Chinnagounder's Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship
240
Chinnagounder's Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship
240Paperback(REPRINT)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253213303 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2001 |
| Edition description: | REPRINT |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chinnagounder's Challenge
The Question of Ecological Citizenship
By Deane Curtin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1999 Deane CurtinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33576-0
CHAPTER 1
Turning South
THE AMERICAN INVENTION OF NATURE
This book began to take shape before dawn on a crowded public bus headed west out of Kathmandu, Nepal. As night gave way to the faint hint of morning light, I began to notice my traveling companions: women with bulging cloth satchels marked out their territory in the aisle in preparation for a long journey; chickens stirred in their cages, waking with the rest of us. As we entered a long series of switchbacks climbing out of the Kathmandu Valley, I noticed children leaning out the windows, suffering queasy stomachs.
Our arrival at the top of the ridge was greeted with the sunrise seeming to explode over the entire Nepali Himalaya. It also meant plunging down another series of switchbacks on the far side of the ridge. As the rear of the bus swung out at each turn dislodging rocks that tumbled into a deep gorge, I noticed the bus seemed to be without brakes. It was a long, harrowing trip: a "six hour" ride turned into twelve.
I had no trouble locating my destination, the Terai, a dense jungle at the southern border of Nepal where the Himalayan plateau falls off into the heat and dust of India. Everyone on the bus had somehow learned where I was going; almost everyone turned to communicate that I had arrived. As I stumbled off the bus, giving thanks that my journey was over, I quickly sensed that something was wrong. Tadi Bazaar was a dust-choked trading village and bus stop miles from anywhere I wanted to be. The "jungle camp" was another two hours by oxcart across dry river beds. After the hours in the bus I decided to walk, covering several miles of cracked earth, a mosaic shaped by the last monsoon rains.
Finally, I arrived at the camp: six canvas tents arranged in a semicircle. Three teenage boys presided as hosts. Still, there was no jungle. After a hasty dinner I asked — in a carefully controlled voice — where I might find the jungle. My hosts slowly pointed west, down a road that disappeared into a dusty haze. Again, I decided to walk.
Looking to my right, I saw one ancient tree, the only vegetation in sight. Straight ahead, the sun was already setting, appearing to set the dusty road ablaze. It was then that I noticed sounds, faint in the distance, the sound of bells: animals returning to the village at night. Then, I heard the sound of human voices — women's voices. At last, the figures of women began to appear out of the sun. First one, then small groups, and eventually many women. Each walked under heavy bundles of neatly bound wood carried aloft on their shoulders.
I had found the jungle.
I realized quickly that I was one reason for the destruction I was witnessing: tourists expect hot meals; some demand hot showers. I also understood why I had seen only boys back at the jungle camp. Gathering firewood is "women's work."
The advertisements for a "jungle camp" were not false, strictly speaking. At one time, the area had been a jungle. Under pressure from foreign conservation groups, the Nepalese government created the nearby Chitwan National Park to attract high-paying foreign tourists. Indigenous people had been relocated to marginal lands on the park's borders to create a "wilderness" within the park. They were now surviving on low budget tourists, like myself, by illegally cutting away at the edges of the receding jungle. There, they risked their lives daily by sneaking tourists into the jungle past King Birendra's royal guards. At the time of my arrival, the guards had recently flown in on military helicopters to check on the king's herd of elephants, which were about to be shipped to zoos around the world.
I later discovered that my experience in the Terai was not unique. Indian sociologist Ramachandra Guha has questioned Project Tiger, an international project designed to save rare tigers at the expense of indigenous people. As Guha has written,
Because India is a long settled and densely populated country in which agrarian populations have a finely balanced relationship with nature, the setting aside of wilderness areas has resulted in the direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich The initial impetus for setting up parks for the tiger and other large mammals such as the rhinoceros and elephant came from two social groups, first, a class of ex-hunters turned conservationists belonging mostly to the declining Indian feudal elite and second, representatives of international agencies, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), seeking to transplant the American system of national parks onto Indian soil. (Guha 1989: 75)
My experience in the Terai along with Guha's reading of recent Indian ecological history raise an unsettling dilemma for us in the first world, for environmentalists and friends of economic "development" alike. What makes sense as a preservation strategy in the first world often has disastrous consequences in the third world. Wilderness preservation may seem logical in sparsely settled areas of North America, but it often benefits neocolonial elites and disenfranchises the poor in the densely populated third world. As Guha implies, well-intentioned environmentalists who do not check their first world biases toward nature conservation typically end up working with the most regressive social forces in third world countries. In defending justice for the environment, they often play unwitting roles in causing gross violations of human justice.
