Archive for 'Ecology'

I not infrequently run across articles, like this recent one from The Age, promoting the concept that some particular premodern society had a more humane relationship to nature than modern/western society does. The Age article, for example, cites professor of archaeology John Parkington, who notes the prevalence of representations of particular animal forms in rock art dating back 200 to 10,000 years, and argues that the representations:

reflect the way the hunter-gatherers saw nature and their place in it, and include elements of shamanism.

With the domestication of plants and animals, humans started “moving ourselves out of the ecosystem … that was the beginning of the process that took us to the position of being outsiders”, he said.

“That’s why we unbelievably and inexplicably are failing to recognise the threat of global warming, because we’re outside it,” he said. “We’re going to carry on manipulating it, as apparent owners of it, until it’s too late.”

Parkington says the hunter-gatherers placed themselves inside the ecosystem, rather than outside looking in. “So they see animals as other beings who know the world in a different way … and sometimes in a very valuable way, and sometimes they want to take on that knowledge.”

The animal that occurs most often in Cederberg rock paintings is the eland, a large antelope that Parkington said was revered by the Bushmen as “a beautiful sentient being”. He said they developed rules for hunting, “a guiding ethos”, as a way of justifying their pursuit of eland and of behaving “sustainably and responsibly in the world … as a species that actually shares the landscape and vegetation with other beings”.

I remain agnostic on the particular human community whose history Parkington studies - their culture may, in fact, have expressed a highly developed sense of sustainability, and their practices may indeed hold lessons for the contemporary period. I would sound one small note of caution, in that it sounds from the passage above that the eland are a primary object of the hunt and, in that context, it would at least be possible to suggest that there might be different psychological motivations - aside from, or in addition to, some deep commitment to sustainability - that might underlie repeated ritual proclamations about how beautiful and sentient these creatures are. But Parkington is the expert on the culture he studies, so I won’t second guess.

If Parkington has been quoted correctly, however, he is making far grander, and more mystical, claims than would apply to one culture alone: he argues (again assuming the news account is an accurate representation - and I do understand that nuance is not the strength of the journalistic medium…) that what accounts for the cultural emphasis on sustainable values and practice is the fact that nomadic forms of existence in general are more “inside” nature - involve a less mediated relationship to nature - than settled existence. Settled agricultural societies, by contrast, have apparently removed themselves from this embeddedness in nature - and their cultural values therefore adopt a more instrumental, less sustainable, orientation to nature.

I find this notion empirically and theoretically questionable - and am also a bit unnerved by its normative implications: is the claim that sustainable management requires a regression to nomadic existence? If this isn’t the normative claim, then shouldn’t this cause us to reflect critically back on the original relationship posited between cultural values and living “inside” nature???

If this were an isolated position, I wouldn’t be too concerned. Unfortunately, I don’t find it that unusual for people - including academics - to valorise pre-modern peoples (sometimes understood, as in this example, as nomadic, sometimes encompassing earlier agrarian societies, sometimes extended to modern indigenous societies, as well) on the grounds that, in a very general way, such people held more sustainable values than are expressed in modern societies. I’m happy for this issue to be explored as an empirical question - as an investigation of how particular premodern societies actually lived, and as an exploration of how they articulated their practices culturally. What worries me is when these sorts of claims start to be made in an undifferentiated and apparently universal way - as though all human societies before a certain historical era, or all contemporary societies that have been materially disenfranchised to a certain degree, have certain moral qualities in common.

Politically, I worry because this position seems at best essentialising - in the guise of offering deep respect, it “others” people by rendering them magical and mysterious and beyond our normal ken - a position that, I suspect, serves to flatten and channel mainstream receptiveness to indigenous political claims in particular ways… (I’ve discussed this issue previously here and at Savage Minds.)

Analytically, I worry because I suspect that, at least in some cases, this position involves drawing an invalid deduction from objective limitations to cultural beliefs: premodern societies were more likely to live in some kind of “balance” with nature for “material” reasons, quite independently of cultural norms, because they simply had fewer resources to mobilise against their environments - the long-term persistence of this kind of balance might well have come to be articulated in cultural norms, or cultural norms might well have made achieving balance with the environment a comparatively easy task; equally, though, cultural norms might have diverged strongly from anything we would regard as “sustainable”, and yet Malthusian forces might have held the population in balance with nature nevertheless…

Ethically, I worry because I feel that academics have the leisure and the training - and therefore the responsibility - to break away from a fixed orbit around our own cultural tropes (in this case, I can’t help but worry about the way in which this common valorisation of premodern cultures seems to channel the romantic vision of the Noble Savage) and examine the best evidence at their disposal, so that we can actually be prepared for the sober decisions we may need to make, if we wish to confront a complex problem like global warming.

Last year we conducted a number of site visits related to planning issues arising from Victoria’s Net Gain policy. The Net Gain policy was added to Victorian planning schemes in 2003 as part of Amendment C19, but significant details relating to how the policy would be implemented were still being fleshed out at the time our visits were being conducted in mid-2005.

At base, the policy is intended to provide a strong incentive for developers to preserve native habitat, by requiring native vegetation displaced during development to be replaced by a much larger quantity of equivalent native vegetation, in a similar ecological niche. While everyone understood the strategic intent of the policy clearly enough, there was considerable uncertainty over the details of implementation. It was common for us to witness genuine confusion over what was “equivalent” vegetation, how much additional vegetation was needed to offset the removal of a particular patch of native vegetation, how far from the original site the “offset” vegetation could be located and, especially, how to interpret the apparent permission granted under the policy, on some occasions, to contribute money or other works in lieu of offset plantings.

We observed various disputes and negotiations contesting whether and how Net Gain policy applies to particular patches or pieces of vegetation. One of my favourites was an attempt to decide whether a particular patch of trees were “natural” or not. This dispute arose because the policy (at least as it was understood in the field at that time - I’m happy to be corrected on this) did not attach Net Gain obligations to native habitat that was deliberately planted - only to native habitat that had arisen “naturally” - presumably because there would otherwise be a strong disincentive to plant any new native vegetation. This policy exception then led to a series of quite intriguing debates over whether, for example, specific trees had arisen spontaneously from fallen seeds, or had been planted actively by farmers in the distant past.

On one site visit, the developer (who was, by and large, quite interested in retaining red gums for the amenity they would ultimately provide to the development) was negotiating the offset implications of a few trees that would need to be removed to clear space for a wetland (itself a product of a requirement for water sensitive urban design). The developer argued that certain red gums had been deliberately planted, and were therefore not sufficiently “natural” for Net Gain to attach. The Council staff asked for proof, and were shown the way in which the red gum trees had been carefully fenced - presumably to protect them from damage by grazing livestock. The Council staff argued that this wasn’t sufficient evidence: that the trees could have arisen naturally, only to have the farmer decide to protect them from livestock at a later point. The developer then responded by walking Council staff further into the proposed wetland area, and showing them this:

The tree actually looks too old, to me, to have been originally planted in this kind of pot, but it was a fantastic moment in the negotiation process.