The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Revolution in order to create markets for the seed and agro-chemical industries. What at
present exists as the ›global‹, she asserts, is not the democratic ensemble of all local
and national concerns worldwide, but the imposition of a set of interests from a few
nations on a world scale; the most powerful countries control global affairs, based on
their own interests that remain narrow, local and parochial. Equally, the World Bank is
not really a bank that serves the interests of all communities in the world; its decisions
are instead guided by the economic and political power of the donors. Such large institutions
have a transformative effect on the discursive contours of the issues they are
designed to address. By creating certain kinds of subjects they lay the foundation for
their own interventions. In this view, the ›North‹ is the ›globalised local‹. Through its
global reach, it exists in the ›South‹, but the ›South‹, since it has no global reach, only
exists within itself. Accordingly, the ›South‹ can only exist locally, while only the ›North‹
exists globally. The problem of ecology is transformed into a problem of technology,
technology transfer and finance. What is absent from the analysis is that the assumption
that the ›South‹ needs technology and finance from the ›North‹ is a major cause
of the environmental crisis and a major reason for the drain of resources from ›South‹
to ›North‹. Today the language of the environment is itself being appropriated and
made the reason for strengthening ›global‹ institutions and increasing their global
reach. Through a shift from present to future, the ›North‹ gains a new political space
in which to control the ›South‹. ›Global‹ concerns thus create the moral base for
»green imperialism« which implies that the ›global‹ in global reach is »a political, not an
ecological space« (1993: 155).
Although such criticism as expressed by Shiva has always existed, it gained broader
recognition in the 1990s with the faltering of growth in the countries of the ›Third
World‹. Authors such as Hajer and Fischer (1999: 5) have argued that, after all, ›the
ecological crisis‹ is a consequence of capitalism's essential features, such as the continued
reliance on economic growth and the desire to create new markets, as well as its
use of such growth to create space for political interventions (thus avoiding active redistribution
of resources). Behind this, there are various key practices of modernity
working to further this political-economic dynamic: the dominance of scientific rationality
and expert knowledge, the strong reliance on – and belief in – technological
innovation as the agent of progress, the implicit legitimisation of the use of violence
and the central tendency to see nature as an exploitable resource or as an externality.
Another recurring assertion attributes global environmental deterioration to the
dominance of the modern system of knowledge expressed through an instrumental
and reductionist attitude towards nature. The view that the modern interpretation of
the human-nature relationship is based on »the axiom of unlimited human potential
for control or mastery over nature«, as Banuri and Apffel Marglin (1993: 21) criticise,
is widely shared among social scientists and will be further treated in the next section
concerned with the cultural construction of nature.