Virtualism, Governance and Practice: Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation

Introduction

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the understandings of nature and the natural environment that predominate in Western societies have shifted in a marked way. Previously, nature had commonly been something to be subdued, whether through engineering works, dikes and drainage systems, through health projects, sewers and reservoirs, or through agricultural improvements, irrigation and soil management. Alternatively, it had been something to be looked after, whether land that needed to be kept in good heart so that it would continue to be fruitful, or specific places that commemorated human achievement.

Since the 1950s, however, nature and the natural environment have acquired new meanings. Something that was to be subordinated to human purposes has become something to be protected and respected for itself. This is the emergence of environmentalism, a set of ways of thinking about the world, particularly about the natural surroundings and their relationship with people. We refer to these as a set of ways because they range widely, from the ecocentrism discussed in the first chapter in this volume, through a concern for biodiversity to more limited efforts to protect particular species or habitats (see, e.g., Bosso 2005). Although they range widely, they have certain things in common.

One important thing they have in common is that while environmentalisms of different sorts are ways of thinking, they are not only that, if ‘ways of thinking’ is taken to mean simply cultural understandings, what is in our heads. They include as well the intersection of these understandings with the world and people in it, which is to say, with ways of identifying and evaluating the natural surroundings. These identifications and evaluations in turn entail ways of organising and acting. So as nature has changed in human eyes, the ways that we deal with nature and each other has changed as well.

Some of the new ways that people deal with these things are the subject matter of this volume. We will consider them as they appear in conservation policies, projects and programmes, which are institutional expressions of one or another environmentalist vision. They are also practical executions of that vision, intended to bring the world, or parts of it, into conformity with it. This is the ‘vision and execution in environmental conservation’ of our subtitle.

These projects and programmes have attracted interest from scholars concerned with power, many of whom see environmentalism as a distinct way of understanding the world, one that imposes distinct orders on people in that world. Our purpose in this volume is to consider the argument that such scholars make. That consideration involves three questions. First, is environmentalism a distinct way of understanding the world? Second, is that understanding associated with efforts to impose a distinct order on the world and people in it? Third, what are the effects of these efforts? These three questions are the ‘virtualism, governance and practice’ of our title.

In this volume, then, we are concerned with two things. One is conservation projects as institutional expressions of environmentalism. The other is how a number of scholars, anthropologists and others, have approached those projects as exercises in power. To anticipate what we will argue in this Introduction, and what is illustrated by the sequence of chapters in this volume, we see that scholarly approach as misdirected because it is partial. Many have seen these projects as Foucauldian systems of knowledge-power and governance or as virtualising regimes that seek to make different parts of the world conform to the virtual reality defined by the environmentalist vision. Such a view is justified if we look at what environmentalist institutions claim to be doing and how they claim to be doing it. However, that view looks much less justified if we look at what happens in environmental management projects as they work out in practice rather than in vision and intent.

While we make this observation about the differences between vision and practice in terms of environmentalism and environmental management projects, we think that it may apply more generally. For instance, a number of recent works describe the same difference in the field of development (Crewe and Harrison 1998; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Mosse 2004; Mosse and Lewis 2005). If it does apply more generally, then we may need to look afresh at the applicability of Foucauldian models or models of virtualism to things like global environmental, development or other institutions. The governance and the shaping of the world that they are seen to exert may exist in the head office and in theory, but may be much harder to find in practice.

Our concern with the relationship between vision and practice means that we approach the practical effects of environmental projects in terms of what they tell us about that relationship. This does not mean that we think that a project that fails to execute the intentions of the relevant organisation is a project that has no important consequences. Such projects can have a host of consequences for those who develop the project, for those who staff it and for those who live where it operates. Such consequences may well be important. However, from our perspective these are unintended consequences, not directly bearing on the question of how able environmental organisations are to carry out the goals that they proclaim and that some scholars criticise.

Environment Visions

People everywhere have always paid attention to their surroundings, including what we would call their natural environment. They have noticed when it gets wetter or drier, when crops are better or worse, when fish and game are more or less plentiful, and they have sought to understand and perhaps even affect these things. In doing so, people have assigned meanings to these things and organised their lives accordingly.

Even though people have always paid attention, the nature of that attention varies across societies and through history. For instance, Tim Ingold (2000) argues that it changed markedly in Europe between the Medieval and Modern eras. He says that in the earlier period, predominant views identified and gave significance to the surroundings in terms of their relationship with people. Later, however, they began to construe important aspects of the surroundings as a realm that is beyond people, a natural environs that is ‘out there’ and has an existence of its own (see also Escobar 1999; Latour 1993).

