The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
More critically, scholars like Myer (1998) have pronounced that science portrays the
loss of biodiversity as a phenomenon occurring mainly in the ›South‹. Consequently, a
solution for the problem deserves the intervention of international institutions, most
of which are guided by ›Northern‹ interests. As in many dialogues of power, the
dominant discourse is creating problems for which it alone can provide solutions.
Commenting on the complex process of ›internationalisation‹ of the environment,
Escobar writes: »What is problematized is not the sustainability of local cultures and
realities, but rather that of the global ecosystem, ›global‹ being defined according to a
perception of the world shared by those who rule it« (1996: 51). He further criticises:
Ecosystem analysts have discovered the ›degrading‹ activities of the poor, but have seldom recognized
that such problems were rooted in development processes that displaced indigenous communities, disrupted
people's habitats and occupations, and forced many rural societies to increase their pressures on
the environment. Now the poor are admonished not for their lack of industriousness but for their ›irrationality‹
and lack of environmental consciousness. Popular and scholarly texts alike are filled with
representations of dark and poor peasant masses destroying forests and mountainsides with axes and
machetes, thus shifting visibility and blame away from the large industrial polluters in North and
South, and the predatory way of life fostered by capitalism and development, to poor peasants and
›backward‹ practices such as slash-and-burn agriculture (1996: 51).
By arguing against a discursive ›globalocentrism‹, Escobar contends that the sustainable
development discourse purports to reconcile economic growth and the preservation
of the environment without significant adjustments to the market system. This
reconciliation is the result of complex discursive operations involving capital, representations
of nature, management and science. In this context, »nature is reinvented as
environment so that capital, not nature and culture, may be sustained« (1996: 49). Following
his considerations, the discourse may be seen as a »tale that a disenchanted
(modern) world tells itself about its sad condition« (1996: 54).
The perception that there are only ›global‹ environmental problems and thus their
solution can only be ›global‹ has also been questioned by Shiva (1993). In discussing
The Greening of the Global Reach, she examines discursive articulations and looks more
closely at what the concept of the ›global‹ conceals, how it builds relations of power
around environmental issues and how it transforms the environmental crisis from being
a reason for change into a reason for retaining the status quo. She argues that the
›global‹ as it emerged in the debates around the UNCED was not about »universal
humanism« or a »planetary consciousness«, but rather constituted a »political space in
which a particular dominant local seeks global control, and frees itself of local, national
and international restraints« (1993: 149f.). In her view, the erosion of biodiversity
is a domain in which control has been shifted from the ›South‹ to the ›North‹
through its identification as a global problem. It has occurred because of habitat destruction
in biodiversity-rich areas, by dams, mines and highways financed by institutions
such as the World Bank for the benefit of transnational corporations and by replacing
diversity-based agricultural and forest systems with monocultures of Green
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