Bush Base, Forest Farm

Culture, Environment, and Development

Elisabeth Croll, David Parkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134919550
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Taking a unique anthropological apprach, Bush Base: Forest Farm explores the management of resources in third would development programmes. The contributors, all distinguished anthropologists with practical experience of development projects, focus on the role of human cultural imagination in the use of environmental resources. They challenge the traditional sharp distinction between human settlement and natual environment (farm or camp, forest or bush), and argue that development programmes should place at their centre an appreciation of people's cosmologies and cultural understandings.

Part I
Bush base: forest farm

1 Anthropology, the environment and development

Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin

As concepts, the environment and development together presuppose an interest in the management of natural resources. Anthropology adds to this a concern with the ways in which peoples bring their cultural imaginations to bear on the utility of such resources. Here, the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings often appears paradoxical. Humans create and exercise understanding and agency on their world around them, yet operate within a web of perceptions, beliefs and myths which portray persons and their environments as constituted in each other, with neither permanently privileged over the other. This anthropological vista thus links an earlier interest in indigenous classification of the ecological and economic with the interpretive construction by people of themselves in their environment.

Whether with regard to questions of immediate subsistence or in the name of development, anthropological approaches suggest that environmental transformations can no longer be seen as problems of human activity in relation to non-human physical surroundings. Instead anthropologists question the conventional oppositions between human and non-human agency, or between person and environment, with the result that persons and their changing environments are regarded as part of each other, and as reciprocally inscribed in cosmological ideas and cultural understanding. Overall, this study attacks the sharp dichotomy of human settlement (base or farm) and external ‘natural’ environment (bush, forest), arguing from African and Asian case studies that most peoples do ascribe a sometimes capricious agency to their environment which they are obliged to interpret and negotiate, and that they commonly regard themselves as inseparably part of it: the forest is the people, in the same way that the ancestors are, in a sense, extensions of the living.

The anthropological emphasis on people’s local knowledge and use of their environments, based often on years of painstaking observation carried out in the people’s language, provides a perspective that few other disciplines can match. Ethnographies abound in latticed descriptions and analyses of the management of local resources. The anthropological perspective, however, may not seem at first to be addressing environmental issues at all. These are approached, as it were, from the shadows: through ritual, beliefs in spirits and holy sites, ideas of human birth and regeneration, the common origins of mankind and animals, the consubstantiality of human and plant life, the characterization of ‘natural’ hazards as the wages of sin or the work of malicious non-human forces, or of rain and fertility as the reward of just behaviour or divine beneficence. Anthropologists, then, are not just concerned with technical or ecological questions, but with the construction of knowledge and the power and pressures behind choices and decisions regarding peoples’ cultural and physical environments, and with the ways in which these environments ‘speak back’ either through people or independently. Currently, the increasing interest in the environment generally and also in the specificity of local environments has created and highlighted the potential contributions of anthropologists to our understanding of environment and development issues.

During the past decade, growing awareness and concern with the natural environment has led to the view that environmental issues, choices and problems are popular, political and academic issues of worldwide import. The United Nations has published several seminal reports and convened a series of international meetings on the environment. The World Bank now has an environmental unit; the media have environmental pages or weeks, and universities new and proposed centres for the study of the environment. Much of this concern has focused on the unprecedented demands on land, water, forest and other natural resources. Particular attention has been directed towards the repercussions for the natural resources and the environment of such activities as: the clearing of bush and forest lands, farming marginal lands, intensifying cultivation or herding in the interests of productivity, the effects of irrigation systems and the construction of reservoirs and the redistribution of populations and creation of new settlements, and pollution and the depletion of firewood and other fuels. Most countries face serious economic pressures, both international and domestic, to over-exploit their environmental resource base, and already this is a source of political unrest and international tension. The dimensions of the problem are now considered so acute that it is fashionable to refer to environmental stress, an environmental crisis or even environmental survival.

The environmental stresses or crises were exacerbated by the economic trends of the early 1980s when falling commodity prices, debilitating burdens of debt, high interest rates and declining financial flows and reductions in aid were all seen to force poor countries to produce more raw materials (minerals, woods crops) to expand the production of agricultural goods and generally overtax the environment. No country it seems is exempt from the problems of depletion, degradation and deterioration, but the developing countries are most at risk as they continue to over-exploit their soils, over-graze fragile grasslands and cut dwindling forest stocks to export more in order to service debts and finance the inputs needed for recovery. Overusing environmental resources in order to survive, the poor further deplete their environment, in turn further exacerbating the difficulties of managing an impoverished resource base. The cycles and downward spirals set in motion by economic factors focus sharply the inseparable links between environmental issues and development.

