Imagining a New Wildlife Politics: Conservation Contrarians and the Corporate Elephants in the Room

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Acknowledgments

Notes

Guatemalan law permits the seasonal hunting of game meat in the Reserve's multiple use zone.

Like many of the “conservation contrarians” described in this essay, I grew disillusioned with international biodiversity conservation organizations after devoting many youthful years to their cause. Also like them, I wore as a teenager “Save the [Species]” T-shirts and wrote regular letters to my congressman calling for dolphin-safe tuna labeling and bans on whaling. Seven years of fieldwork in the Maya Biosphere Reserve region of Petén, Guatemala, under the mentorship of the person I identify here with the pseudonym Patricio, taught me that conservation was very much more complex than depicted in the “action alert” newsletters that initially raised my environmental consciousness. In full disclosure, I remain a committed ally of my Guatemalan colleagues who, having separated from Conservation International (CI) in 2002, are trying to forge a less elite and more progressive vision of biodiversity conservation at the intersections of social, agrarian, and environmental sectors. For a history of how diverging visions between the Guatemalan-led field office and the Washington, D.C., headquarters staff led to ProPetén's secession from CI, see Liza Grandia, Silent Spring in the Land of Eternal Spring: The Germination of a Conservation Conflict, 3 Current Conservation 10–13 (2009).

Rosaleen Duffy, Nature Crime: How We’re Getting Conservation Wrong (2010), hereinafter Duffy.

Amelia Hill, Wildlife Conservation Projects Do More Harm Than Good, Says Expert, The Guardian (29 July 2010), hereinafter Hill.

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/09/rosaleen-duffy-nature-cri_n_663746.html (visited 29 June 2011).

Hill, supra note 4.

Kathy MacKinnon, Are We Really Getting Conservation So Badly Wrong?, 9 PLoS Biology, 2 (2011). At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3026713/ (visited 29 June 2011).

See, for example, one recent exchange in a conservation journal between two prolific writers, Jim Igoe, a well-known environmental anthropologist, and Kent Redford, Vice President of Conservation Strategy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which highlights several points of contention between the camps. Jim Igoe, Rereading Conservation Critique: A Response to Redford, 45 Oryx 333–34 (2011), hereinafter Igoe. Kent H. Redford, Misreading the Conservation Landscape, 45 Oryx 324–30 (2011) hereinafter Redford.

Jim Igoe and colleagues recruited several ex-conservation-nonprofit-workers-turned-academics for a 2007 Wenner-Gren workshop on “Disobedient Knowledge” that later resulted in the 2009 special volume of 3 Current Conservation, Jim Igoe, Sian Sullivan, & Dan Brockington, eds.

As Igoe, supra note 8, at 333, emphasizes these “are not distinct communities but [people who] inhabit interconnected networks.” They may also be sequential categories, as many conservation contrarians, like me, were once “true believers” and/or employees of conservation organizations, but became disillusioned by their experiences.

Many of these critiques have been organized into special-themed journal volumes about: capitalism and conservation in 42 Antipode (2010); dispossession and protected areas in 4 Conservation & Society (2006); and communities and conservation in 3 Int’l J. Biodiv. Sci. & Mgmt (2007).

At http://www.facebook.com/JustConservation (visited 3 November 2010).

Jim Igoe & Sian Sullivan, Problematizing Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation: Displaced and Disobedient Knowledge. An Executive Summary for IIED's Sustainable Agriculture, Biodiversity and Livelihoods Program (International Institute for Environment and Development, 2008).

J. Peter Brosius & Lisa M Campbell headlined another special-theme journal with Collaborative Event Ethnography: Conservation and Development Trade-Offs at the Fourth World Conservation Congress, 8 Conservation & Society 245–55 (2010).

For example, see 3 Current Conservation supra note 9 and the Conservation and Human Rights issue of IUCN's journal, 15 Policy Matters (2007).

The listservs of the Social Science Working Group of the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Anthropology and Environment section (E-ANTH) of the American Anthropological Association are recommended.

