Abstract
Scientific understanding of the natural world provides a basis for environmental policies around the world. Science, however, describes the way the world works, rather than prescribing what humans should do. Environmental policies arise from human interests and values, rather than from science itself. The diversity of human interests and values means that environmental policies are often a matter of political contestation. In this contestation, unexpected coalitions of interest sometimes arise. This chapter examines policies relating to nature conservation, with special attention to Indonesia, to demonstrate the diverse range of interests and values that can sometimes coalesce over specific environmental issues.
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Notes
- 1.
Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1999).
- 2.
Michael Hart, Hubris: the troubling science, economics and politics of climate change (Ottawa: Compleat Desktops Publishing, 2015).
- 3.
Gary D. Rosenberg, The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Boulder CO. Geological Society of America, 2009), p. 235; Mark V. Barrow, Nature’s ghosts: confronting extinction from the age of Jefferson to the age of ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 4.
Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski, A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), p. 355.
- 5.
For a broader discussion of these issues, see Richard G. Pearson, ‘Reasons to Conserve Nature’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31, no 5, (May 2016), pp. 366–371.
- 6.
David W. Pearce, ‘The value of biodiversity’, in Alan T. Bull (ed.), Microbial Diversity and Bioprospecting (Washington DC: ASM Press, 2004), pp. 469–475. See also Sungsoon Fang and Ronald M. Evans, ‘Microbiology: Wealth management in the gut’, Nature 500 (29 August 2013), pp. 538–539.
- 7.
Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic appreciation of nature’, British Journal of Aesthetics 3 no 3 (1963), pp. 195–209.
- 8.
It has been claimed, however, that the oldest national park in the world is the Bogd Khan Uul in Mongolia, founded in 1783. See Martin Price, Mountains: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 79.
- 9.
For further discussion of this issue, see Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 86.
- 10.
The term is first attested to in General Technical Report PSW-GTR (Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1978), p. 78.
- 11.
Pearson, ‘Reasons to Conserve Nature’, p. 366.
- 12.
See for instance ‘11 Scientific Reasons Why Being in Nature is Relaxing’, Mental Flosshttp://mentalfloss.com/article/60632/11-scientific-reasons-why-being-nature-relaxing, accessed 12 October 2017.
- 13.
See Robert Cribb, The politics of environmental protection in Indonesia (Clayton [Vic.]: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988).
- 14.
Katie M. Scharf, MarÃa E. Fernández-Giménez, Batjav Batbuyan and Sumiya Enkhbold, ‘Herders and hunters in a transitional economy: the challenge of wildlife and rangeland management in post-socialist Mongolia’, in Johan T. Du Toit, Richard Kock and James C Deutsch, eds, Wild rangelands: conserving wildlife while maintaining livestock in semi-arid ecosystems (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 326.
- 15.
Cribb, The politics of environmental protection in Indonesia.
- 16.
J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: a new look at life on earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 17.
The definition of Indigenous peoples is itself contentious, but I here refer to the identification of Indigenous peoples as the survivors of pre-colonial populations, now a minority in their former lands, and retaining both significant aspects of their former cultures and, crucially, a special attachment to their lands. On these issues, see Henry Minde, Indigenous Peoples: Self-determination, Knowledge, Indigeneity (Delft: Eburon, 2008).
- 18.
There is vigorous debate over the scale of ecological change, including potentially the extinction of megafauna, brought about by the settlement of Australia by the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal Australians around 65,000 years ago. For a taste of the debate, see Stephen Wroe et al., ‘Reply to Brook et al.: No empirical evidence for human overkill of megafauna in Sahul’, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) 110 no 36 (2013 Sep 3): E3369.
- 19.
For a discussion of the complexities of these issues, see Anne Ross, Kathleen Pickering Sherman, Jeffrey G Snodgrass, Henry D. Delcore and Richard Sherman, Indigenous peoples and the collaborative stewardship of nature: knowledge binds and institutional conflicts (London: Routledge, 2016).
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Cribb, R. (2019). Nature Conservation and Its Bedfellows: The Politics of Preserving Nature. In: James, H. (eds) Population, Development, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2101-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2101-6_3
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