Green Development?

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Once sustainability seemed a rather edgy and challenging concept: messy and controversial, but also aspirational.  Michael Jacobs pointed out in a memorable exchange with Wilfred Beckerman in Environmental Values in 1995 that sustainable development and sustainability were essentially ethico-religious terms, a bit like social justice or democracy.  They expressed key ideas about how society (and the economy) should be governed, albeit in a way that skated over the intractable political ecology of wealth, power, consumption and environmental change.

It seems they are not like that any more.  Everybody, from rock bands to corporations, claims to be green.  The ‘green economy’ is booming, with banks and other businesses trading in everything from pollution permits to carbon derivatives.  After the deeply disappointing ‘Rio+20’meeting in June 2012, seasoned observer Fred Pearce observed in New Scientist ‘this is how civilizations end … not with a bang but with a whimper’. Continue reading →

Diva species: flagships that sink the fleet

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Take any introductory class in conservation biology and you are bound to learn about umbrella species and flagship species; two of the main tools in the conservationist’s toolbox. Umbrella species occur when the conservation of one species (the umbrella) leads indirectly to the conservation of other species, usually because the umbrella species needs a lot of space. Flagship species are those that have particular resonance with an important conservation audience, such as donors, tourists or local people, allowing the flagship to generate resources and support that can be used to conserve many other species.

So far, so much like a conservation biology textbook. But are things always this simple? A lot has been written on these concepts and their practice, and I don’t make any claim to be familiar with it all. But I do have some first-hand experience of a situation in which the flagships and umbrellas began to look like they might get pretty leaky. Continue reading →

Biodiversity is in the eye of the beholder

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While I was conducting my PhD research at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, I spent a lot of time talking to local people about ‘the forest’ (or eihamba in the local language, Rukiga). My interviews were about the benefits and costs of mountain-gorilla tracking tourism and conservation for local people, and the forest came up all the time. This was not surprising – the forest is home to the gorillas and other species of conservation concern, and also plays a major role in the livelihoods of local people. But something was wrong. As I wrote up my interviews in my room every night, I noticed that in some cases the same respondent had been very positive and very negative about the forest in the same interview. This often seemed entirely contradictory.

After a lot of thinking and discussions with my supervisors it finally dawned on me that the word ‘eihamba’ was being used to mean two very different things. On the one hand, it meant the physical forest, including the species within it and the resources it provided (or took away in the case of crop-raiding animals). On the other hand, it meant the institution of the national park, the boundary of which almost exactly matches the edge of the physical forest (which of course is no coincidence). The same respondent could talk in positive terms about benefits of gorilla tourism that they attributed to the forest as a physical entity, and then about the costs of conservation that they blamed on the forest as an institution. In both cases they used the same word – forest. Continue reading →