See, e.g., Charles Zerner, People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation (2000).

Duffy, supra note 3, at 17.

With many flora and fauna being trafficked for ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Chinese cuisine, or luxury products for a new class of Chinese millionaires and billionaires, the emergent demand for wildlife from China seems to be a special case that deserves more systematic attention.

Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy, & Jim Igoe, Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas 134 (2008), hereinafter Nature Unbound.

Duffy, supra note 3, at 6.

This dangerous extension of war analogies in the politics of wildlife management also draws comment in Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, From Sleeping Treaties to the Giddy Insomnia of Global Governance: How International Wildlife Law Makes Headway, 14 J. Int’l Wildlife L. & Pol’y (forthcoming 2012).

Duffy, supra note 3, at 58–59.

Nature Unbound, supra note 18, at 79.

Id. at 79.

Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples (2009).

In 1997, there were 136 trans-frontier parks with 85 more being planned. Nature Unbound , supra note 19, at 165. Because indigenous and tribal peoples often live in frontier regions, they will be disproportionately impacted by parks located along national borders.

Id. at 153.

Another compelling story is that of a Guatemalan cooperative that sold its land in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, under coercive conditions, to the Nature Conservancy, as described in Amilcar R. Corzo Márquez, Vida, Migración, Tragedia, 1 Del. Rev. Latin Am. Stud. (1999) at http://www.udel.edu/LASP/vol1Corzo.html (visited 29 June 2011).

Dowie, supra note 34, at xxiii.

Nature Unbound, supra note 18, at 82.

Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve (2002).

Chapter 2 of Nature Unbound, supra note 24, also presents a nuanced treatment of the history and IUCN classification of protected areas, while nonetheless emphasizing the vital importance of Yellowstone to the mainstream conservation imagination. Readers interested in European variations on this topic might consult two works describing the critical role of botanical gardens in the empire-building process and how local knowledge informed colonial science. See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (1995) and Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (2000).

Id.

See, e.g., Robert H. MacArthur & Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967).

In Nature Unbound, supra note 19, ch. 3, there is an excellent comparison of the uncertainty of various extinction models used by different conservation organizations based on a wide range of estimates of the total species on earth (between 7 and 30 million and only 15,000 to 25,000 taxonomized annually). This is not to deny the extinction crisis, but to show that wildlife management is governed by politics, not by science.

Since the publication of Wolfgang Sachs, Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (1993), many conservation contrarians have analyzed the failures of global environmental management regimes, which use the urgency of the extinction crisis to impose external authority on problems that may be better solved locally.

As Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe show in their analysis of the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA), this IUCN classification system encourages standardization and subtly shapes national conservation policies as state agencies attempt to conform to these guidelines. Notably, the database fails to record human presence in parks. Nature Unbound, supra note 19, at 28.

Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees: When Protecting Nature Means Kicking People out, 6 Orion xxiii (2005). In one of the most widely debated articles ever to appear in Worldwatch Magazine, Chapin calculates that the top three (WWF, TNC, and CI) absorbed half the $1.5 billion available in 2002 for conservation activities. Mac Chapin, A Challenge to Conservationists, 17 Worldwatch Magazine 17–31 (2004).

Half of the annual budgets of large conservation nonprofits go to paying salaries of employees and consultants, creating a “fundraising treadmill,” as well as resentment from field staff about stark pay differentials. Christine MacDonald, Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad (2008) at 58 & 204. Indeed, while at CI, I observed that the lowest ranking secretaries in Washington, D.C., were paid more than the Guatemalan program director who, at one point, supervised more than 100 local employees. Mark Dowie quips that this concentration of human resources in Washington, D.C., leads to “Potomac fever,” i.e., the belief that environmental change can be engineered from headquarters corridors. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (1995).

J. P. Rodríguez et al., Globalization of Conservation: A View from the South, 317 Science 755 (2007), deplore especially the local competition from CI and TNC, which are registered in 18 and 23 countries, respectively. Annette Lees & Suliana Siwatibau, Strategies for Effective and Just Conservation: The Austral Foundation's Review of Conservation in Fiji, 3 Current Conservation 21–23 (2009) discuss the brain drain in Fiji from government agencies to BINGO field offices which effectively control over 90 percent of national funds available for conservation.

