Celebrities and Conservation
Last week, our fair department hosted Dan Brockington to speak about “Celebrity and the Environment: Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation.” He certainly sparked some conversations, but I think most people just ended up confused about what his point was. He dryly humiliated a bunch of conservation celebrities (ranging from Harrison Ford to Russ Mittermeier), but his talk never really came together. He refused to say whether he believed having celebrities in the conservation world was good or bad. The story that stuck out for me involved the creation of a park in east Africa, spear-headed by celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone. They touted the initiative in classic conservation terms, “saving nature,” “restoring the wilderness,” etc., etc., but Brockington effectively pointed out that a huge number of people were pushed out of the park, and they in fact had to re-locate lots of species from elsewhere that hadn’t been in the area for many years. So, yeah, conservation can be pretty virtual in that way, though how that’s different from the rest of the world we live in I’m not sure.
I think Brockington’s take-home message (unstated, so I’m just guessing) was that celebrities can only become famous if they satisfy a narrative that “Westerners” desire. So, by interpreting the effective messages in celebrity conservation, we can peel back and see the hidden, ugly truth of conservation desire in Americans. That I guess has to be true, and I’m sure there are racist/colonialist overtones to some work that some fringe conservationists do. But why pick on celebrities in conservation, in particular? Whatever you have to say about celebrities in conservation is true for celebrities pursuing any cause. Moreover, it’s true for how any cause is presented to the public, whether by celebrities or news media. (Sample headline from the anthropology world: “Climate change ‘cultural genocide’ for Aborigines.” That’s not inflammatory, is it? Or playing into our war-like nature?)
I get it: celebrities are vapid, and issues are presented to us in incendiary half-truths. Unfortunately, I don’t think that message is particularly important to anybody in our department. Anybody who spends this much time thinking about conservation should be smart enough to recognize the nuances in our field, as is true with any field that finds itself head-to-head with celebrity culture. It’s as if Brockington had gone to Human Rights Watch with a message of, “What’s with Angelina Jolie and all those babies from Africa, right? Like, how crazy is she? You guys are nuts, and your philosophy is problematic.”
Oh well, I know I sound defensive. It was a very entertaining and engaging talk, but ultimately hard to untangle. Kind of like celebrity intrusion into “the real world.”
(And, for synergy sake, Corey’s posting about celebrities today, too.)
I believe that this post has missed the point of Dan’s talk, and similar recent criticisms of some forms of conservation (e.g. Mark Dowie (2009). Conservation Refugees. MIT Press; Heynman, McCarthy, Prudham and Robbins (2007) Neoliberal Environments. Routledge; Igoe, Brockington and Duffy (2008). Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas. Earthscan. These criticisms are aimed not at ” fringe conservationists”, but past and on-going practices of major conservation organisms.
These issues are complex. And they should be carefully worked out through respectful negotiations in which the rights and entitlements of the peoples who have lived in the conservation targets live, sometimes continuously for a thousand years or more. One of Dan’s concerns (and I haven’t read this book yet – just past ones and familiarity with the issues from being a biodiversity and indigenous peoples negotiator) is that conservation negotiation are not commonly a level playing field. Conservation organizations are not all bad in this, but like many large bureaucracies they have their good sides and bad sides. And up to this day, they have been involved in deals with governments that have resulted in the removal of millions of peoples from their homelands.
The criticism of celebrity conservationists is that they obscure much of the complexity and debates. As boosters of the organizations they work for, their job is to send simple, positive messages about those organizations. Doing so, they are able to generate substantial amounts of capital from wealthy donors and generate support from corporations and business that are arguable culpable in creating some of the conservation problems in the first place. The capital and land holdings of The Nature Conservancy, for example, are greater than many of the developing countries in which they work.
