Culture and Conservation

Beyond Anthropocentrism

Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Helen Kopnina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317937289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Today, there is growing interest in conservation and anthropologists have an important role to play in helping conservation succeed for the sake of humanity and for the sake of other species. Equally important, however, is the fact that we, as the species that causes extinctions, have a moral responsibility to those whose evolutionary unfolding and very future we threaten.

This volume is an examination of the relationship between conservation and the social sciences, particularly anthropology. It calls for increased collaboration between anthropologists, conservationists and environmental scientists, and advocates for a shift towards an environmentally focused perspective that embraces not only cultural values and human rights, but also the intrinsic value and rights to life of nonhuman species. This book demonstrates that cultural and biological diversity are intimately interlinked, and equally threatened by the industrialism that endangers the planet's life-giving processes. The consideration of ecological data, as well as an expansion of ethics that embraces more than one species, is essential to a well-rounded understanding of the connections between human behavior and environmental wellbeing.

This book gives students and researchers in anthropology, conservation, environmental ethics and across the social sciences an invaluable insight into how innovative and intensive new interdisciplinary approaches, questions, ethics and subject pools can close the gap between culture and conservation.

1 Exploring human–nature dualism and the history of the environment in anthropology

Introduction

The separation of humans and nature is a historic debate in the social sciences. This debate involves the degree to which humans should be considered distinct from the natural world and the differences between Western and non-western worldviews. These distinctions are often generalized in efforts to divide or unite the two realms on various socioeconomic, spiritual, or ideological bases. Here we shall explore the roots and repercussions of dualism in perceptions of humans and nature. We begin with a background discussion of the philosophies and ideologies that underlie these dualistic perceptions. We will touch upon the ways in which the anthropocentric interpretation of Judeo-Christian philosophy, for instance, has influenced many of the social sciences and fed the dualistic tradition. Our goal here is not to argue the fallacy of distinguishing between culture and the environment, but rather to underline the dangerous effects and implications of an anthropocentric, hierarchical division between humans and nature, in which social justice and human entitlement are persistently prioritized over ecological justice, or justice for all species. We shall then discuss the ways in which the history of environmental anthropology has been influenced by hierarchical, dualistic thinking, laying the groundwork for our discussion of the ramifications of the constructivist argument that the environment should not be protected or conserved, but rather used as individual cultures see fit.

Human–nature dualism and conservation

As we touched upon in the Introduction, some social scientists have argued that human–nature dualism creates a false dichotomy between humans and nature that is not helpful to modern wildlife conservation, which should aim to balance the needs of people with the conservation of nature (Ingold and Palsson 2013). According to this philosophy, human–nature dualism and the distinction between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism needs to be avoided in order to emphasize their inherent connection to one another. From our perspective, however, it may not be dualism, itself, that is problematic – after all, humans can be seen as separate from ‘nature’ in the same way that any living organism or member of certain species can be seen as separate from its environment. The problem, we believe, lay in the fact that there is a strong correlation between diminished care for environment and hierarchical dualism between humans and nature. As also discussed in the Introduction, anthropocentrism is based on the belief that humans are superior to other life forms, in which the value of nonhumans is less about intrinsic worth and more about utility. Thus while dualism can benignly imply that humans are seen as separate from nature, when combined with an anthropocentric view of the world, dualisms more commonly express humans as superior life forms with a monopoly on rights – moral rights, rights to life, progress, and so on.

There is a degree of disagreement about where or when this hierarchical view of humans in relation to animals evolved (or indeed, whether anthropocentrism is a universal rather than a historically and culturally variable phenomenon). Some scholars believe that dualism developed as human relationships with animals that were once based on proximity gradually changed to relations based on separateness (Cronon 1995a). Specifically, it has been argued that industrialization and urbanization were responsible for the growing psychological distance between humans and animals (Thomas 1983 and Franklin 1999 in Vining 2003). Related to this, some argue that faith in human superiority and progress has roots in the Enlightenment, when science began to atomize, objectify, and dissect nature (Merchant 2006). Still other authors argue that Western perceptions of the environment are tied into the ideology of colonial and neo-colonial expansion and the associated philosophy of manifest destiny which viewed the conquering of indigenous groups, wilderness, flora and fauna as a God given right of Euro-American settlers.

