Biodiversity as transcultural discourse

the parameters of policies, authorities and material conditions that have their source outside the reach of immediate local networks. This understanding of local-global re-lationships points to the importance of studying ›the local‹ not only through rural or marginal spaces but also through spaces in which far-reaching decisions are made.

Following the understanding of discourse as »an area of language use expressing a par-ticular standpoint and related to a certain set of institutions« that emphasises some concepts at the expense of others, Peet and Watts are concerned with a more equita-ble distribution of resource risks and benefits, highlighting the »liberatory or emanci-patory potential of current political activity around environment and resources« (1996:

2). In the controversy over biodiversity conservation, political ecology emerged as criticism of the capitalist view arising from an urban-industrial system that constructs biodiversity as a natural resource of information for agricultural and pharmaceutical research in the sense of mere biological raw material. It goes beyond »closing and self-legitimating doctrines«, and opens the society-nature construct to new forms of plural-ism and co-evolution (Gari 2000: 258f.).⁹ Given the uneven distribution of biodiver-sity and the immense potential profits to be made in its exploitation, it has been claimed by scholars such as Myer (1998) that the dominant discourses on the subject deserve further examination.

3.1.2 Biodiversity as transcultural discourse

[N]ature is always constructed by our meaning-giving and discursive processes, so that what we perceive as natural is also cultural and social. (Escobar 1999: 2)

A growing focus on the politics of discourse has raised questions about the way in which nature is conceived and represented in global environmental governance.

Among others, Escobar, who defines discourse as »the process through which social reality inevitably comes into being« (1996: 46), sees biodiversity as »a construction constituting a powerful interface between nature and culture and originating a vast network of sites and actors through which concepts, policies, and ultimately cultures and ecologies are contested and negotiated« (1998: 75). Following this constructivist interpretation, biodiversity does not exist in an absolute sense as an object that science uncovers, but rather as a historically produced discourse that articulates a relation be-tween nature and society in global contexts of science, economies and cultures. The current scientific approach to biodiversity, he asserts elsewhere, »is geared not toward

›theorizing biodiversity‹ per se but towards assessing the significance of biodiversity loss to ecosystem functioning, and to ascertaining the relation between biodiversity

9 According to Rival (2001), the growing importance of political ecology to the study of the interac-tion between society and environment results directly from the impact of global economic forces on the world's tropical rainforest areas, particularly in Central and South America. For a case study from the Americas, see Culture and Global Change. Social Perceptions of Deforestation in the Lacandona Rain Forest in Mexico by Arizpe et al. (1996).

The discursive context 45 and the ›services‹ ecosystems provide« (2006: 243). Others like Redford et al. com-ment: »Biodiversity is a social invention; people are its inventors as a meaningful con-cept« (2006: 237f.). Like few other terms in contemporary ›Western‹ society, Bamford considers biodiversity as an issue that has emerged as »a key symbol of late twentieth century techno-scientific thought« (2002: 36).

By referring to conservation as a science-based activity, Milton (1997) argues that scientific knowledge defines biodiversity and supplies the criteria and the technology measuring it. From a sociological perspective, Peuhkuri and Jokinen remind that glo-bal conservation strategies are principally based on the ecological knowledge of sci-ence. In this process, the scientific community has achieved a central position in defi-ning the nature of environmental issues: »Scientific knowledge is increasingly used as the main source of arguments in environmental debates and policy making« (1999:

134). In spite of all its power, it has been stressed by Berkes (1999) that scientific re-source management is unable to halt the depletion of rere-sources and environmental degradation. In this line of thought as well, Takacs (1996) has undertaken to assess the foundational premises of The Idea of Biodiversity. He has shown that even within con-servation biology there is no coherent understanding of biodiversity and the role and significance of single species in ecosystems. Despite his critical view on strong cons-tructionism, he argues that ideas can act as forces of nature; they can reshape how we view, value and treat nature. His book is about the dialectic between two natures:

nature, the real world that surrounds us, and ›nature‹, how we portray that world. Or, rather, it is about the dialectic between biodiversity, the notional totality of life on this planet, and biodiversity, the term biologists have concocted as an approximation for that totality: a scientized synonym for nature, imbued with the values biologists cherish (1996: 105f.).

Another line of work examines the globalisation of environmental discourse and the new languages and institutional relations of global environmental governance and management. In their analysis of transnational environmental rhetoric, Harré et al.

(1999) critically view the scientific discourse that dominates the global debates, which they demonstrate to be insufficient as a means of understanding many aspects of the environment. They express their concern about monocultural ›Western‹ modes in terms of Greenspeaking and argue in favour of a global exchange of perspectives on the natural environment. That the discursive process of conservation comes along with a new vocabulary has also been stated by Sundberg (1998). She refers to a standardised discourse that becomes most visible in documents produced by international institu-tions. Examples include terms like ›ecosystem‹ or ›natural resources‹ that become ter-minological expressions of the global movement. This is based, according to Escobar (1996), on an economistic approach towards nature that is foreign to many indigenous populations. Elsewhere, he argues that

cultural models of nature are constituted by ensembles of meanings/uses that, while existing in texts of power that increasingly include transnational forces, can neither be reduced to modern con-structions nor be accounted for without some reference to grounds, boundaries, and local culture. They

The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 46

are based on historical, linguistic, and cultural processes that without being isolated from broader his-tories nevertheless retain a certain place-based specificity. Ethnographically, the documentation of these ensembles of meanings/uses should be situated in the larger contexts of power and articulation with other nature regimes and global forces more generally (1999: 11).

