Who owns nature?

Who Owns Nature?
by Philippe DESCOLA

International policies for the protection of the Environment rest on a very specific conception of nature, which appeared in Europe during the Enlightenment. This conception is far from being shared by all the peoples of the earth, who value different cosmological principles. According to Philippe Descola, the preservation of biodiversity can only becomefully effective if it takes into account this plurality in the understanding of nature.

At the instigation of international organisations such as UNESCO, the World Conservation Union or the United Nation Environment Program, the number of protected areas going under the heading of nature reserves has risen dramatically over the past three decades. Just over 100.000 land and marine sites fall inthat category amounting to 19 millions km2 or thereabout, that is equal to the aggregated areas of the continental USA and Canada. This growth in the zones excluded from exploitation is as recent as it is spectacular since, as from 1973 their surface has quadrupled. In spite of the differences in status between these protected areas, and the highly variable level of protection actually afforded bythem as a result, these special zones are cause that a non negligible part of the world’s earth surface, approximately 12% may currently be considered as a sort of public asset. The whole question is to know precisely who is the public which owns this asset and who benefits from it. Indeed conflicts of ownership are many and there is nothing new to them. The case of Yellowstone National Park, thefirst natural reserve of modern times, is archetypal of what later happened elsewhere. Created in 1872 in the Northern Rockies on the hunting grounds traditionally roamed by the Shoshones, the Bannocks and the Nez Percés, it is often presented as having been empty of American Indian population

when it was created. Official lore has it that those tribes were filled with a superstitious fear ofthe geysers the Park is famous for. Nothing is further from the truth as those geysers were the background to seasonal rituals. What is more, a group of about 400 Tukadikas, a Northern Shoshone branch, dwelt permanently within the Park perimeter and was transported manu militari about 10 years after its creation towards the Wind River Reservation in an inglorious episode carefully kept out of thebrochures produced by the National Park Service1. Not a day passes without this primitive conflict being played out between city elites desirous to protect the sublime beauty and the famed reserves of biodiversity of the landscape and local peoples sentenced drastically to kerb their use of lands they have inhabited often for centuries, indeed to abandon them for good. Here Maasai are preventedfrom grazing their herds in Serengeti Park and turned into a photo-safari attraction along with the giraffes and the elephants, there, the Jawoyns from Australia’s North-Western Territory are obliged to fight a long drawn legal battle to recover their sovereignty over Nitmiluk National Park. Elsewhere, squads of militant ecologists from Boston or Karlsruhe explain to a few hundred Southern ChiapasLacandons that they have got to quit assarting to grow corn in their milpas so as not to jeopardize the Montes Azules biosphere reserve. Everywhere arguments flare up around the rights of one or other community to claim for itself the use of this or that section of the human environment. In fact these conflicts revolve around two questions, closely related but rarely framed in explicit terms: Whoowns Nature and whom is it to be protected for? I shall address them in turn before outlining a possible way around them. Two contrasting types of answers are usually proposed to the first question. First it is possible to insist that only nature owns nature, that it has an inherent value, unrelated to its usefulness to humans and that it must be protected accordingly in and for itself. However...