3 Conservation and imagination: clash on environment Despite the fact that both sets of contributors were to address the issue of ‘conser-

Box 6.3 Conservation and imagination: clash on environment Despite the fact that both sets of contributors were to address the issue of ‘conser-

vation’ one was left with the impression that they were speaking a very different language.

The Western environmentalists largely concentrated on the destructive impact of human activity. They lamented the disappearance of natural habitat, the loss of areas of wilderness . . . Their prescriptions echoed this standpoint. Land should be set aside in national parks where human interference was kept to a minimum. More resources should be spent on policing these areas, on preserving the wilderness that Africa can offer the rest of the world.

13111 One ecologist . . . warned Zimbabweans to beware the evils of development. Nature, he claimed, needs to be protected from economic exploitation so that society can enjoy the aesthetic and recreational benefits of an unspoiled countryside.

By contrast, Zimbabwean participants seemed to see no inherent contradiction between conservation and development . . . There was very little talk by local environmentalists of the recreational and aesthetic or the fact that the vast majority of visitors who frequent protected areas come from outside the continent. ‘Conservation for us,’ claimed one Zimbabwean, ‘means the wise management of natural resources for economic use. It does not mean the absence of use at all costs.’

. . . arguments for a preservationist approach to the environment and the exclu- sion of human activities from protected areas are unlikely to find much support amongst African populations. The history of early conservation in Africa is indis- tinguishable from the history of colonialism and in particular the eviction of indige- nous communities from land and resources that they once enjoyed.

In Africa . . . where the majority of people still depend for their subsistence on agricultural production . . . the land and its wild animals are not a source of aesthetic enjoyment but a resource to be managed so that people can survive.

As one Zimbabwean environmentalist concluded: ‘It is impossible to talk of wildlife preservation to a farmer whose fields have been raided by elephant and buffalo. Unless there is some tangible economic return to support his family, wildlife is a threat not an asset. When Western environmentalists talk to us about the aesthetic and recreational appeal of our landscape and the need to preserve our wild animals in their natural habitat, we wonder if they would continue to have such ideas if they shared our poverty. For most Africans the land is not an arena for leisure pursuits but a means of livelihood and survival.’

Source: McIvor (1995: 35)

46). Although organisations such as Greenpeace and Earth First have not really entered the debate over tourism, and indeed as Table 6.1 suggests, may wish to ignore tourism as an environmental problem, the relationship to new forms of tourism of the activities undertaken by organisations such as Earthwatch, The International Ecotourism Society, Programme for Belize and Coral Cay Conservation is clearly identifiable.

There are three overarching conclusions that can be made from this review of the different streams of environmentalism. First, when we talk of ‘environmentalism’, we are talking ostensibly about First World perceptions of environment, ecology and nature,

11111 and in particular the views formulated and advanced by organisations based in the First

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World and disproportionately represented in the new middle classes. As Table 6.1 suggests, these environmental streams have also permeated debates over contemporary tourism and the formulation of supposedly sustainable forms of travel. Second, the idea of the geographical imagination is a useful means of understanding how and why elements such as the ‘environment’ and ‘conservation’ are seen in radically different ways by different groups or interests and how certain interpretations are more powerful than others, and have the ability to impose themselves on others. This is especially important in the context of tourism, as the perceptions of local people and communities of their environments can be dramatically different from those of the environmental groups that seek to protect them and the tourists that visit them. Third, in a geograph- ical sense, environmentalism more than any other political theory has drawn in both global and local dimensions. We are asked to think not only of our local environments but to consider the ways in which these environments are part of a global ecosystem (see, for instance, Sachs, 1992a, 1992b). It is to the consequences of this that we turn next.

Environmentalism and power

In Chapter 3 it was argued that environmentalism and ecology are identified as one of the ways in which power is transmitted, and some critics invoke neo-colonialism as a way of representing this and indicating the co-existence of a number of different forms of colonialism. It was suggested that thinking about environmentalism and sustainability, at least in part, as one such form of neo-colonialism has produced new ways of formu- lating the contemporary debates on environmental issues. The ways in which this has been applied to the development of tourism were also suggested.

Box 6.4, concerning the impact of what Daltabuit and Pi-Sunyer call ‘new, “soft path”’ tourism (and which they also refer to as a ‘more intensified ecological tourism’ (1990: 10)) on the indigenous Maya communities in the Yucatán region of southern Mexico, helps to illustrate these points. The authors assess the fortunes of local people in supplementing the now well-established mass tourism industry based upon Cancún with the emergence of these new forms of tourism. They refer to ‘new corre- lations of power’ and the effects of ‘hegemonic’ metropolitan cultures. Their work is also of importance as they refer to the ‘environmental movement as a political force and powerful cultural construct’ (1990: 10). One case study is of Coba, a village situated close to the remains of a major Classic Maya metropolis in Quintana Roo, Mexico, outside the general orbit of tourism until recently and centre of what Daltabuit and Pi-Sunyer call the phenomenon of ‘archaeotourism’. The story of Coba is a familiar one: the declaration of a national park, the expropriation of local lands, the building of

a large and comfortable foreign-owned hotel complex (Villas Arqueológicas) and uni- lateral solutions imposed upon local people who are excluded from any processes of decision-making.

Doubts must also be raised over the nature of environmental concerns and how these are translated into practice. A global concern for the environment and the call to ‘think globally, act locally’, while lofty and perhaps laudable in practice, have a tendency to become a crusade (to ‘think globally, impose locally’) that is devoid of notions of social justice and a concern for local people’s perceptions. As such it echoes top-down approaches to development. Take, for example, an invitation by the World Land Trust (WLT), issued in 2001, to purchase an acre of wilderness in Patagonia. On the reverse side of the invitation is an endorsement from Sir David Attenborough and an explana- tion that ‘The WLT, together with its partners, have already helped save 300,000 acres

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