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FRIDAY,
FEBRUARY 29
3:30
- 5:30pm, Saunders 220
SESSION 1:
Political Ecologies of Globalization
Dianne
Rocheleau, Professor of Geography, Clark
University
Segmented
Sustainability and the Undoing of Diverse Ecologies
Rod
Neumann, Associate Professor, Department
of International Relations, Florida International
University
The
EU Biodiversity Narrative: Implications for Theory
and Application
Do human activities improve Nature or diminish it?
Debates on this question in Western science and philosophy
are centuries-old and unresolved. At least since the
publication of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and
Nature, scientific opinion has tilted decidedly toward
a notion of—as Marsh so graphically phrased
it—“man the disturber of Nature’s
harmonies”. Thus the wave of state-based conservation
practices that began in the Americas around the time
of Man and Nature’s 1864 publication and eventually
spread throughout the postcolonial world emphasized
the creation of territorially bounded, fortress-style
protected forests, reserves, and parks. In recent
decades the debate has heated again, fueled by the
emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, chaos
theory, and non-equilibrium ecology. Ideas of wilderness,
primeval Nature, and stable climax communities have
given way to ideas of nature-culture hybrids, socially
produced nature, and second nature. Conservationists
have attacked these new conceptualizations of nature-society
relations as politically dangerous, arguing that such
a view of Nature will help justify ecologically destructive
practices. The European Union, however, has embraced
the new hybridity paradigm in their biodiversity conservation
strategy. According to the European Environmental
Agency, Europe’s current biodiversity is the
product of centuries of human interaction with nature.
“In Europe, more than on any other continent,
the influence of human activity has shaped biodiversity
over time”. Rather than disturbing Nature’s
harmonies, European framing systems are “responsible
for creating and maintaining species-rich semi-natural
grasslands”. Land abandonment resulting from
demographic and socio-economic shifts in rural Europe
is thus “considered detrimental to biodiversity”
(EEA 2004: 2). In this paper I treat the EU’s
biodiversity conservation strategy as a regionally
based environmental narrative, which I refer to as
the EU biodiversity narrative. I begin by contrasting
the EU biodiversity narrative with environmental narratives
(also called environmental orthodoxies or hegemonic
environmental myths) deployed elsewhere in the world,
particularly Africa. I explore the EU’s rural
development policies associated with biodiversity
conservation, again contrasting them with biodiversity
conservation strategies in Africa. I examine the empirical
evidence to substantiate both Europe’s exceptionalism
and the relationship between rural abandonment and
biodiversity loss. I close by speculating on what
the EU biodiversity narrative might mean for theorizing
nature-society relations and for applied biodiversity
conservation in other parts of the world.
SATURDAY,
MARCH 1
9:00 - 11:30pm, FedEx Global Education Center
SESSION 2:
Sustainable Conservation: The Political Ecology of
Saving Nature
Lisa
M. Campbell, Rachel Carson Assistant Professor
of Marine Affairs and Policy, Duke University
Culture
and environment or culture versus environment? Land
use values and conflict in rural North Carolina
In 2006, land use planning and development became
hotly contested in the area known as 'Down East' Carteret
County, North Carolina. At the heart of the conflict
is rapid land use change, as Down East experiences
a transition from a 'working' to 'amenity' landscape.
Concerns about the impacts of this transition led
to the formation of 'Down East Tomorrow' (DET), a
grassroots group dedicated to "to help unite
the communities, give voice to the people, and cultivate
a vision for the future … that allows for economic
improvement without sacrificing the community integrity,
cultural heritage, and environmental quality."
In this paper, I use political ecology to examine
how and why DET's efforts to have Carteret County
implement a 1-year moratorium on development failed.
Using the written record (minutes of meetings, newspaper
articles, and DET communications) associated with
the moratorium, I trace how issues of community, science,
governance, participation, and power played out (and
were played on) over the course of 2006. In particular,
I argue that a focus by both moratorium proponents
and commissioners on water quality ultimately played
a part in the defeat of the moratorium. This outcome
illustrates the difficulties (both practical and philosophical)
of reconciling the cultural, environmental, and economic
values of land in areas of rapid transition. While
political ecology can help in understanding the moratorium
'story', the story can also contribute to our understanding
of political ecology, particularly some of the debates
about whether or not there are distinctions between
a 1st and 3rd world political ecology.