This can generate an enormous imbalance of power. It might be a comfort to some scientists to believe they work above and free from politics, but it is almost always the local people who bear the burden of conservation agendas, and only recently has the idea of benefit sharing been implemented at any meaningful scale. Acknowledging the reality of colonial frontiers, and that indigenous peoples and local communities are not always benign in their impacts on the environment, there is considerable evidence (above) that this is more often not due to traditional practices, but lack of secure land tenure by which land-based peoples are unable to protect themselves against colonists, corporate rural development, and so on. And when traditional subsistence activities have been destroyed through ecological dispossession, and cultures changed through capital schemes that impose capital requirements on traditional societies (e.g. land taxes, health care costs which have to be met through wage labor of trade in ecosystem goods and services), this leads to the harms that conservations have cited as an excuse for conservation.
Whether the Native Title report is inflammatory or not depends on your point of view, I suppose. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948), the definition is as follows:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Interpretation of the whether the climate change impacts on indigenous peoples is genocidal will turn in some measure on the interpretation of “intent” and “deliberately”. But, as in many areas of law, there is still debate on what counts for intent – for example willful ignorance and willful negligence can count as intent in many arguments. One common conservationist argument, for example, is that the Bush Administration had the willful intent of dismantling environmental protection and conservation laws. Carl Pope (Strategic Ignorance, 2006) made the argument that the Bush Administration did a lot of its damage through willful ignorance (if issues are studied, then evidence is generated on which to render opinion – avoidance or delay can then keep policy from being made).
But this seems to be legalistic finery. If you take out the terms, for the moment, related to intent and deliberateness, it’s clear that climate change impacts on indigenous peoples meet some of the criteria of genocide. Genocide doesn’t simply refer to Rwanda-style mass murders. It also speaks of “serious or bodily mental harm” and conditions that bring about “physical destruction in whole or in part”. Climate change is currently, and has greatly expanded potential, of seriously harming indigenous identity and cultural survival. Species range shifts and invasive species, ecological regime shifts, erosion, climate-induced diseases, and so on are not theoretical constructs to be laid into scientific models. They cause significant bodily and mental harm, and destroy the physical basis on which traditional cultures depend.
And deliberateness and intent is in some way moot. The reality is that the urban centers and coastal margins of the world, through their over-demand on the world’s resources, are now transferring the consequences of their consumption on rural communities as a classic externality. There are some serious question on liability (e.g. if greenhouse gases become regulated as a pollutant, at what point can individuals as well as companies be held liable for their direct carbon emissions, and indirect impacts through their carbon footprints?) and personal responsibility here. But for some peoples watching sacred and ceremonial species disappear, and who are increasingly being called upon to bear the conservation burden of protecting what is left, and who’s millennial heritages are being destroyed, “genocide” doen’t seem overdrawn. What is the proper, non-inflammatory response here? Would “ethnocide” be acceptable? A furrowed brow and an expression of sympathy for their troubles? The developed world be be as shamed and horrified by these impacts on ecosystems and peoples as much as Darfur, Rwanda, Kosovo, or any other of the hundreds of barbaric acts of the last century. It seems to me that the failure to be inflamed that is significant part of the problem.
Back to Brockington’s point, I believe that he is complaining about what I call the “zoo syndrome”. In many cities, zoos are a darling of the local media, because they are the source of endless human interest stories during the breeding season, and most citizens want to be boosters of some of their local public works. News organizations are very reluctant to investigate problems in acquisitions, animal care, excessive mortality and other problems that beset many zoos. This charismatic shell around zoos can make it very difficult to critically review and reform zoo practices. This is not to characterize zoos as all bad, just as I don’t paint conservation organizations as all bad. But it is worthwhile to be able to take critical looks at their activities. The conservation movement must also realize it is but one player in the environmental arena, and that is can’t act as if individual and collective rights don’t exist, and needs to be especially careful to protect minority rights in the face of majoritarian economic and political power. Most of the large NGOs arose to fill a public vacuum at a time when many governments didn’t have the capacity or interest. As the scale of conservation and climate change problems increase, many more sectors of the public will be mobilized, and I belief conservationists will need to take a much more respectful and nuanced position that they have taken in the past.
Thanks for your comment. Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but it appears from your comment that you were not actually in attendance at this talk, nor (as you state) read the book about which he was speaking. Taking a critical look at conservation practice is certainly more than worthwhile, even necessary. Unfortunately, the substance of his talk did no such thing.