As already mentioned, Escobar sees biodiversity, although with concrete biophysical references, as a discourse of recent origin. This discourse fosters a complex network of diverse actors and movements, from international organisations to local communi-ties. Its trans-cultural character is demonstrated by the activities of some of the most powerful environmental NGOs such as the IUCN or the WWF. It has resulted in an institutional apparatus that systematically organises the production of forms of knowl-edge and types of power, linking one to the other through concrete strategies and programmes. International institutions, botanical gardens, universities and research in-stitutes, pharmaceutical companies and the great variety of experts located in each of these sites occupy dominant positions in the network. As they circulate through the network, ›truths‹ are transformed and re-inscribed into other knowledge-power con-stellations. These sites of translations, negotiations and transfers are more than ›local‹

places and defined by processes that take place within such networks, where the boundaries of technoscience and other domains are never stable (Escobar 2006).

Hajer and Fischer (1999) have at the same time questioned the global ›discourse coalition‹ whose key actors are seen to have framed the issues, determined the lan-guage and pre-defined the direction in which solutions are to be sought. In order to be heard, one needs to comply with the terms of this pre-given discourse. The authors try to move beyond the dominant ›techno-managerial‹ discourse and its recommenda-tions by conceptualising it in terms of cultural politics. They emphasise the need to re-turn to an analysis of the broader cultural implications of environmental discourse, termed as »culture of progress«, which is characterised by »an insistent reliance on the idea that problems, once recognized and publicly acknowledged, can be handled by the institutions of science, technology, and management« (1999: 3). In their contribu-tion to the debate on Globalizacontribu-tion and Environmental Governance, Long Martello and Ja-sanoff (2004) are more optimistic that environmental regimes such as the CBD have admitted the need to promote indigenous knowledge and community participation so as to improve people's lives in the developing world. No longer seen as merely victims of the ecological crisis, local populations are instead assumed to hold some part of the solution to the environmental problems the world faces today.

The institutions and processes designed to manage the world system not only accommodate diverse na-tional interests and facilitate cooperation; they help to construct a politics that at once crosses geopoliti-cal borders and transcends them. Forums such as these are creating supranational norms and regula-tions and, in the process, helping to redefine agency, authority, leadership and even citizenship in a new domain of supranational politics. [...] The willingness to seek global solutions to problems of the human environment is one of the big – and as yet only partly told – stories. (2004: 3)

The discursive context 47 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, dis-rupted 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 ›ir-rationality‹ 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 sustain-able development discourse purports to reconcile economic growth and the preserva-tion of the environment without significant adjustments to the market system. This reconciliation is the result of complex discursive operations involving capital, repre-sentations 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). Fol-lowing 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 be-ing a reason for change into a reason for retainbe-ing 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, na-tional and internana-tional restraints« (1993: 149f.). In her view, the erosion of biodiver-sity 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 de-struction in biodiversity-rich areas, by dams, mines and highways financed by institu-tions such as the World Bank for the benefit of transnational corporainstitu-tions and by re-placing diversity-based agricultural and forest systems with monocultures of Green

The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 48

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 insti-tutions 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 assump-tion 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 contin-ued 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 re-distribution of resources). Behind this, there are various key practices of modernity working to further this political-economic dynamic: the dominance of scientific ra-tionality 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.

The discursive context 49

[N]ature is simultaneously semioticised and real. (Roepstorff & Bubandt 2003: 26) The general theoretical trend that emphasises an epistemological deconstruction of central concepts of anthropology also allowed for an increasing pluralism in the aca-demic understanding of nature. In environmental discourse, culture and nature have been conventionally distinguished from each other as if they were two separate realms of reality. An important theme of recent debate in environmental anthropology is the critique of this divide as a dominant element of the ›Western‹ philosophical tradition, which is seen by Descola and Pálsson as »the key foundation of modernist epistemol-ogy« (1996: 12).¹⁰ From this process of reconsideration, it has been argued by scholars interested in theorising nature such as Roepstorff and Bubandt (2003) that nature – very much like culture – emerged as a historical, cultural and social construct with po-litical, moral and emotional associations. The argument here is not that the biophysical environment does not exist. It rather implies that ideas actively shape human percep-tions and uses of nature; their contested definition is thus a matter of great impor-tance (Bryant 2001: 162).

Although the view of science as bias-free and disembodied from the social, politi-cal and economic realms of human existence is still widely held, critics have increas-ingly undermined its perception as a privileged way of producing an objective, reliable and value-free body of ideas. Since it is a social construction of our own society, knowledges as discursive formations are burdened with presuppositions derived from our own culture. This recognition implies that the natural and the social sciences op-erate as systems of meaning within culture and create and transmit cultural concep-tions themselves. In particular, the theoretical dualism inherent in the predominant scientific worldview, in which an intensified dichotomy of reality separates not only culture from nature but likewise, subject from object, mind from body and social sci-ences from natural scisci-ences were questioned by anthropologists after they realised that the nature-culture dichotomy was an inadequate tool to account for the ways in which the people they studied were referring to their respective environments. In discussing the emphasised ›inextricable link‹ of culture and nature, Posey (2000b) has criticised the predominance of scientific values and biological and economic prerogatives inher-ent to the currinher-ent biodiversity discourse. He means the functionalist anthropocinher-entric philosophy underlying science that reduces nature to a mere ›object‹ for human use and exploitation. Similarly, it has been argued by Grenier that international science is reductionist: »It categorizes specialities according to a hierarchy, manages these

com-10 The relationship between culture and nature has been a longstanding topic of philosophical de-bate. To go further into this debate and the development of scientific thinking is beyond the scope in the present context. For this, consider the study Ecology of Knowledge by Wojciechowski (2001), who delineates the development and the nature of ›Western‹ culture with its particular mode of rationality that has been determined to a large extent by cultural framework of the ancient Greeks and by Judeo-Christian hierarchy of values.