These can often result in abrupt paradigm shifts, as I observed over years of fieldwork in Guatemala. For example, after pushing for community-based and certified timber extraction in Guatemala during the 1990s, CI management suddenly began promoting in the early 2000s the idea of “direct conservation” or the payment of “conservation incentives” to get forest communities like Carmelita to halt the management plans that CI foresters themselves had designed.

Lees & Siwatibau, supra note 47, nicely contrast Fijian valuations of biodiversity for food security and cultural and ancestral identity with the Western emphasis on pristine and wild nature.

Robert Fletcher, Neoliberal Environmentality: Towards a Poststructuralist Political Ecology of the Conservation Debate, 8 Conservation & Society 171 (2010).

Dan Brockington & Rosaleen Duffy, Capitalism and Conservation: The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservation, 42 Antipode 469 (2010).

Jim Igoe, Katya Neves, & Dan Brockington, A Spectacular Eco-Tour around the Historic Bloc: Theorising the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion, 42 Antipode 486 (2010), hereinafter Igoe et al.

Janice Alcorn, Big Conservation and Little Conservation: Collaboration in Managing Global and Local Heritage, in Local Heritage in the Changing Tropics: Innovative Strategies for Natural Resource Management and Control 14 (Greg Dicum ed. 1995).

Marcus Colchester, Conservation Policy and Indigenous Peoples, 7 Envtl Sci. & Pol’y 145 (2004).

Alcorn, supra note 47, at 24.

Ileana Gómez & V. Ernesto Méndez, Association of Forest Communities of Petén, Guatemala: Context, Accomplishments and Challenges, PRISMA and CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) (2005).

Reviewed in Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Nicholas S. J. Watts, & Arielle Levine, Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas: Darwin, Marx, and Modern Science in the Search for Patterns That Connect, 13 J. Int’l Wildlife L. & Pol’y 357 (2010).

Nature Unbound, supra note 20, at 1.

The idea has even been extended to “cultural services.” Jim Igoe, Sian Sullivan, & Dan Brockington, Problematising Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, 3(3) Current Conservation 4–7 (2009).

Id. at 5

James D. Nations & Daniel Komer, Rainforests and the Hamburger Society, 24 Environment 12 (1983).

Igoe, Neves, & Brockington, supra note 53; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).

Applying these questions to human resource management in conservation BINGOs, whose pay scales for executive management have skyrocketed in recent years, I would ask whether CI's CEO should earn $449,873 annually while developing country field directors earn less than five percent of this and interns work long hours without stipend or health insurance.

In Nature Unbound, supra note 20, Duffy and her colleagues do offer two very useful indicators of equitable distributions: (1) Do the benefits of a conservation project offset the livelihood losses, especially those associated with population displacement by protected area designations and other conservation interventions? And (2) Are the people who bear the livelihood costs the same as those who benefit from the conservation intervention?

Duffy, supra note 3, at 70.

Nature Unbound, supra note 20, at 111.

Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (1953).

As described by Michael Zara, The Evolution of Corporate Legal Standing in U.S. and International Law: One View of the Doctrine of “Corporate Personality,” 92/923 Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Controlling Processes, Selected Essays 1994–2005 (Laura Nader, ed. 2005). The first of these cases was a bank dispute from Savannah, Georgia, in 1807 which allowed a bank to bring an action to federal court, Bank of the United States v. Deveaux and another in 1817 involved a trustee dispute at Dartmouth College. Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment, by providing an expanded role for the federal government in state affairs like corporate chartering, inadvertently gave momentum to the corporate quest for legal status in several cases involving railroads and western expansion, most notably Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). In part this was because corporations were more frequent users of the courts, and as such, the law drifted in their favor. (For further discussion of this phenomenon, see Laura Nader, The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects [2002]). According to Howard Zinn in an interview for the 2004 documentary film, “The Corporation,” of the 307 cases brought before the court between 1890 and 1910, 288 were instigated by corporations. An important 1986 case involving Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) afforded corporations the rights of psychological persons with free speech, and most recently in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment could not be used to limit corporate funding of political candidates.