Just as the meaning and significance of the surroundings has not been stable within Western societies, so it has not been uniform among them in the Modern period. For instance, British imperial game preserves in Africa may look like environmental conservation. However, they reflected specific metropolitan understandings of England and its relationship with Africa, and of English men and their relationship to wild animals (MacKenzie 1989). National parks in the United States also may look like environmental conservation. However, they reflect specific understandings held by colonists and their descendants of the settlement of North America, the state of the continent and the place of pre-colonial populations (Cronon 1995). Parks in some European countries also may look like environmental conservation. However, they too reflect specific understandings, in this case not of a pre-colonial landscape putatively empty, but of an early human landscape, though ‘early’ can be as late as the first part of the twentieth century, before the industrialisation of agriculture in the area in question (e.g., Aldridge 1989: 81; Kull, Kukk and Lotman 2003; an example in Austria is Nationalpark Neusiedler See n.d.).

Present-day environmentalism also carries a range of meanings. The images of the natural environment and of threats to it implied by a concern with global warming are different from the images and threats implied by a concern for a valued species, and are different again from the images and threats implied by a concern for biodiversity and the security of ecosystems. The first chapter in this volume considers one of the sets of meanings that the environment has in contemporary society. In ‘Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism’, Vassos Argyrou analyses ecocentrism, and in doing so pursues the question that Ingold addressed, the relationship between Modernity and understandings of the natural world. In doing so, he shows how environmentalism can have a totalising vision of the world and the people in it.

Argyrou begins by identifying a feature of Modernity that he sees as crucial. That is a rejection of qualitative difference. This rejection is apparent in much of science, which reduces what appear to be qualitative differences between things to quantitative differences in the arrangement of basic units that these things share, whether electrons and protons to account for the apparent differences between hydrogen and lead, or of nucleic acids to account for the apparent differences between cauliflowers and butterflies. This rejection of qualitative difference appears as well in the Modern approach to the human world, manifest in growing attacks on discrimination between people based on race, sex, religion, physical ability and the like. For Argyrou, then, Modernity is driven by a vision of sameness: differences are superficial and at most quantitative, rather than fundamental and qualitative. Sameness has existed previously in Western thought, for instance in Medieval arguments that all living things are God's creatures and subjects. While sameness may have been important in earlier thought, the Modern form bases it on what are taken to be material, natural grounds, rather than divine ones.

Environmentalism takes, as we have said, a variety of forms. However, in its most thoroughgoing form, the forms of ecocentrism that Argyrou describes, it manifests that Modern, material vision of sameness. This sort of environmentalism does not just reject qualitative differences within the natural world and within the social. In addition, it rejects qualitative differences between these two worlds: the distinction between them is illusory. With this denial of differences nature is socialised, for instance with the argument that trees (Stone 1974) or whales, porpoises and dolphins (US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit 2004) have legal rights. Alternatively, people and society are naturalised, for instance with the argument that people's mental, cultural and social attributes are governed by the natural processes of genetics (e.g., Dawkins 1976) or evolutionary psychology (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1991). This denial of difference is not, however, even-handed, but instead reflects Modern naturalism. While people are construed as part of nature, nature itself is construed in a way that is purged of its social networks (Latour 1993; Strathern 1989), thereby forgetting the ways in which the social makes the natural (Smith 1990).

Figure 1.1 Spaceship Earth (courtesy NASA).

Argyrou's ecocentrists, with their vision of people and nature as one, are part of a movement that obliterates another kind of difference by imposing a different kind of sameness. That is the difference of distance, which is reduced to insignificance in the image that led Ingold to his characterisation of the Modern view, the famous photograph of the earth taken by astronauts orbiting the moon (Fig. 1.1; see Cosgrove 1994). If people are part of nature and if all of nature has the same rights, then we are all part of the same system and distance disappears. This is the view contained in James Lovelock's (1979) influential idea of Gaia, the earth as a single, integrated system. If people and nature are one, subsumed in a single whole, then environmentalists can claim a moral right to control the use of the environment throughout the world. In this situation, conservation planners in New York have the right and even the obligation to make sure that New Guinea villagers do not hunt their prey to extinction (as van Helden describes in his chapter in this volume) and that Jamaican town-dwellers do not fish out their waters (as Garner describes in his chapter).

Ecocentrism, then, completes the movement that began with the change that Ingold described, and presents a third Western view of the natural surroundings. Ingold said, remember, that in the Medieval period those surroundings were defined in relationship to people, while in the Modern era they became separate, nature ‘out there’. With the appearance of ecocentrism, the radical separation of people and the surroundings is reversed, with people and nature becoming one in a way that makes nature people's foundation, and so locates it ‘in here’.