The classic American environmental dispute, one that still shapes our thinking about the environment, occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century over the fate of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California's Yosemite National Park. It pitted John Muir, singer of praise to wilderness, against Gifford Pinchot, who advocated damming the valley to provide a constant water supply to the city of San Francisco. Pinchot was a utilitarian. He believed natural resources must be developed scientifically for human benefit in a democratic society. A populist, he feared the European tradition that reserved access to the environment for the wealthy. Pinchot's academic training was in forestry; he described his profession as "tree farming" (Worster [1977] 1994: 267). To his environmentalist critics, it is severe criticism to say that Pinchot brought an "agricultural mind" to the question of wilderness.
Reflecting Pinchot's utilitarian influence, to this day national forests are overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Congress requires that they are managed to produce the maximum sustainable amount of timber each year. As Pinchot said, "'The purpose of Forestry, then, is to make the forest produce the largest possible amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees'" (quoted in Worster: 267).
Muir, Pinchot's lifelong critic, insisted that nature has value in itself, apart from human uses. It has value even if never experienced by human beings. Muir was instrumental in establishing the national park system, which is run by the Department of the Interior with its own legislative mandate, not the Department of Agriculture. Logging and mining are prohibited in national parks.
Although Pinchot won the battle — the valley was dammed — the shock over this use of one of America's first and greatest national parks has worked in favor of natural preservation in the long term. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which gave the legal definition to the (immigrant) American concept of wilderness. The act makes clear that the need for formally designated wilderness areas was in response to "an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization." Since wilderness is necessary as a brake to the rapid growth of American economic culture, the most famous words of the act come as no surprise: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain" (Wilderness Act 1964: sections 2a and 2c).
From an American perspective, the alternatives Muir and Pinchot represented seem exhaustive: nature either exists as a resource for human use, or it has value in itself, apart from permanent human settlement. In fact, however, the act was a series of political compromises that continue to frustrate efforts to both protect integrated ecosystems and respect cultural integrity. Despite its apparent separation of nature from culture, it also defines wilderness as an "enduring resource" for present and future generations of Americans.
The focus of the act was on scenic value rather than ecological value. Only when it comes to the last of its management goals does it mention that wilderness areas "may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific ... value" (section 2c). Critics of the wilderness system often point out that the arbitrary borders of national parks and officially sanctioned wilderness areas typically are not designed to protect entire ecosystems. The slaughter of bison leaving Yellowstone National Park in search of food during the winter of 1997 is only the latest of many such examples.
In addition to its ambiguous ecological legacy, many Native American critics of the wilderness system contend that it is a neocolonial attempt to enforce the legal separation of tribes from their traditional lands. As with so many American legal and moral traditions, the act represents as universal, definitions of nature and culture that are, in fact, culturally specific reflections of a dominant population.
Given this history, we can understand why the Muir/Pinchot debate looks to Guha like a local dispute, not a debate about global environmental ethics. The debate was an attempt to establish moral limits to economic growth using the most familiar categories of Western moral philosophy: extrinsic and intrinsic value. The utilitarians and their contemporary incarnations, neoclassical economists, attempt to reduce all value to extrinsic value. Immanuel Kant and his heirs in the human and natural rights traditions emphasize intrinsic value as the foundation of all value.
Granted, since moral standing in the Enlightenment tradition was intended to apply almost exclusively to human beings (and then, not to all human beings), the Muir/Pinchot debate does mark an important extension. Nature was often the philosopher's standard example of something that could not have moral standing. However, as Guha points out, the debate over the moral standing of nature is "radical" only as a new direction within the oldest categories in Western moral philosophy.