For an excellent history of early 20th century corporate capitalism, see David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977).

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (1976).

Noam Chomsky, The Bounds of Thinkable Thought, The Progressive October 1985.

Liza Grandia, Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders (forthcoming, 2012).

For further insights on this topic, see Karl Polanyi's logic of the “double movement” in his magnum opus, The Great Transformation (1944).

Noel Castree, Neoliberalising Nature: The Logics of Deregulation and Reregulation, 40 Env't & Planning A 131 (2008).

Quoted by Dowie, supra note 27, at 208.

In prescribing recipes for success, development practitioners often highlight project content and overlook more important process factors. The art of attuning projects to the processes that created their historical, political, and cultural context is, of course, more difficult to replicate.

Fletcher, supra note 44.

Ramachandra Guha & Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997); Richard Peet & Michael Watts, Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (1996).

Jim Igoe, Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities from East Africa to South Dakota xi (2004).

Nature Unbound, supra note 20.

Dowie, supra note 27, at 246.

Duffy, supra note 3, at 73.

To be sure, there are other conservation NGOs with different leadership, institutional structures, size, financing, and geographic positioning which maintain more adversarial positions toward “big business” and practice more collaborative methodologies with local and indigenous communities affected by protected areas.

Steven E. Sanderson, head of WCS, earned $825,170 in 2006. NRDC head John Adams earned $757,914. NWF hired its long-term director Jay D. Hair from the private sector, and recently TNC recruited Mark Tereck, a former managing director of Goldman Sachs, to its presidency. See also the reporting of scandals over financial favors TNC gave to board members, donors, and to director Steve McCormick, in articles by David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens in the Washington Post (May 4, 5, and 6, 2003).

Fletcher, supra note 44, at 476.

Castree, supra note 68, at 141.

Kenneth Iain MacDonald, The Devil Is in the (Bio)Diversity: Private Sector “Engagement” and the Restructuring of Biodiversity Conservation, 42 Antipode 473 (2011).

In the mid-1990s, a number of conservation BINGOs opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but in 2005 not a single international biodiversity conservation organization took a position on the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), despite concerns that its implementation might undermine the economy of a region that covers less than 1 percent of the world's land mass but is estimated to hold 8 to 10 percent of the planet's species.⁸³ When I asked Kent Redford about the Wildlife Conservation Society's position on the DR-CAFTA prior to its passage, at a lecture he gave at UC Berkeley titled “Has Poverty Alleviation Abducted Conservation?” he replied that his organization “does not engage in policy work.” CI's vice president for conservation and government said, “We don't have a position [on CAFTA].” A World Wildlife Fund representative wrote, “WWF has not been tracking CAFTA either in Central America or in our U.S. office. As a result, we don't have a position on CAFTA…” Nor did TNC take a position even though this trade agreement poses significant threat to biodiversity. For instance, emboldened by a provision in the DR-CAFTA that allows corporations the legal standing to sue governments over future lost profits if local environmental laws inhibit their activities, Harken Energy (on whose board George W. Bush formerly served) threatened Costa Rica with a $58 billion lawsuit (greater than the country's entire GDP of $38 billion) for being denied the right to drill offshore in Costa Rica's protected Talamanca region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For more information, see Grandia, supra note 66.

Since I began monitoring this situation in 2005, approximately two-thirds of CI's board has been composed of corporate representatives, Liza Grandia, Silence Is Beholden: Are Corporations Hog-Tying Conservation Groups in Cafta Fight? The Daily Grist (June 5, 2005). At http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/06/02/grandia-cafta (visited 6 July 2011).

Redford, supra note 8, at 1.

¹ Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change, International Development, Community, and Environment Program, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610, USA. [email protected].