The ecocentrism that Argyrou describes is an extreme form of environmentalism. However, like other forms it defines the world, and in that definition it provides both justification for changing the world and guides for action to effect that change. The justification is contained in the assertion that we confront severe and imminent environmental degradation. We need to act quickly to introduce thoroughgoing changes, even if this means overriding local opposition and forgoing some of the rights and privileges that people enjoy (see Brockington 2004: 414). The guides contained in its definition of the world tell us what we should do. In the case of the ecocentrism that Argyrou describes, these would include sets of changes in the ways that people deal with their natural surroundings and with each other.

These guides reflect a body of suppositions contained in the definition of the world that underlies them. For some of the writers that Argyrou describes, those suppositions are derived from research and speculation about the origin and development of life on earth, and about the origin of the universe. The biologists and physicists who produced that research and speculation wanted to produce parsimonious ways of making sense of a set of observations about life on earth and about the universe. In that way they are fundamentally descriptive, even if the events and processes that they describe are not accessible to us. We can not, after all, see the emergence of organic chemicals in the primordial earth of thousands of millions of years ago, much less the Big Bang of more thousands of millions of years before that.

For Argyrou's ecocentrists, however, these parsimonious accounts become something different, the basis of a definition of the fundamental nature of life on earth, and indeed of the earth itself. This definition, being fundamental, is not only descriptive but is also prescriptive. Put simplistically, if we are all really the same at a fundamental level, the sort of sameness invoked by those who say that humans share a high percentage of their genes with various other species, then any apparent differences between us are merely on the surface. They are epiphenomenal, and therefore are not legitimate bases for dealing with one another. The next step, of course, is to discourage or prohibit such illegitimate dealings, and so bring people's lives in the world into conformity with the definition of that fundamental nature.

What we have described here is an instance of virtualism (see Carrier 1998), and it is worth explaining what that is. Let us begin with a set of people who have studied one or another aspect of the world, whether that be English grammar, economic activity or the natural environment. These people necessarily approach their object of study from a certain perspective, which is to say that they are interested in it for certain reasons and want to answer certain sorts of questions. From their study, they produce a body of observations and a set of rules and principles that give them significance and that explain them. Of course, these rules and principles are not complete and neutral. Rather, they are partial. That is because they are concerned with specific parts of the world and because they reflect the perspective of those who formulate them. As well, of course, they are not directly observable, just as the law of gravity is not directly observable however often we may see objects fall. Rather, they are parsimonious models that do two things. First, they translate what we observe into the terms of those models, such as apples falling from the branches of trees that get translated into masses in a gravitational field. Second, they account for what the falling apples do, and do so in ways that can be used to predict future events, such as the fall of apples still on branches.

The results of the study of gravity, or English grammar or economic activity, constitute a kind of virtual reality. That is, they are a set of partial analytical and theoretical arguments that define a world, rather like a computer program defines the world that one sees when one puts on the goggles of a virtual reality game. This virtual reality becomes virtualism when people forget that the virtual reality is a creature of the partial analytical and theoretical perspectives and arguments that generate it, and instead take it for the principles that underlie the world that exists and then try to make the world conform to that virtual reality. Of course, not just anyone with a view of how the world really is can implement that vision and seek to make the world conform. Rather, these virtualising visions are enacted through the nexus of knowledge and power that Foucault (1972) describes. So, the visionary must be powerful politically and the vision must be grounded in a form of knowledge production that is powerful socially, such as the biology and physics that some ecocentrists invoke.

Virtualism is, then, not just a process that occurs in people's heads. It is also a social process by which people who are guided by a vision of the world act to try to shape that world to bring it into conformity with their vision. The broader the vision and the more powerful the visionary, the more pervasive the shaping. For Argyrou's ecocentrists the vision is total, encompassing everything on earth, and indeed elsewhere; in grounding it in science, they claim a potent legitimacy for it.

Virtualising Visions

Many writers have seen aspects of virtualism in environmental conservation, and especially in projects intended to protect biodiversity. Arturo Escobar (1998: 56) argues that the concern with biodiversity has ‘resulted in an…institutional apparatus that systematically organizes the production of forms of knowledge and types of power’. This apparatus defines the world in terms of its biological vision and attempts to bring the world into conformity, through ‘scientific research, in-situ and ex-situ conservation, national biodiversity planning, and the establishment of appropriate mechanisms for compensation and economic use of biodiversity resources’ (1998: 57). From the perspective of this concern, often the world that is seen is strongly abstracted, translated into the terms of the conservationist model in the same way that a physicist translates an apple falling from a tree into a mass in a gravitational field. So, conservationists of the sort Escobar describes represent the world in terms of biodiversity hotspots, and perhaps threats, and ignore the social and political features of the areas that they portray.