In regard to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Lynn White (1967) explained dualism as stemming from Western Christianity through which humans were separated from and granted dominion over all other beings. However, not all scholars agree. Ronald Simkins (2014) argues that the Bible actually encourages stewardship of animals, precisely because of the great responsibility to the natural world that God entrusts to people. In closely examining the biblical texts, Simkins challenges a standard interpretation of the Bible as an anthropocentric treatise that has shaped Western dominion over the nonhumans, arguing instead that the anthropocentric interpretation of the Bible came from those believers seeking validation for pre-existing anthropocentric tendencies. He argues that this latter interpretation is based on selective readings of the Bible that emphasize particular passages of God granting Man authority to lord over the Creation. In contrast, Simkins argues, The Book of Job communicates a more humble perspective, that the world is not simply about humans. Simkins thus contends that a close and more holistic reading of Scripture profoundly challenges the anthropocentric dogma. Yet, despite this alternative meaning and/or perhaps because of, its perceived creationist origins, hierarchical dualism between humans and nonhuman species survives. Even today in some debates over stewardship, sustainable development, or resource management, we can detect elements of humankind’s perceived justification for control over the natural world.

Box 1.1 Nature vs. culture in the United States

In large part due to the fertility of American soil, much of America’s agricultural success comes from a developmentalist, expansionist philosophy that continues to characterize the nation, and focuses on increasing consumption and impeding environmental conservation. Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1920) thesis of the American Frontier is considered by many to have been the impetus for the progress-oriented relationship between Americans and their national environment. The Frontier was the unchartered territory of the West, grand and uninhabited, representative of the rugged, unconventional, entrepreneurial man that could endure it and make it part of himself. Turner believed that American traits developed under the impact of Frontier forces and cautioned of what might happen to Americans if the Frontier disappeared. While the theory of the Frontier denotes America’s passion for unadulterated wilderness, it also bespeaks of our desire to control and our capability to destroy the nature that we cherish.

The Frontier drew early Americans inward, confronted them with the challenge of Native American societies, and dared them to make it their own. They did. Although recently debated by Simkins (2014), Lynn White (1967) argues that by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference towards the feelings of natural objects. Settlement of the Western states soon led to the agricultural traditions that have characterized middle America for the last century.

Advanced farming, not unlike urban parks, involves the almost total destruction of the pre-existing natural ecosystem and its replacement by an artificial system with different structural properties and energy transfers (Flibbert 1980). These agricultural systems soon required so much human labour that animals and large inputs of fuels and materials became necessary to run the created system. The difference between the United States and other agricultural nations was the intensity of the agriculture. For instance many regions around the world still depend on labour-intensive, or low energy agriculture that uses a large amount of labour but does not depend on fossil fuels. Economists have long argued, however, that given a choice, human groups will always choose the lowest cost over highest yield (Hardesty 1977: 61). With the early emphasis on agriculture however, Americans had, from the point of view of profit and production, the best of both worlds. Today, American commodity agriculture is heavily subsidized and can depend upon inputs of energy from outside the system to reduce the human labour requirement while still maximizing output (Flibbert 1980: 99). The fact that the system is an inefficient expenditure of energy has never appeared to be a major national concern.

According to Flibbert (1980: 115), two images have dominated the American mindset in regard to the environment and their role in its conservation. People, he argues, are either inheritors of the garden (Eden) or the wilderness (Canaan) – those who have envisioned themselves as inheritors of the garden are motivated by a strong sense of mission (see Cronon 1995b; Merchant 1995; Slater 1995). As custodians, they see their obligation to hold the land in trust, to seek from it both the rewards of labour, as well as spiritual fulfilment. The cultivation of the land not only controls the weeds and pests of the garden but also helps the individual govern the powers of darkness within (Flibbert 1980).

Figure 1.1 Rice field, Mississippi Delta, United States

Source: Photograph © Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet

Those that see as their inheritance, the wilderness, are motivated by a sense of enterprise. Owners prompted by self-interest and a strong sense of personal initiative, have set out to tame the land and transform it into articles of commerce. According to the inheritors of Canaan, nature must be subdued so that natural resources can be converted in human commodities (Flibbert 1980; Cronon 1995b). Captains of industry, their goal has been to transmute the wilderness into a garden (Flibbert 1980; Marris 2011). Flibbert (1980: 115) believes that the simultaneous existence of a garden and a wilderness mentality can best be understood if we see them as extensions of the elements of idealism and materialism in American life – the former a manifestation of the transcendent impulse of destiny seeking, the latter a predilection toward more tangible aspirations and goals.

This poses an appropriate metaphor for Americans’ struggle over environmental management. For although the United States is largely characterized by passionate nationalist sentiments that are tied to naturalistic philosophies, Americans, like citizens of most increasingly urbanized nations, largely make their living detached from the environment. They are thus largely either unaware of the impact of their individual actions on the ecology, or do not even recognize their urban environment to be a category of the natural world worth preserving.

