Conservation is Our Government Now
Section 1: Interpretive Questions
I. Chapter One: On page 9, West starts identifying the critiques of NGOs and in particular, the Research and Conservation Foundation of Papua New Guinea (RCF). She discusses how NGOs essentially inject their own narrative concerning nature and culture with no regard to the culture surrounding them. Instead, the culture surrounding them needs to be fixed, since it is not right in their (NGOs) image. On the website for the RCF, their mission is stated, “to promote and preserve the unique flora and fauna of Papua New Guinea for the people of PNG and the world to encourage, finance, assist in, and undertake research into the flora and fauna of PNG and to cooperate with institutions and persons with similar aims”. Towards the end of the chapter, West brings up a great point of, “social scientists have responded with a proliferation of critical analyses of conservation-as-development projects. Underexplored in these analyses are the multiple cross-cultural understandings of and productions of environment and society through the discourses and practices of conservation and development, and the historical circumstances in which these productions came about” (p. 25). The question that I draw from this is how do you think we move forward from this point with this information? There has been a disconnect, but what is being done about it? How can we use the rest of the information that West gives us to apply to future studies and work?
II. Chapter Two: In this chapter, West thoroughly critiques the way in which conservation groups went about implementing their projects, especially in PNG. She clearly labels each side of the conservation project (the conservation-related actors and the Maimafu Gimi). She addresses that there was a clear lack of communication when setting up the conservation-development projects. The way each side values relationships, exchanges, social settings, and commodities is vastly different. From what I gathered from the chapter, the Maimafu Gimi were never approached and how they understood the terms of agreement or if they would like to put the agreement back in their own words. This could have been due to no one thinking that needed to be done, since the words made sense to the Maimafu Gimi. It was overlooked that the same word could have different cultural meanings in a different place. Also, because domination is so deeply rooted in the capitalist mode of production, naturally the group we funded to go down there would dominate the Maimafu Gimi instead of working along side them like they expect. The question(s) I have from this, is how do we take this clear issue into consideration when we are measuring the success of conservation efforts? Is there a way in which we can be able to measure social relationships in terms of success or failure and how does that relate to the environment around these relationships?
Section 2: Reaction
I felt awestruck by the first chapter of West’s book. I did not want to put it down at all. I had never thought about the way in which NGOs went about their projects. I always thought of them as the good guys. Not to necessarily say that they are the bad guys, but based on the descriptions of tragic miscommunication between NGO workers and local people, I can’t entirely see the benefit in their methods. Plus, I don’t think conservation is actually the main goal here. Which is such a mind-blowing thing to think about, that “biodiversity conservation interventions are now the intellectual and material terrain through which the practices of economic development are often carried out” (West 24). My first question is to think, are we just pushing capitalism on them in the form of “saving the environment”? How do we think this will possibly work? Does no one care about the cultural that existed before we came here, and who is going to stop us from erasing it completely? (We, as in Westernized culture seeking economic development.)
Section 3: Current Events Article
On September 1st, 2017, 19 baby gorillas were named in an annual ceremony Kwita Izina as part of a conservation effort to save these endangered gorillas in Rwanda. I picked the article about this ceremony because the naming of the gorillas is done by conservationists. They do note that they want to include “locals” (namely children) so that the conservation techniques are continued even after the governmental organizations leave. There is absolutely nothing listed about how the people surrounding the protected gorillas feel about the conservationists being there, which was notable to me after reading the two West chapters about PNG. It lists why we should be looking after the gorillas in this area of Rwanda, why they are endangered (the locals are “threats”, in so many words), and the amount of money being generated from tourism in Rwanda with the conservationists being there. Everything about this conservation effort screams capitalism, yet it is being celebrated because it is published in a Western newspaper. It does recognize that the gorilla population has grown by 26.6% since they first started these ceremonies 12 years ago, but how do we accurately measure if that is successful? How do we trust that this is the best course of action for protecting the environment/gorillas?
Section 1: Interpretive Questions
1. In Chapter 5, West points out, “the idea that indigenous peoples are fixed sets of communities that somehow lose their authenticity when they stop practicing particular sets of behaviors indicates a lack of understanding of the history of change over time in human societies” (West, 166). This idea that she is addressing is evident in several areas of Western culture; politics, mass media, education, and cultural attitudes. The comments she included from the book that tourists sign in Maimafu’s village particularly highlight this, with key words jumping out like “hobbit”, “spoil this paradise”, and “untouched”. “Native” people brings about a very specific image to many tourists of PNG. My question is: do you think it is possible to think of PNG in a way other than what we are conditioned to think? Until we actually experience it ourselves? Is that true of any place we haven’t been? Should we try to educate ourselves on “other” places, or does that create bias and feed into the “imaginary” idea we inherently have about “scientifically relevant” places?
