CU-Boulder GEOG 2412 - Social Construction of Nature

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10/10/11$1$Geog 2412: October 11, 2011 Social Construction of Nature Announcements ! WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE? THURSDAY, OCT. 13, 12-1 P.M, UMC 35 Join the Assembly for Sustainability & Equity for an informal discussion about environmental justice, locally and globally, including food justice, environmental racism, and pollution inequalities. UMC 353, Thursdays, Oct. 13-Dec. 1, 12-1 p.m ! Contact: Meghan Montgomery, [email protected] ! http://ecenter.colorado.edu/environmental-justice ! INFORMATION SEMINAR: Global Seminar Tanzania THIS WED Oct 12th. 5 to 6 in the UMC 382 • Contact: Laura DeLuca: [email protected] Lecture Outline ! Finish/Review of Political Economy ! Selling nature to save It ! Examples ! Limits ! Social Construction Perspective: key concepts ! Nature ! Wilderness/national parks ! Discourse and narrative ! power/knowledge ! Examples ! National parks ! desertification10/10/11$2$A Political Economy Take on Market Environmentalism ! We are “selling nature to save it” McAfee, 1999. ! Merely shifting the burden to the poor, disenfranchised abroad (“underpolluted” countries ala Lawrence Summers), but with lots of “natural” wealth, w/o the means to utilize/develop them Examples ! Carbon sequestration: Northern Companies and individuals continue to pollute and ‘buy’ forests in the South ! Ecosystem Services for Biodiversity: Communities are paid to protect forests, biodiversity. Who consumes the nature saved? ! Uneven distribution of costs and benefits: nature becomes a product for some, a cost for others Limits of Political Economy Perspective ! Anthropocentric view of Nature: nature as resource ! Economistic: hard to fit in ethics, eco-centric or bio-centric perspectives ! Reifies capitalism: ignoring other complex relations ! What about social construction?10/10/11$3$A Social Construction Approach ! What is nature? ! Context ! History ! Discourse ! Perspective ! power What is nature? ! Raymond Williams (1976) keywords !! The essence of something!! Biological determinism !! Environmental determinism: Environmental factors determine cultural characteristics and fates !! Ellen Churchill Semple (1911)!! The non-human world!! An inherent force !Nature as the “non-human world”10/10/11$4$Nature as… “The state, condition, or quality that is before, separate from, or outside of society, human history, and volition.” - Robbins et al, 2010: 119 “mother nature at her best” Just across the border… Tourists’ Nature Outside the Reserve? ! A Different Nature ?10/10/11$5$ And This? Social Construction ! Does not deny material existence (of forests, wildlife, etc) ! Exposes the construction of particular kinds of natures, based on ! Ideas ! Culture ! History ! Environmental Discourse ! Narratives ! Power/knowledge Environmental Discourse ! Nature and our knowledge of it is socially constructed ! Powerful discourses that reproduce particular narratives ! Pristine Wilderness (New World, Africa) ! “frameworks that embrace particular combinations of narratives, concepts, ideologies, and signifying practices” (E&S: 122) ! Where does our information about African nature come from? ! Why does it matter?10/10/11$6$Disneyification of Nature ! http://awf.org/content/solution/detail/4506/ ! Romanticization of Maasai ! Recreation of “African nature” in theme parks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_EudJ4ZGfM Impacts of Discourse ! Knowledge/Power ! Prevalence of a particular view to the exclusion of other knowledges ! The discourse becomes truth ! Policies: ! Wilderness: removal of people from ‘natural’ areas ! Continued promotion (and sale!) of certain kinds of nature at the expense of others ! Desertification: settlement of migratory peoples, de-stocking of herds, land use change ! Creation of certain kinds of natures A social Construction Perspective ! Deconstructs Discourse ! Exposes the history, ideology, culture, CONTEXT ! Unveils assumptions ! Critically analyzes assumptions AND sources of knowledge ! Power/Knowledge10/10/11$7$Examples of African Nature ! National Parks in Africa ! Early hunters, colonial powers ! Certain views of African Nature: wild, in need of taming, then to be saved ! Africans: savage ! Desertification ! Colonial powers ! Certain views of Nature: forested, green ! Africans – deforesting, destroyers of the environment Teddy Roosevelt ! Leading Conservationist in the U.S. Leading hunter in Africa The National Park Model ! An island of protected space separated from people ! A tourist destination and place for ecological research ! A model replicated around the world ! The London Convention of 1933--> obliged European powers to set up parks in their colonies, on the Yellowstone Model10/10/11$8$The Yellowstone Model ! March 1, 1872, Yellowstone declared first national park in the world. ! Used by Native Americans for about 11,000 years ! Native Americans removed on basis that: ! Misused the land (hunting, burning) ! Ruined the pristine beauty of the landscape The National Park Ideal ! As a cultural construct ! As historically Euro-American ! ‘sublime’ nature ! ‘pristine’ nature ! Places to visit but not to stay ! Recreating ‘Eden’ ! Africans? ! Missing from the picture … or… ! Nobel savage - closer to nature Cautions with Social Construction view ! Relativism: if all knowledge counts then how do we decide? ! A difference between giving up on science and understanding the social, historical roots of knowledge production ! Denying a material reality? ! co-production of nature and


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CU-Boulder GEOG 2412 - Social Construction of Nature

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