Agricultural advancement in the United States for too long appeared to remove the need for environmental conservation. Furthermore, the extenuating pressures of modernization overshadowed the importance and relevance of the environment in modern America. Bennett (1999: 268) has theorized that conservation emerges as a concept when its achievement is difficult. If this is the case, then perhaps we can rest assured the recent push towards conservation in America will only increase. For America and other complex societies to fend off environmental destruction, however, the pressure to conserve will have to be as great as the pressure to produce and compete. All of the factors that often seem to inhibit conservation (population size, consumption habits, industry, economics, etc.) in complex societies, would then have to be matched by an equally powerful motivator to practice conservation. As we will discuss in Chapter 5, some believe that nothing short of a global market in environmental awareness will solve this dilemma.

Although nature–culture dualism has been so normalized over time that it has become seemingly fundamental to everyday discourse, as well as, to many areas of the ‘natural’ sciences, many theorists, in large part because of anthropological engagement with diverse cultural ways of understanding the world, question its intellectual validity (Strathern 1992; Verdery and Humphrey 2004; Strang 2016). In an effort to counter hierarchically dualistic and anthropocentric tendencies, several researchers provide examples of indigenous worldviews that value animal life on par with or even superior to human life (Anderson 1996; Rose 2014). There is ample evidence that indigenous, non-industrialized societies had profound connections to nature (Caldwell 1990; Chokor 1993; Anderson 2012; McElroy 2013), and anthropologists have noted the inherent veneration of animals in many native religions (Taylor 2005; Sponsel 2013, 2016).

Deborah Bird Rose (2014), for example, discusses the non-anthropocentric traditional culture of the Aborigines of the Simpson Desert in an exploration of an achievement of indistinction. She reminds us that a non-hierarchical stance has often characterized indigenous cultures; and that not all humans have inhabited places according to the asymmetrical binaries familiar to Western populations. Instead of inviting tropes of hardship, overcoming, and conquest – as it might within a Western mindset – a region defying easy inhabitation called forth ‘love and commitment’ on the part of its first human inhabitants. Among the patterns that the First Peoples followed, central was the Rain and its arrival transforming the desert into a blooming, singing, bursting-with-life landscape. The indigenous people, Rose tells us, lived by ‘chasing water’, by a poetics of belonging and mobility, according to the dictates of water’s comings and departures. Thus the indigenous human in this example is not so much decentered, as in the Centre along with everyone and everything else – animals, other people, plants, moving wetlands, and wildly different seasons all shaped by place-based ecologies.

Rose describes this as a place-centred perspective, and expounds upon the masterful way of life that flows from it. Why, might we ask, call this mastery, and thus allude to it as power? To disrupt its received conception as domination, manipulation, or control, through which others are compelled to fit within human-supremacist agendas of use and exploitation? The fact is, that the power of Aboriginal life was sourced from harnessing, deferring to, obeying, and moving with the vast forces attending a universe of life. When humanity places itself outside and above the natural world, however, its constructed distinction and artificial perch offer the illusion of superiority and a transient experience of ‘wealth’ at the expense of others, while what is sacrificed is the very source from which true power flows as abundance, creativity, unexpectedness, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing. False power, on the other hand, breeds alienation and scarcity. ‘Indigenous philosophical ecologies’, to use Rose’s phrase, embody an ethos of restraint which not only lets-be the natural world’s creative rhythms but also draws from those rhythms for the expression of cultural creativity. During times of draught, Rose narrates, when the desert was not visited, songs were sung, stories told, and memories relived. Thus did the desert’s diverse ways materially and spiritually enrich the first people.

In other examples, Eugene Anderson (2011) describes worldviews amongst the Maya and Northwest coast peoples also demonstrating environmentally conscious alternatives to the dualistic Western perspectives. Among the Maya there is no concept equivalent to the opposition of ‘nature’ and ‘people’ or the ‘human’ realm in Western philosophy an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exploring human–nature dualism and the history of the environment in anthropology
• 2 The social construction of nature
• 3 Mainstream conservation and alternative environmentalism
• 4 Communities and conservation
• 5 Debates over incentive-based conservation programmes
• 6 Environmental ethics and rights for human and nonhuman species
• 7 Environmental justice and democratic legitimacy
• 8 Sustaining the unsustainable: debates over development, population, and consumption
• 9 Education for environment’s sake
• 10 Attempting reconciliation and moving forward
• Index