2. In Chapter 6, West breaks down two prime examples of pieces of Gimi life turned into commodities. However, she makes sure to highlight the individual interactions which planted the seeds for this situation to grow, which I found particularly interesting. When discussing the beginnings of the Harpy Eagle Project, West notes, “he [Jonathan] made outrageously inappropriate promises to the people of Maimafu regarding how much money would come with the protection of harpy eagles” (West, 193). Because of the way that this volunteer Jonathan spun the situation for the people of Maimafu, a series of various other social, political, and economic issues stemmed from it. My question is: do you think that Jonathan had any regard for the differences in social relations between those in the United States and those in the village of Maimafu? Do you think anyone on the RCF staff thought twice about reassuring the people of Maimafu that money and tourists would come from protecting the harpy eagles? Why do you think they would indulge an idea they didn’t know to be 100% true? Is it really only to keep their cooperation?
3. In Chapter 5, West foreshadows the discussion of the harpy eagles and bilums becoming commodities that occurs in Chapter 6. She foreshadows this when discussing the reason a young biologist gave her for coming to PNG, “Papua New Guinea was filtered through the Internet. The information this man gathered was partially factual, partially designed to ‘sell’ the country as a tourism destination, and partially news related. All of it fed his imagination” (West, 161-162). When the researchers (David Gillison and Jonathan) come to Maimafu to find the harpy eagles, they further complicate the social relations involved with land ownership. However, due to the fact that these traditional social relations that occur are not what Westernized society pictures when they picture “native” or “indigenous” people, it is cast off as being inauthentic, and therefore something that does not need to be taken seriously. Due to the researcher’s action of claiming that the harpy eagle was in dire need of researching because it has “little know to science” qualities, they directly disrupted the Maimafu village and left the local people to pick up the pieces. This eagle, along with the bilum, has been commodified. My question is: do you think there is anyway to stop commodification from happening when Western culture forces itself onto “others”? Do you think the people in Maimafu village brought the commodification on themselves for wanting development? Which event do you believe the commodification began with?
Section 2: Reaction
As we get into the later chapters of this book, I feel like its finally being confirmed for me that individuals bring institutions ideals and values into their own when expressing them to others. Keeping that in mind, when there is a cultural clash of this magnitude, involving this many layers on each side, I can’t believe I had to wait until the last page of chapter 5 for West to write, “the conservationists associated with the Crater Mountain project have noble intentions, but their effectiveness in providing development options and in understanding the human uses of biological diversity are hampered by the lack of attention they pay to anthropological data” (West, 182). Due to the fact that the conservationists almost all come from Westernized cultures, its safe to assume that could be the reason that they have been using capitalistic ideals (i.e. commodification) and disrupting (without acknowledgment) the social relations of the people living in the environment they are trying to protect. I think the researchers feel they are doing a good job. There is something about the Western way of thinking that puts a blind spot on the details and complexities of a “primitive” society. This is most likely to do the fact that it’s actually labeled a “primitive” society, when there are multiple layers to the culture of 2,400 people living in this village. West points out that “almost all of the tourists, and many of the conservation activists, who have visited Maimafu during my time there have voiced disappointment when they found out that there are few local ritual practices tied to mythology, no initiation rituals, and little traditional dress. The ‘loss’ of these imagined markers of indigenousness was seen as tragic” (West, 166). Many conservationists can’t seem to let go of their institutionalized way of thinking of people living in PNG, and I think that is the part of it all that is the most tragic.
Section 3: Current Events Article
On September 14th, 2017, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified the snow leopard from “endangered species” to “vulnerable”. The group said that data they collected in 2016 prompted the reclassification. Later in the article, the author points out that the Snow Leopard trust called out the International Union for Conservation of Nature for not using reliable techniques in their data collection. They claimed that the group “relied in part on asking people how many snow leopards they think exist in any area”. This is important, at least to me, that the author included it. It ties right in with Chapter 5 when West uses all her available resources to reach a conclusion. The article continues on to say that a coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Snow Leopard Program claimed they followed the proper protocols when reaching their assessment, if not going above and beyond. The number they came up with was the “lowest acceptable population figure – 4,000”, and it still called for reclassification. Some conservationists are worried that the reclassification will pull funding and attention away from the cause of saving snow leopards, because they are still threatened by “habitat loss and degradation, declines in prey populations and poaching for illegal wildlife trade”. I did find that the language used didn’t seem to promote that the people living around the snow leopards were causing the issues. However, later in the article, it said “emerging potential threats include mining and other infrastructure development that would affect their habitats”. I found this extremely interesting considering conservation groups seem to go into these areas promising development in exchange for the local people helping with the conservation effort, but that statement seems to suggest that the development is an emerging problem that needs to be addressed and potentially stopped.
