous peoples, colonialism reached ‘into our heads’ (Smith, 1999), and it did the same (with very different implications) for the colonizer: colonization changed the very categories within which nature and society were conceived.

Richard Grove (1995) and other environmental historians (see, for example, Griffiths and Robbins, 1997) have made the point that experiences of colonialism with regard to exploiting nature have been far from uniform, and that an impetus to conserve nature began when colonial authorities grew alarmed at the speed of environmental degradation in colonized lands. Somewhat paradoxically, while ideas about the exploitation of nature moved with the colonizers from the centre to the periphery of old empires, ideas about the conservation of nature circulating in the periphery were brought back to the centre. However, it is important to recognize that both the exploitation of nature in the colonies and the impetus to conserve nature for longer-term human use were a product of the colonial mindset, which was shaped by the interaction between colonial experiences in the centre and periphery. The colonial mindset can only be understood by looking at this interaction; but it was fundamentally rooted in European values, which constructed nature as nothing more than a resource for human use and wildness as a challenge for the rational mind to conquer. As Tom Griffiths (1996) has pointed out, even those settlers who were most enamoured of the flora and fauna in their adopted homelands saw themselves as either hunters or collectors, and wanted to assert their mastery over the wildness that they simultaneously admired and feared, or to collect specimens that could be named and safely deposited in museums. Early colonial ideas about the conservation of nature essentially grew out of a broader desire to ‘tame’ the wild.

Decolonization and Conservation

In terms of direct political control by European powers, colonial rule was finally brought to an end in much of the world in the third quarter of the 20th century, especially as the result of a string of anti-colonial struggles that emerged in former European colonies in the wake of World War II. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, new post-colonial political structures emerged. The end of direct political control might have been expected to open the way for more independent thinking about the relations between society and nature, perhaps based on non-Western traditions and cultural fusions. This did not happen. From the late 19th century onwards, the decolonization process had involved the creation of ‘modern’ nation states that were built, essentially, on European models and traditions, and the deep ideological legacy of colonialism endured. Smith (1999) comments that indigenous people have been subjected to ‘the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out’ (p7).

Modern European colonialism was not monolithic, and the diverse experiences of decolonization were complicated. In parts of the world where European settlement and land occupation was either complete or very extensive (for example, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the US, Canada and South America), direct imperial control by European political powers ended as the settler societies progressively assumed administrative control (in a relatively painless form of decolonization). But such settler societies had established their own, internal, forms of colonialism in order to dominate indigenous minorities (for example, in Australia; see Chapter 4), or profoundly suppressed majorities (as in the case of South Africa or Rhodesia [Zimbabwe] before majority rule). In many settler societies, indigenous peoples were herded into isolated fragments of their former terrain, on ‘reservations’, ‘missions’ or ‘tribal lands’, administered with a complex mix of brute exploitation, paternalistic exhortation and racist disdain. In such contexts decolonization has often been piecemeal and is still far from complete.

As decolonization reached its peak in terms of the political independence of nation states, new forms of trans-national and global colonization – in the form of cultural and economic engagement – began to gather force, accelerating rapidly during the last part of the 20th century. The process of political decolonization was therefore overtaken by globalization and neo-colonialism, making the transition to post-colonial societies complex and messy. Even in the post-colonial era, dominant global development strategies are still rooted in European or Western values, and in familiar ideologies of nature. Through the ‘development decades’ of the third quarter of the 20th century, nature was treated either as the fuel for modernist economic growth, or as something precious, needing absolute preservation. The adoption of the language of ‘sustainable development’ at the end of the 20th century (especially in the 1987 Brundtland Report [World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987] and the outputs of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio) maintained a view of nature as an economic resource, to be managed in ways that yield sustainable economic benefits (Adams, 2001). This may have created new frameworks for ‘natural resource management’, but it did not challenge the colonial legacy of imperial, anthropocentric and utilitarian attitudes towards nature.

In trying to make some sense of the implications for conservation of the complex transition to the post-colonial era, this book focuses on the legacy of colonial mindsets in specific regions that were in the periphery and centre of the former British Empire. This is partly because we felt a need to narrow the focus to parts of the world within which we felt confident we could identify key issues and important contributors to the discussion. However, given the size and power of the British Empire, and the weight in contemporary global affairs of settler societies originally set up by the British (m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Authors
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Nature and the Colonial Mind
• 3. Decolonizing Relationships with Nature
• 4. The ‘Wild’, the Market and the Native: Indigenous People Face New Forms of Global Colonization
• 5. Sharing South African National Parks: Community Land and Conservation in a Democratic South Africa
• 6. Devolving the Expropriation of Nature: The ‘Devolution’ of Wildlife Management in Southern Africa
• 7. Decolonizing Highland Conservation
• 8. Responding to Place in a Post-Colonial Era: An Australian Perspective
• 9. The Changing Face of Nature Conservation: Reflections on the Australian Experience
• 10. When Nature Won’t Stay Still: Conservation, Equilibrium and Control
• 11. Beyond Preservation: The Challenge of Ecological Restoration
• 12. Feet to the Ground in Storied Landscapes: Disrupting the Colonial Legacy with a Poetic Politics
• 13. Conclusions
• Index