Amity
Doolittle, Program Director, Tropical Resources
Institute, Yale University and Associate Research
Scientist in Conservation and Development, Yale School
of Forestry and Environmental Studies
"Native
land tenure, conservation, and development in a pseudo-democracy:
Sabah, Malaysia"
This article explores the interacting politics of
native customary law, conservation, and rural development
in Sabah, Malaysia. Drawing on the specific details
of native property rights in a rural community and
state conservation and agricultural development initiatives,
this article delves into the inherent contradictions
between the logic of conservation, commercial land
development, and native land tenure regimes. Native
smallholders in Sabah see their customary land tenure
as remnant expressions of local autonomy, which has
not been fully experienced since the advent of colonial
rule at the end of the 19th century. Conversely, state-driven
conservation and development plans, and the ways in
which they adversely affect individuals’ access
to natural resources are viewed by villagers as the
quintessential expression of the power of a centralized
and undemocratic government. By probing at the intersection
of these polarizing practices this article explores
the relationship between the Malaysian state and agriculture-based
villagers from the vantage point of access to and
ownership of land and resources. The article concludes
that Sabah’s ruling elite benefit from the
contradictions between conservation, development,
and native land rights. It is to their advantage to
maintain the status quo since political positions
are not dependent on voter support in Malaysia’s
pseudo-democracy. Native people have tried to resist
state control over their land tenure practices for
over a century through de facto practices that undermine
the intent of state rule. But these smallscale actions
have not resulted in widespread changes. Therefore,
the marginalization of native agriculturalists will
continue until the time comes when Malaysia’s
pseudo-democracy transitions to an authentic democracy
in which the interests of a broader section of society
are a priority for the state.
Gail
Hollander, Associate Professor, Department
of International Relations, Florida International
University
The
Political Economy of Fuel Crops: The Emerging Global
Ethanol Assemblage
From the seventeenth and into the nineteenth century,
sugar “was the single most important of the
internationally traded commodities, dwarfing in value
the trade in grain, meat, fish, tobacco, cattle, spices,
cloth” (Fogel 1989, 21). For this reason, scholars
have referred to sugar as the “oil” of
that period. Today, with the rise of biofuels technology,
sugarcane is increasingly seen as an energy resource,
leading some to envision sugar as the oil of the twenty-first
century. This paper considers the turn toward biofuels
by examining the emergence of a global assemblage
of states, domestic and transnational corporations,
non-governmental organizations, growers, consumers,
and a set of interdependent technologies, including
biotechnology, ethanol technology and automotive technology.
I use the concept of global assemblages, drawing on
the work of Aihwa Ong, Stephen Collier, and Saskia
Sassen, to consider how sugar geopolitics, once at
the heart of colonial endeavors, are now thoroughly
implicated in postcolonial global restructuring. In
doing so, I argue that theorizations of food commodity
chains and of the geopolitics of fuel commodities
need to be brought in dialogue with each other in
order to capture the newly emerging and dynamic relationship
between food and fuel crops. By way of illustration,
I use several examples, including the recent agreements
between the Brazilian government, the state of Florida,
and various corporations. These novel forms of state,
federal and corporate capabilities invoke old tropes
and rework preexisting patterns of accumulation as
they set about to construct new infrastructures and
ethanol sourcing systems.
1:00-3:00,
FedEx Global Education Center
SESSION 3: Land and Power:
The Relevance of World History for Political Ecology
Today
Jason
W. Moore, Assistant Professor, Department
of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill
"'Amsterdam
is Standing on Norway': World Accumulation, Dutch
Hegemony, and the Environmental History of the Capitalist
North Atlantic, 1545-1789"
'Amsterdam is standing on Norway'–
a popular saying in the Dutch Republic of the 17th
century. Like all popular expressions, there was more
than one inflection to the phrase. Amsterdam was,
in the first instance, built atop a subterranean forest
of Norwegian origin. But southern Norway during the
era of Dutch hegemonic ascent was also a vital resource
zone, subordinated to Amsterdam-based capital. Ecological
imperialism, it seems, was inscribed in the logic
of capitalism from the very beginning. This paper
follows the movement of strategic commodity frontiers
within early modern Europe from the standpoint of
world accumulation. While the Americas are often regarded
as the zone of conquest in the centuries after 1492,
a broader geographical perspective reveals the dialectical
interplay of frontiers on both sides of the Atlantic
– between American silver extracted in Potosi
and the capitalist refashioning of northern Europe’s
political ecologies. From its command posts in Amsterdam,
Dutch capital deployed American silver in the creation
of successive frontiers within Europe, transforming
Scandinavian and Baltic peripheries into vital resource
supply zones – above all in shipbuilding timber,
cereals, and mining and metallurgy. The frontier character
of these transformations was decisive, premised as
it was upon drawing cheap supplies of land and labor
power into the orbit of capital. We see in northern
Europe precisely what we see in the Americas –
a pattern of commodity-centered environmental transformation,
and thence relative ecological exhaustion, from which
the only escape was renewed global conquest and ever-wider
cycles of combined and uneven development.
Henry
Bernstein, Professor of Development Studies
in the University of London at the School of Oriental
and African Studies
“Who
are the ‘people of the land’? Some provocative
thoughts on globalization and development, with reference
to sub-Saharan Africa”
‘People
of the land’ is an emblematic signifier for
the target constituencies of trasnational peasant
and farmers movements, defined by a political project
opposed to globalization. That opposition draws on
some key ideas of political ecology, which also inform
notions of alternative futures for farming and farmers.
This paper seeks to raise questions about who the
people of the land in a globalising capitalism ‘really
are’, based in political economy and illustrated
by both the historical trajectories of agrarian change
in modern African history and the current conditions
of ‘classes of labour’ in the countrysides
(and beyond) of sub-Saharan Africa.
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