The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
and the ›services‹ ecosystems provide« (2006: 243). Others like Redford et al. comment:
»Biodiversity is a social invention; people are its inventors as a meaningful concept«
(2006: 237f.). Like few other terms in contemporary ›Western‹ society, Bamford
considers biodiversity as an issue that has emerged as »a key symbol of late twentieth
century techno-scientific thought« (2002: 36).
By referring to conservation as a science-based activity, Milton (1997) argues that
scientific knowledge defines biodiversity and supplies the criteria and the technology
measuring it. From a sociological perspective, Peuhkuri and Jokinen remind that global
conservation strategies are principally based on the ecological knowledge of science.
In this process, the scientific community has achieved a central position in defining
the nature of environmental issues: »Scientific knowledge is increasingly used as
the main source of arguments in environmental debates and policy making« (1999:
134). In spite of all its power, it has been stressed by Berkes (1999) that scientific resource
management is unable to halt the depletion of resources and environmental
degradation. In this line of thought as well, Takacs (1996) has undertaken to assess the
foundational premises of The Idea of Biodiversity. He has shown that even within conservation
biology there is no coherent understanding of biodiversity and the role and
significance of single species in ecosystems. Despite his critical view on strong constructionism,
he argues that ideas can act as forces of nature; they can reshape how we
view, value and treat nature. His book is about the dialectic between two natures:
nature, the real world that surrounds us, and ›nature‹, how we portray that world. Or, rather, it is
about the dialectic between biodiversity, the notional totality of life on this planet, and biodiversity, the
term biologists have concocted as an approximation for that totality: a scientized synonym for nature,
imbued with the values biologists cherish (1996: 105f.).
Another line of work examines the globalisation of environmental discourse and the
new languages and institutional relations of global environmental governance and
management. In their analysis of transnational environmental rhetoric, Harré et al.
(1999) critically view the scientific discourse that dominates the global debates, which
they demonstrate to be insufficient as a means of understanding many aspects of the
environment. They express their concern about monocultural ›Western‹ modes in
terms of Greenspeaking and argue in favour of a global exchange of perspectives on the
natural environment. That the discursive process of conservation comes along with a
new vocabulary has also been stated by Sundberg (1998). She refers to a standardised
discourse that becomes most visible in documents produced by international institutions.
Examples include terms like ›ecosystem‹ or ›natural resources‹ that become terminological
expressions of the global movement. This is based, according to Escobar
(1996), on an economistic approach towards nature that is foreign to many indigenous
populations. Elsewhere, he argues that
cultural models of nature are constituted by ensembles of meanings/uses that, while existing in contexts
of power that increasingly include transnational forces, can neither be reduced to modern constructions
nor be accounted for without some reference to grounds, boundaries, and local culture. They
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