If we attend carefully to Guha's challenge to American definitions of nature and culture, we will see that neither Pinchot nor Muir allow us to understand the problems environmentalists face in India, and in many other third world countries. The concern Guha highlights is not captured by Pinchot's utilitarian philosophy of wise use for capitalist interests, either as an economic resource for capital development or as a refuge from urban life. It is also not captured by Muir's vaguely Kantian philosophy of separation of nature from (capitalist) culture. Recall that Guha began, "Because India is a long settled and densely populated country in which agrarian populations have a finely balanced relationship with nature." Guha's interest in traditional agriculture as a central ecological problem derives from his overriding interest in how to maintain traditional relationships between nature and human culture, relationships to land that are disrupted when either first world attitude intrudes. For very different reasons, both Pinchot and Muir assume that nature and culture are categorically distinct.
Guha's observation should cause us to question whether the terms of the American debate are truly exhaustive. If we shift from narrow Western perspectives on the environment to a more inclusive set of perspectives, the critical environmental problem is not wilderness preservation in the distinctively American sense, although I do not deny this is a critical issue in many contexts, especially if wilderness preservation really means biodiversity preservation. The critical problems have to do with local reconciliations of culture with nature: biologically diverse agriculture and fishing, traditional access to land and water, and social forestry. The critical environmental issue for the great majority of the world's people is the struggle to maintain traditional relationships to particular places: their ecocommunities.
Close to 80 percent of the world's people do not live in the first world; most lead agrarian lifestyles. Despite our images of its crowded cities, 80 percent of India's population is rural. Most of these people are poor, despite the glowing reports on India's new middle class that regularly appear in the Western press. Unless we are satisfied to project the biases of a small minority of the world's people onto the majority, we need to subject our Western, often urban, industrial assumptions about the relationship of nature and culture to rigorous scrutiny. We need to examine both the first world defense of wilderness, to the extent that it is a reaction to first world economic urbanism, and the idea that nature exists only as a resource. If we want to reconcile environmental justice with justice for the disenfranchised people of the world, we must learn from the daily lives of third world women and their communities as they mediate between nature and human cultures.
THE AMERICAN INVENTION OF CULTURE
Just as we unknowingly project first world definitions of nature onto the third world, so we project first world definitions of culture. Such tensions often boil over at international conferences. The International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, Egypt, September 5-13, 1994) was one such conference.
Conflict over commas and brackets in the so-called Cairo Document, the official document of the conference, was widely reported in the Western press. The press depicted the conference as a showdown between first world liberal feminists, who wanted to secure language guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, and the determination of the Catholic Church to prevent any such language, even at the expense of the conference itself.
Not so widely reported were the objections of third world women to the very terms of this debate. They charged that it falsely polarized the conference, silencing the concerns of women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where population increases shape the daily patterns of women's lives. Despite its title, which promised equal discussion of population and development, the conference tilted toward a one-sided dispute over reproductive rights and contraceptive technology. The broader issues connected to family planning, issues that affect the ability of women to function effectively within their communities — the right to development and environmental and economic justice — went largely unreported.
Indian social and environmental activists, Vandana Shiva and Mira Shiva, were prominent among those who expressed their frustration at being caught in the crossfire between first world liberals and conservatives. They condemned the liberals, whose concern for "individual sexual freedom," as they put it, fostered the image that "women's rights" are "antithetical to the rights of children and women's freedom as based on neglect of the family." "By ignoring the social, economic and family responsibilities that third world women carry, the exclusive focus on 'sexual and reproductive rights' is disempowering, not empowering, for third world women because it makes women appear socially irresponsible" (Shiva and Shiva 1994: 16). In turn, the Shivas argued, the appearance of a vacuum in social responsibility allows conservative forces to press for a "family values" agenda which forces women back into oppressive social structures and makes truly effective family planning choices difficult.
Caught between such forces, technological advances are often turned against women: the "right" to an abortion combined with the increasing availability of prenatal sex testing, for example, often results in disastrous consequences for third world women. Amartya Sen captured the dimensions of this problem when he compared actual female births with "normal" birthrates and found that "more than 100 million women are missing" (Sen 1990). In India alone, the sex ratio of women to men has declined from 972 women per 1,000 men in 1901, to 929 in 1991 (India 1993: 16-17). It is not at all clear that either the right to an abortion, or the church's "family values," significantly help third world women to function effectively within their communities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chinnagounder's Challenge by Deane Curtin. Copyright © 1999 Deane Curtin. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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