Paper short abstract:

This paper considers different understandings of kauri forests as expressed by Māori healers, plant pathologists and citizen-science volunteers, while also reflecting on the resulting biosecurity initiatives designed to prevent the dieback triggered by a lethal microorganism.

Paper long abstract:

Kauri (Agathis australis) a tree species native to Aotearoa/New Zealand is one of the world’s largest and longest-living conifer and is regarded by forest ecologists as an ecosystem engineer, capable -over thousands of years- of altering the biochemical composition of the ground. Other 17 species of plants and animals depend on kauri and the type of soil it generates for its survival. Kauri tree is an authentic world maker and kauri forests are among the most impressive of Aotearoa/New Zealand's landscapes. Taken to the brink of extinction by two hundred years of unrestrained logging under colonial rule, recovering patches of kauri forests are now facing a new biological threat, Phytophthora agathidicida. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on healthy and declining kauri forests, this paper is informed by the various research activities, experimental treatments and biosecurity policies undertaken by scientists and Māori elders. This presentation analyses how particular understandings of the landscape are translated into very different conservation and management practices, even when designed with the sole purpose of saving kauri.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore the proliferation of the corridor across Tanzania’s literal and figurative conservation landscape. I present a corridor project case study to show how dominant discourses on landscape-level conservation practice touch down at the local level and manifest in problematic ways.

Paper long abstract:

Where protected areas were once considered self-contained and standalone investments in conservation, for some decades the focus has been shifting towards networks of connected protected areas at a landscape scale. The idea of the conservation corridor has emerged in parallel as a tool or strategy for supporting ecological connectivity – in its simplest, most intuitive incarnation, a stretch of land under some form of protection connecting two existing areas of conservation value, often with a focus on facilitating wild animal movement.

In this paper, I explore the corridor for conservation as a manifestation of landscape-level conservation practice. I present the story of how two villages in south-central Tanzania’s Morogoro region became embroiled in a donor-funded, voluntourism-executed attempt at creating a joint, interdependent village corridor, ostensibly intended to contribute to ecological connectivity between two famous protected areas. Through this case study, I show how dominant discourses on landscape conservation – characterised by the aesthetics of the ‘natural’, a binary understanding of nature/society, and ambiguous appeals to pre-history – filter down from the national level, align with powerful but problematic state-sanctioned planning mechanisms, and ‘touch down’ on the ground in unpredictable ways.

I explore how this contested conservation space remained intractable on one side of the village border while being ‘erased’ on the other. Drawing from network thinking within political ecology, I position this village corridor as a material manifestation conservation’s ‘territorial fix’, but also as a concatenation of personal proclivities, privileged knowledges, spatial planning tools and mundane professional practice.

Paper short abstract:

The Konyak Naga tribe have an inextricable link with the forest and it's resources as it provides them with all the necessary resources. And it becomes an important source of income and livelihood. This has resulted to a well structured traditional practice of using the those resources efficiently.

Paper long abstract:

Abstract:

As per the title indicates, the present work is an attempt to analyse and understand the conservation of forest resources and the traditional practice of using forest resources for a sustainable livelihood among the Konyak Naga of Nagaland. The various art and craft found among the tribe are a source of economy where the raw materials used are usually gathered from the forest. The old traditional practice of tattooing different parts of bodies, the raw materials were used from the forest resources. In the recent years many changes have taken place in the social and cultural front that resulted in giving up most of the many traditional practices such as animism, tattooing, etc.,. In spite of such changes, some traditional practices survived like the traditional practice with regard to forest conservation and has been passed down from generations to generations. The problem is thus to understand how the traditional practice with regard to forest conservation and its resources has its place among the Konyak Naga tribe. The goal is to understand the paradigm of such practice by applying the method of observation and interview and also by supplementing with secondary sources and case study. The result of this study is the discovery of its importance in relation to the identity of the Konyak Naga tribe of Nagaland. By studying the practice and tampering with anthropological perspectives, one’s own understanding can be enriched in the understanding of Konyak Naga culture.

Key Words: Konyak Naga tribe, Forest resources, Conservation, Tradition, Culture.

Paper short abstract:

The whole debate on landscape conservation is often trapped in western notions and categories. This argument is here examined by taking into account Batak ecocosmologies and perceptions of landscape and how these are being negotiated in various contexts.

Paper long abstract:

The satellite image of the Earth photographed from space has brought in a new awareness of the ‘finiteness’ and vulnerability of the planet (Robertson 1992, Sachs 1993, Milton 1996), while enhancing the perception that the World can be ‘scanned’, examined and understood from ‘afar’ and ‘above’ (c.f. Ingold 1993). Implicit in the conservationists' doctrine is a moral commitment to rescue the natural world from the ecological catastrophe by establishing a better 'sustainable society'. Yet it is important to recognise that the proponents of this global change is mainly ‘the West’. By appealing to universal human values, environmental NGOs promote a kind of relativism, which generally neglects the epistemology of those peoples they often claim to represent and stand for. As a result, the whole debate on landscape conservation is often trapped in western notions and categories. Similarly, the argument on whether indigenous people are purposely or unintentionally conservationists is also deceiving, since it tends to establish a fixed criteria or definition of who is the ‘authentic conservationist’ (Gray 1991). These arguments are here being examined by taking into account Batak ecocosmologies and the way in which different perceptions of landscape are being negotiated through the interaction between Batak, conservationists and government agencies. An assessment of Batak ethnography reveals that metaphysical presuppositions underlying people’s understanding of ecological imbalance and species decline are based on culturally specific notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’. If in western cosmologies human society is modelled after an idealised notion of ‘nature’, in Batak cosmology the environment is modelled after an idea of society where humans and the majority of non-human beings, are all endowed with the capacity to act as autonomous subjects. Clearly, the inclusion of these perceptions into the global environmental discourse might be difficult or, at least, problematic.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how border making processes materialize controversial conservation practices in the Western Taiga in northern Mongolia. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among reindeer herders, it discusses how territorialization turns the boundless Taiga landscape into an "abstract space."

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore how border making processes materialize controversial conservation practices in the Western Taiga region in northernmost Mongolia. I focus on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken among the Tsaatan reindeer herding community and draw on indigenous perceptions of the Taiga landscape as a boundless homeland (Pedersen 2009). To the Tsaatan, the Taiga is a highly complex, heterogenous, and animate environment that embraces all living entities (Küçüküstel 2021) such as spirits, humans, and non-human animals. This boundless landscape is tied together through paths and bonds invigorated through movement. Since the establishment of the Tengis-Shishged National Park, however, Tsaatan households have to face severe challenges. Profound conservationist interferences such as the division of the Taiga into conservation zones through borders cuts the ties that are essential to this more-than-human environment: it is transformed into an “abstract space”, following a linear and homogenous vision of the land that opposes how environments are experienced by the people who inhabit them (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). In fact, through their daily interaction with the landscape, reindeer herders experience ecological disturbances such as decreasing pasture quality and herd health, which they associate with the national park borders. In order to critically reflect on how these borders disrupt the landscape, I discuss how processes of territorialization resemble what Ingold (2009, 29) has called the “logic of inversion”, which “turn[s] the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed.”