The term ‘development’ has been in use for many decades, evoking powerful images signifying progress, aspirations, ideals, promises or plans which in common addressed a desire for social, political and economic betterment. So all-embracing were the meanings attributed to the term that there was and is little common agreement as to its specific meaning. Over the past few decades the changes in definition might be summarized by the following sequence: as economic growth, as modernization, as distributive justice and as socio-economic transformation. In more recent years development has been further redefined to take account of its erosion of environmental resources. Like the environment, development, too, can now be said to have its own downward spiral, i.e. the very resources on which it is based are increasingly at risk from the existing management practices and environmental exploitation presently undertaken in its name.

Agriculture, forestry, energy production and mining generate at least half of the gross national product of many developing countries and the capacities of their natural resources very much underlie the maintenance and growth of these economies. They now face enormous pressure to over-exploit their resource base both for continuing growth and development and for sustenance and survival. However, previous concern centred mainly on the negative repercussions of the process of development for the environment. Now it is increasingly recognized that, in turn, environmental deterioration can undermine economic development. Today there is equal concern about the ways in which environmental degradation can slow, halt or reverse economic development. In many regions investigation and documentation reveals how environmental degradation is eroding the resource base of the potential for further development. Presently, much of development aid aims at replenishing the resource base rather than or as a prerequisite to generating new economic activities. That is, the very process of development itself cannot subsist upon a deteriorating environmental resource base; the environment cannot be protected when development ignores the costs of environment destruction and the necessity of replenishment and enhancement.

These increasingly explicit links between economic development and environmental stress prompted the United Nations General Assembly in 1983 to appoint a World Commission on Environment and Development. Its aim was to re-examine the critical environment and development issues and to propose long-term strategies for achieving sustainable development that takes account of the interrelationships between people, resources, environment and development. The resulting Brundtland Report was important in that it officially acknowledged and expanded on the linkages between development and the environment and provided international legitimacy and popular currency for the term ‘sustainability’. The Report focused on one central theme: that the failure to manage the environment and sustain development threatened both. Many present development trends degrade the environment and leave more persons poor and vulnerable to its vicissitudes. It also highlighted the linkages between poverty, inequality and ecological degradation and thus in the interests of both the environment and the poor advocated and popularized the term sustainable development.

Sustainable development is both economic and ecological in focus. It does not reject the notion of economic growth but advocates that is based on policies that sustain and expand the environmental resource base. Economies, it is argued, may grow, but should remain firmly attached to their ecological roots, which should be continuously nurtured, protected and replenished so that they support future long-term growth. Within this context, the Brundtland Report, which assumes the condition of economic growth and the possibility that production processes would constantly be modernized, has been the subject of a number of critiques (Court 1990). These critiques are primarily directed at its conception of development based on economic growth, itself based on the exploitation of limited capital tied up in natural resources, and it is this very conception which causes environmental destruction. In this primary sense ‘sustainability’ may not only be endangered by ecologically unwise agricultural practices but also by all agriculture. It follows that production must not degrade resources beyond the point of renewal.

A second important critique is that local populations should share fully in available power and be permitted uncontrolled access to their own natural resources while continuing to live within their own cultural and social contexts. As Chambers pointed out ‘the environment and development are means, not ends in themselves. The environment and development are for people, not people for environment and development’ (1986:7). He argued for an emphasis on ‘sustainable livelihood’ which enabled causal connections to be made between development and livelihood and between environment and livelihood. The new interest in the way that environmental issues are constructed socially both before and during development had increasingly highlighted the relevance of the experiences of indigenous peoples in ‘managing their environment’. Thus, there has been an increasingly important body of work which draws attention to the management of ecosystems, especially agro-ecosystems, by those immediately dependent on their environmental resources—and the disregard, devaluation or ignorance of this experience and local knowledge by those practising environmental management in the name of development. These chapters take cognisance of a number of these studies.

Many of the post-Brundtland Report studies have also focused on two major, relevant areas frequently omitted in the debates about environment and development. The first is the relevance of the framework of global economic relations for the study of and protection of the environment. For instance, Redclift (1984; 1987) has argued that the investigation of the international economic and political forces behind unsustainable practices has received little attention. That is, the very linkage between development and global politics and economics is detrimental to the environment: ‘the problems of initiating sustainable development alternatives are frequently undermined by the pursuit of illusory, and detrimental policies, whose origin lies in the North and in the relationship that is maintained between North and South’ (1987:22).

Second is the relation between person and environment which rejects the previous ways in which the ‘environment’ was usually regarded as located outside ourselves, as a space inhabited. It was the bounded quality of the environment wich was seen as its defining characteristic. Radical ecologists are among those who have taken a renewed interest in people’s relation with nature, and for them the solution lies in rejecting previous codes for reading nature, instead pursuing a more spiritual version of ecology, a kind of pantheism in which moral and practical cues are taken from the environment. Such views do not appear to have gained wide currency, but as Redclift (1987) has argued, they are potentially elements in a new discourse which is more holistic and incorporates a cross-cultural approach. Examining another culture’s concept of the environment and sustainability is a logical consequence of considering development and the environment as an integrated process based upon conceptual integration. In a social and cultural construction of the environment, it is not only a part of nature but also a part of culture which by implication argues for a recognition of cultural diversity.