Dan Brockington (2004), for instance, describes how environmentalist organisations describe the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania. They present it in almost purely ecological terms, stressing the nature and supposed fragility of the ecosystem, and ignore the socio-political context in which it exists. The people who were displaced by the park are not mentioned or are treated as illegitimate interlopers who despoil the surroundings. Raymond Bryant (2002: esp. 275–7) describes a more thorough instance of this in the Philippines. There, an umbrella organisation of national and international organisations presents biodiversity and its protection in terms of a map, a representation that is highly abstract: ‘Not visible in this map is any sign of people: there is no reference to cities and towns or any real indication of cultural and linguistic factors’ (2002: 276). Likewise, the state is ignored, at least in the form of political units like provinces. Where it does appear, it is only in terms of state-authorised entities linked to biodiversity: ‘parks, protected areas, marine reserves’ (2002: 276). Even when biodiversity projects claim to attend to the social aspect of conservation, planners and managers tend to do so in ways that translate people's actions into terms that fit with preexisting notions of the effects of those actions. Paige West (2006), for instance, describes a project in Papua New Guinea specifically designed to integrate the conservation of biodiversity and the social needs of people. In spite of this professed attention to the social, the solutions that managers arrived at reflected their presupposition that local people are threats to biodiversity.

What we have related from Brockington, Bryant and West refers to representations that translate the world into the terms of an environmentalist model. These representations elide aspects of life that do not conform to the model's terms, either because they are defined as immaterial or because they are inconvenient. As Bryant argues at length, such representations are exercises in power-knowledge that both create and describe the world in an authoritative way. This virtualism in creation and description can take more concrete forms.

One such form is the focus of Maarten Onneweer's chapter, ‘New Nature: On the Production of a Paradox’. He describes efforts in the Netherlands to protect the environment by reshaping the surroundings, in the form of the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur (EHS), the Main Ecological Structure. As Onneweer describes, the EHS involves creating areas of what can be called ‘raw nature’ in various parts of the country, connected by corridors to form a national nature network. Intriguingly, creating raw nature requires substantial human effort, as the areas selected to become parts of the EHS are turned into construction sites: hills are created and topsoil is stripped away, and water courses, drains and embankments are changed. The bulldozers and backhoes depart and things are left to take their own course.

This activity is guided by a vision of nature that, as Onneweer describes, developed over the last third of the twentieth century. During that period a set of Dutch environmental scientists gradually developed and advocated a particular model of natural processes in the country, the ways that they were being threatened and how they could be protected. Together with environmental organisations, they persuaded the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries (now Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality) to implement their vision, to make their virtual reality real on the land.

As we said, virtual realities reflect the particular perspectives and concerns of those who construct them in the world that they confront. This is true of the EHS. It rests on a view of the surroundings that takes as its point of reference what north-western Europe is presumed to have been like between the end of the last ice age and the beginning of human habitation. This is not the nature of Argyrou's ecocentrists, which includes people. Rather, it is Ingold's Modernist view of the environment, the view that drove early national parks in the United States and that is expressed in representations of the Mkomazi Game Reserve and in biodiversity conservation in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. This is an environment that is out there, distinct from humans.

The vision that drives the EHS is not innocent, any more than is the one that drove the American parks. Rather, it is one that elides and denies the Dutch past. Significant parts of land in the Netherlands have been reclaimed from the sea and effectively all of it has been the subject of intensive agricultural and engineering effort for centuries. Perhaps because of that, many in the Netherlands value a worked and productive landscape, one in which centuries of human activity are visible. Their vision of the environment is one that is found in many parts of Europe, a vision of a simple past, pre-industrial or perhaps even ancient, but still a past that is peopled. This is denied by the virtualising vision of the EHS, which elevates space defined by nature over place defined by people's activities. The bulldozers and backhoes that strip the land of its topsoil also strip the land of its links to people, and people of their links to the land, justified by environmental ideology and its ‘principles or higher causes…in whose name sacrifices have to be made’ (Brockington 2004: 414).

As Onneweer observes, this denial is implicit in one aspect of the EHS vision, the notion of a transportable nature that can be stamped on the land anywhere in the country. Such a notion encourages forgetting and physically erasing the histories of people on the land, as these people see the results of their and their ancestors’ efforts to shape their land denigrated and overwritten with a land that knows neither them nor anything peculiar to people and place. And in this, the environmentalism that underlies the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur meets the vast agricultural and urban projects of what James Scott (1998) identifies with High Modernist ideology. Divergence and locality, the social and historical processes that generate them and the differentiations that they