Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context?Lessons from the World Heritage Listof the virtual environment of Komodo National Park. Certainly, Komodo National Parkhighlights the disjuncture that exists between the discourse of management (see Pannell1997), with its emphasis upon natural values, biodiversity, habitat conservation, andcollaborative partnerships, and the day-to-day drudgery of cleaning toilets, emptying rubbishbins and controlling the movement of people to and from designated visitor destinations.While some may argue that bridging this discontinuity between discourse and de jourpractices is simply a matter of translation, made possible by more funds and resources, thetruth is that the role of national environmental agencies and international conservationorganisations in managing nature in the new millennium increasingly revolves around imagemanagement and the manipulation of the eco-tourism experience. Like the creation of anIndigenous culture, in order for the nature produced by these forms of political ecology to beperceived as environmental realism, the anthropogenic conditions of its production must beconcealed or back-grounded. As this suggests, the highly mediated ‘naturalisation’ of natureis an overtly political act, which consumes its own agency and motivations.Based on the experience of Komodo National Park, serious questions need to be askedabout the identities of the producers and consumers of this nature. For example, ‘fromwhom’ and ‘for whom’ is TNC ‘saving the last great places on Earth’ (TNC logo). Given thenumerous references in TNC-produced material about the ‘destructive fishing practices’ oflocal people, the answer to the first part of this question is obvious. As Katz points out, TNC“works in partnership with national environmental organisations to block all ‘humaninterference’ with the environment it protects” (1998: 59). In Komodo National Park this lastpoint is evident in TNC’s arguments that the “carrying capacity of the park for permanentpopulation is currently exceeded” and that villagers within the Park should “move to adjacentlarger islands” to restore balance to the Park’s ecosystems (Singleton et al. 2002: 9). Whilethe evidence strongly supports the claim that the preservation efforts of TNC “insistently evictpeople from nature” (loc. cit.), as the example of Komodo National Park illustrates, onlycertain kinds of people are affected. ‘Eco-tourists’ and the ‘nature lovers’ from around theworld who underwrite TNC’s international biodiversity investments are certainly not amongstthose evicted from nature. While some have referred to the development ofenvironmentalism as a form of ‘green imperialism’ (Grove 1995), the kind ofenvironmentalism practiced by TNC today constitutes a modern-day form of mercantilecolonialism, with the self interests and motivations of those involved in this privatecorporation concealed by a feel-good mantle of global green altruism. Notwithstandingcurrent talk of post-colonialism and multiculturalism, as Masao Miyoshi argues, “colonialismis even more active now in the form of transnational corporatism” (1996: 79).This analogy with the likes of the Dutch East India Company, operating in this region somethree hundred years ago, is even more fitting when the nature of TNC’s ‘partnership’ with theGovernment of Indonesia is taken into consideration. The granting of the multi-million dollartourism concession in the Park to TNC’s joint venture company, PT Putri Naga Komodo,enabling this corporation to “develop the Park as an eco-tourism destination and to collectentrance fees” (TNC 2002: 5), aptly illustrates how these ‘partnerships’ serve as gatewaysfor the privatisation of nature. In keeping with the analogy of mercantile colonialism (and thelogic of modern global capitalism), nature, like the sought after resources of the old worldplundered in the past, is regarded as a universal commons 48 . And, as Cordell (1989, 1993)and others have identified (see Ganter 1994), those local people erased by the concept of a‘public space exploited by private interests’ bear the full brunt of the ‘tragedy of thecommons’ (Hardin 1968).As this talk of privatisation and the tragedy of the commons suggests, the issues hererevolve around local ownership, security of tenure, and ‘resource sovereignty’ (Howitt et al.48 Similar ideas about the existence of a universal common underwrite the notion of World Heritage.43