If anthropologists (beginning with Daryll Ford who intriguingly invited speculation on the material and cosmic worlds as each informing the other in African Worlds (1954) have long argued that the environment and cosmos are inseparable, they have been much slower to incorporate the phenomenon of development into their analytical frameworks. In retrospect, what would Forde and his colleagues have made of this addition? It is one thing to describe statically or cyclically the role of myth, rite and belief in the shaping of land use and understanding but quite another to include also the influence of a new epistemology premissed on changing society through the role and methods of outside specialists. In the modern world, however, it can be argued that development has joined religion as an ideological force of global significance. It does not just refer to methods and plans about how to get things done, but entails moral prescriptions, various collective enthusiasms, different and competing hierarchies of adherents and an overriding assumption that human betterment is society’s primary essence, that for which it exists and by which it justifies itself. The Durkheimian parallel can be elaborated indefinitely. The analogy at least serves to remind anthropologists that, to some degree, development is as much a fact of everyday life for most peoples of the world as the other kinds of overarching frameworks of assumption and action. It is not peripheral, to be interrogated by those not carried along by the mainstream (a false idea in itself), but is intertwined with the many other discourses which pattern the anthropological object.

The concept of sustainable development not only provides a framework for the integration of environmental policies and development strategies, but is also a new opportunity for anthropologists to contribute their skills and insights. The concept also embraces and is premissed on many core assumptions of anthropological interest and analysis such as order, agency, time, space, classification and the deployment of power and knowledge (Fardon 1985). The very notion of sustainability is predicated on perceptions of time, aiming to meet the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations. Moreover, conceptions of such needs are perceived to be socially and culturally determined. In deploying the broadest possible definitions of development, the concept of sustainable development incorporates both the material and non-material into a new and holistic conceptual ordering, simultaneously recognizing that there can be no fixed or single order. The Brundtland Report stresses that it is perceived as a process of change in which the ‘utilisation of resources, the direction of investment, the orientation of technical development and institutional change are all in harmony’ but also emphasizes that harmony is not perceived as a fixed state, but rather a process of change punctuated by the unplanned, unforeseen and unexpected. Moreover, there can be no single order or blueprint for sustainable development, given the wide cultural variations in ecological, economic and social perceptions and practices.

Finally, international, national and popular bodies increasingly recognized that the achievement of sustainable development rests on the exercise of political agency or will. The Brundtland Report argues that it is the distribution of power and influence which lies ‘at the heart of most environmental and development challenges’. Indeed, it reiterated that many problems of resource depletion and environmental stress arise from disparities in economic and political power so that sustainable development is conceived not so much to be about natural resources of the physical environment as about issues of control, power, participation and self-determination. Today, it is not so much that environmental difficulties are new, but that previous conceptions of development tended to simplify ecological systems, reduce the diversity of species and strategies and ignore cultural variations in ecological conditions, perception and concepts. These are only beginning to be understood in their complexity and diversity. At the centre lies the difficult, negotiable and contested relationship between person and environment, and crucially, anthropological perspectives on cultural understandings of the environment.

REFERENCES

Brundtland, G. et al. (1987) Our Common Future: World Commission on Environment and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chambers, R. (1986) Sustainable Livelihoods, Mimeo, University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies.

de la Court, T. (1990) Beyond Brundtland, Green Development in the 1990s, London: Zed Press.

Fardon, R. (1985) Power and Knowledge, Anthropological and Sociological Approaches, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Forde, D. (ed.) (1954) African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples, London: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1984 .

Redclift, M. (1984) Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green Alternatives, London: Methuen.

—— (1987) Sustainable Development, Exploring the Contradictions, London: Routledge.

2 Cultural understandings of the environment

Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin

A WORKING ENVIRONMENT

An old man weaving mats and baskets in front of his house in Giriama country in Kenya dismissed the idea that this was work. This and similar activities, such as growing tobacco, keeping goats, and trapping small animals, he regarded as spare-time activities fitted in with more important tasks such as attending meetings, advising younger people and tending ancestral shrines. Real work, for him (as for everyone else), was urban salaried work or entrepreneurial farming, and then subsistence farming. An elderly Chinese grandmother modestly described herself as too old to work now ‘only able to do her bit by cooking the meals, taking care o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Bush base: forest farm
• Part II Ecocosmologies
• Part III Changing to order
• Name Index
• Subject index