Section One: Interpretive Questions
1. In the last chapter of this book, West illustrates the disconnect that occurred between the conservationists and Gimi while trying to create this conservation-as-development project. She captures this, “in order to achieve conservation, as scientists and activists imagine it, there has to be a kind of slowing of the modern and the movement of surplus capital into out-of-the-way places and then a stasis of sorts. In order to achieve development, as Gimi imagine it, there has to be a speeding up of the modern and the movement of capital into Maimafu” (West, 2006:216-217). I thought her word choice when explaining the conservation side was interesting, “slowing…movement of surplus capital” because capital is exactly what Gimi want moved into Maimafu (an ‘out-of-the-way place). My question is who gets to make the ultimate decision of where capital is moved? Didn’t the conservation group make that decision by promising tourists and revenue from conservation efforts?
2. Later in Chapter 7, West finds connections between the list of questions (the group of men asked her to translate, type up, and give to WCS) and the production of space. This is when the group of men critique the RCF for producing Crater Mountain. I thought the translation was especially important, because I flipped right to appendix D and read the questions in full before reading the rest of this chapter. The two translations came out to be very different, and in a noteworthy way. The first translation, “whom does ‘Crater Mountain’ belong to? Is it ours or is it yours? With your answer, who is the boss?” and the second translation, “whom does Crater Mountain belong to? Does it belong to you or to us? It belongs to us, so if you don’t answer all of these questions for us, we will take it back” (228). West goes on to explain that these questions were built to challenge the RCF in their thinking of space, and that when two groups live with radically different expectations of each other in the same production of space, and this causes the tension that currently lives there. She references Lefebvre, “Each mode of production has its own particular space, the shift from one mode to another must entail the production of a new space” (Lefebvre 1991:46). With this in mind, my question is: which group will take over with a shift from the other group? What will this new space look like? Which do you think is a better outcome?
3. West ends the book on the note of commodities once again. She ties it back to the “birds of paradise”, which has been a reoccurring subject of interest in her book. On the last page, she is discussing how the notion of “scarcity” is what drives people to do things like these conservation efforts and visiting villages in Papua New Guinea. Because they are only found on this island, they are valuable. She notes that “today they are symbolically valuable to Papua New Guinea; indeed the Raggiana bird of paradise is the symbol of the nation-state, in that it embodies the imagined reality of the island: beautiful, exotic, remote, untouched, and unstudied, and on the edge of extinction by the modern” (Gewertz and Errginton 1991:28). My question is how can we continue to disguise the infiltration of these areas as “science”? Should be ignore the fact that they seem to want capital too?
Section Two: Reaction
I’m actually very sad that this book is over. But in my opinion, it instilled a very important message in me that I think I had forgotten before I read it, which is sad in itself because it is fundamental to how we should view the world. The way in which Westernized popular culture and mass media portray “other” cultures is to say they are all the same in being “other”, which is the exact opposite of the case. Almost every “other” group of people is going to have a different way of going about their culture, their economy, their sustainability; depending on the environment they are in. However, the part of this that strikes me the most is that these “other” cultures are more advanced than that of Westernized civilizations in the fact of believing that the person and their environment are one. This is an incredibly important topic of discussion, I believe, and one that goes overlooked far too often.
Section 3: Current Events Article
According to the International Business Times UK, a new giant rat species was discovered in the Solomon Islands. Tyrone Larvey is the lead author of the paper detailing the rat’s discovery, as well as the one who made the proper identification of the new species. When he went to the Vangunu Island in the Solomons, he was so excited to hear about this new rat species that might exist because he had just started his Ph.D., and wanted to be like those people who go on adventures and discover new species. The local people on the island called the rat “vika”, and so when Lavery discovered it, he named it “Uromys vika”, to give tribute to the local people who helped him find the rat. The last paragraph of this article struck me as the most important. It sounds like this discovery on this island out in the Solomon Islands is going to start another conservation-as-development project that is going to be done incorrectly. How do we take the proper steps to interfere with this process? Are we even allowed to?
