The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
scape and its non-human inhabitants. In comparison to ›Western‹ societies where religion
is usually relegated to a small part of life, religion, worldview and resource management
strategies are often inseparable in such societies. This occurs in two ways.
First, religion provides overarching moral sanctions and encodes environmental knowledge.
Such sanctions are invoked directly to support conservation and join such
knowledge to the more classically religious issues such as reassurance, social sanctioning
and cosmology. Second, people are emotionally involved with their natural surroundings.
The emotional involvement may reach the level of actually incorporating
natural elements in society. Culture influences human emotions; we are taught how
and when to feel particular emotions. In questioning how people process information
and what the real ends of human action are, he asserts that we use resources to satisfy
not only our needs for food and shelter but also our needs for love and security: »in
conservation as in other moral matters, human beings make sacrifices for what they love, not
for what they regard as merely a rational means to a material end« (1996: 72).
We may expect to find that traditional subsistence-oriented cultures will encode a tremendous amount
of intensely emotional and personal material about animals and plants, and that this material is
highly structured and organized into a simple, memorable worldview that is dramatically highlighted
in myth and ritual. (Anderson 1996: 72)
Consequently, environmental problems and their solutions must be attributed to a
blend of reason and emotion. A moral code based only on emotion or only on practical
reason, Anderson argues further, will not work. To succeed, a moral code must
have something to do with reality, it must be strongly believed. But belief, in this sense,
does not mean dogmatism. In practice, cognition and affect are not separate and
should not be analytically separated. This perception leads him to claim that most social
science theories tend to deal with »highly intellectualised and passionless actors«
and are thus »incomplete« (1996: 155). One major problem for modern resource management
is that urban life decouples most of us from direct experience with ecological
reality, just as overspecialisation decouples from a broad ecological view. Considering
that emotion and value are inseparable, Schroeder proposes to view ecology, commonly
understood as a science that studies relationships between organisms and their
environments, in a broader sense as a »matter of the heart« (1996: 19). By including
humans as an integral part of ecosystems, he continues, more kinds of interaction
must be taken into account. If we want to understand how people are related to their
environments, we need to understand how they experience these environments. These
experiences contribute to the quality of people's lives and lie at the heart of many resource
management issues.
Understanding these experiences is more than just a technical task of social science data collection. It
is also a creative, human process, which requires us to open ourselves to perspectives other than our
own. [...] we need to use our imagination. We need to be able to bend our own view of the world [...].
We need to be willing to experiment, to play around and see what the world might look like and feel
like from different points of view. (Schroeder 1996: 26)