The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Thus, environmental discourse is not only communication about the environment but
also the process whereby understandings of the environment are constituted through
communication. It implies the view that the concepts and attitudes that we employ in
relating to natural environments have an effect on how these are experienced. The
analysis of environmental discourse, it has been argued by Escobar (1996), may serve
as a basis for elaborating feasible concepts useful to reorient strategies in conservation
practice. This implies that explanations and ways of thinking do not emerge from a
universally shared ›logical‹ order but are ›constructed‹ over time and space. With the
emerging of new forms of political negotiations on a global scale, scholars have been
paying more attention to broadly defined relations of power and difference in interactions
between human societies and their ambient worlds. In doing so, they have challenged
dominant interpretations of the causes of environmental degradation and contested
prevalent prescriptions for responding to such problems. Based on the axiom
that resource management is organised and transmitted through social relations and
that biodiversity conservation is largely a matter of human organisation, it was recognised
that research on problem-solving efforts should take advantage of social theory
and applied studies evolving from anthropological research concerned with environmental
issues. 2
By unravelling recent threads of discussion, two major strands of analysis may be
differentiated analogous to the question of material vs. symbolic interpretations of social
phenomena that lie at the heart of philosophical debates currently coursing in the social
sciences: an essentialist approach that emphasises the biological aspects and universal
values of nature and a constructivist one, which reflects a growing belief that nature is
socially constructed, as argued by the authors cited above. As a form of idealism, constructivism
implies that external contexts such as ›reality‹ only have meaning in terms
of being socially constructed through human agency (Dilley 1999: 30). This proposition
holds that social reality is not a social fact in its own right but is something produced
and communicated, its meaning derived in and through these systems of communication.
Just as most anthropologists position themselves somewhere between the
extremes of materialism and idealism, most studies in environmental anthropology fall
between the two positions, recognising that an integrated analysis must consider the
mutual constitution of culture and nature, thus treating environment as an outcome of
combinations of both biological and cultural factors. In consonance with scholars like
Thin, who argues that environmental influences on human behaviour »are never
purely material or ›natural‹, but are always in part cultural since they are mediated by
the culturally determined ways in which they are perceived« (1996: 187), I have also
chosen a way between objectivist and constructivist views. My argument is that both
are a reflection of wider relations of power and since they are also linked to practice, are themselves
important in maintaining power structures (Gardner & Lewis 1996).
2 In common usage, the term ›environment‹ refers to non-human influences on humanity. Like ›nature‹,
it is shorthand for the biophysical context, the natural world in which we live. At the same
time, it refers to human interaction with, and interpretation of, that context (Thin 1996: 185).