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ECOLOGIES OF COMPARISON
An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong
By TIM CHOY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4952-5
Chapter One
PROBLEMS OF A POLITICAL NATURE
One day in 1995, some indigenous clansmen mounted bulldozers and cleared a six-hectare tract of land in Sha Lo Tung valley, the heart of one of Hong Kong's country parks. The bulldozing captivated onlookers and reporters, who assumed the land was protected after a coalition of environmental NGOs successfully stalled a village-backed proposal to build a low-density housing complex there. Furious at the plan's blocking, with neither approval nor compensation for lost development potential in sight, the clansmen took matters into their own hands. As they flattened trees, uprooted vegetation, and tore through soil, they told observers that they were simply preparing the plot of land for agriculture. If they could not build, they would farm—as their ancestors had done. Environmentalists, meanwhile, decried the event as an attempt to destroy the ecological value of the area, a brazen plot to subvert the region's potential scientific interest and therefore its qualification for environmental protection.
I learned of this event a few years after the fact. I remember the moment vividly. I was conducting field research on the global circulations of environmental expertise in Hong Kong, interviewing Janet, a young British expatriate in Hong Kong who had worked for several years as the spokesperson for a prominent international environmental NGO. When I asked her how local people received her work, Janet nodded quickly, remarking that doing environmental politics in Hong Kong required confronting the perception of environmentalism as a foreign or "Western" political platform. It presented a real problem, she admitted, and environmental organizations, particularly international ones, needed to deal with it more effectively. For instance, had I heard of Sha Lo Tung? The most heart-wrenching thing she had witnessed in her career had taken place there.
Janet had been active in the coalition that mobilized to halt development near Sha Lo Tung. Uniting professional environmental NGOs like Friends of the Earth and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, as well as volunteer organizations like Green Power and Green Lantau Association, the coalition emerged in 1990, when the Hong Kong Lands Department approved the Sha Lo Tung development proposal.
When initially submitted to the Hong Kong government in 1979, the proposal included plans for a nine-hole golf course with a nearby country club and residential developments. Over the next ten years, however, a remarkable thing happened. As the proposal was shuffled between the Sha Lo Tung Development Company and various government departments, it grew significantly in scope. By 1990 the proposed project had evolved into a large campus encompassing an eighteen-hole golf course, a country club, sixty-six low-density houses, and two hundred apartments, all encroaching on protected lands in Pat Sin Leng Country Park, one of Hong Kong's many country parks, by 31 hectares.
Developers are usually not allowed to build in a country park, but the Sha Lo Tung Development Company found a loophole: indigenous partners. Under Hong Kong law, men descended through the male line from residents of villages that were recognized in 1898 by the colonial government hold certain land rights, including inheritable ownership and building rights. The Sha Lo Tung Development Company had sought and gained village partners, buying land from villagers in return for a promise of a cut of the profits. While the proposed housing complex would lie within the borders of the country park, technically, it would not be built on park land. In this way, the company could locate luxury housing in the middle of Pat Sin Leng.
Janet and others in the coalition responded instantly to the Hong Kong government's approval of the proposal, coordinating and publicizing a week of petitions, marches, and lobbying efforts, and their actions bore remarkable fruit. Hong Kong's Agriculture and Fisheries Department, which had initially authorized the development, now backpedaled and admitted that its approval had hinged on a technical error. Officials from the Environmental Protection Department remembered that they still had not received an independent environmental impact assessment requested years ago, and researchers began to evaluate the Sha Lo Tung Valley as a potential Site of Special Scientific Interest. Scientists determined that 65 percent of Hong Kong's dragonfly species inhabited the land around Sha Lo Tung, at least two varieties of which were unique to Hong Kong. If the valley were classified a Site of Special Scientific Interest by the Town Planning Board, it would be off-limits to development. By the mid-1990s environmentalists appeared to have won the day: the golf course and housing complex were stalled. But whatever satisfaction Janet enjoyed from this victory disappeared when Sha Lo Tung villagers mounted their bulldozers and purposely flattened some of the lands—now "habitats"—that she and her colleagues had worked so hard to protect.
I listened raptly to Janet's account, but at her mention of bulldozers, I suddenly realized that I had heard the story before. Shortly after my arrival in Hong Kong, relatives who thought I might appreciate a tale of cultural conflict in environmental controversy had told me about the incident. In fact, I would encounter it several times during my fifteen months in Hong Kong, leading me to wonder how Sha Lo Tung had come to be held so widely as an exemplary case.
Certainly, the bulldozing presented a powerful story. It featured a cast of stereotypical players: environmentalists protecting an undeveloped landscape and some obscure animals from a golf course; villagers decrying the meddling of outsiders; scientists generating new data for use in environmentalist arguments. These players met in a political drama that appeared, as it unfolded, to move toward one outcome but then turned dramatically to another. This plot twist was striking, but what most arrested me came afterward. "And they bulldozed the trees to the ground!" Then nothing.
Silence followed the punch line—an empty beat rousing me from my recollections in Janet's office, a punctuating pause in conversations with family and friends. My interlocutors' eyes would take that beat to scan my face, waiting.
At stake in the silence were two related things. The first was my location and stance: Would I view the example from within or outside environmentalism, from within or outside a commitment to Hong Kong's locality? Would I side with the environmentalists' opposition to building a manicured landscape for elites in a country park, or would I instead advocate the cause of villagers who asserted indigenous land rights? These positions were starkly opposed, and yet they shared a common apprehension of the Sha Lo Tung incident as an instance of cultural and political conflict. That is, both took Sha Lo Tung as an event that revealed the extent to which environmental politics in Hong Kong were inevitably entangled in questions of cultural difference. The only question worth posing, it seemed, was which side one would choose.
It wasn't difficult to guess the right response in different situations. Janet had invoked the Sha Lo Tung incident as an illustration of how tenaciously cultural barriers impede environmentalism in Hong Kong. The villagers' anger exemplified the resentments that she believed were directed toward environmental work. Her story was offered as a tragedy, and the appropriate response, I surmised, was a sympathetic gasp. Many friends and family who had grown up as Cantonese subjects of colonial rule, meanwhile, told the story of Sha Lo Tung with wry smiles. Even if they themselves might have preferred that the valley remain undeveloped, Sha Lo Tung offered a glimpse of local agency, a momentarily effective resistance to environmental NGOs whose most visible representatives were either expatriates like Janet or elites who had been educated overseas. Viewed in this light, environmentalist values derived from origins and commitments beyond Hong Kong's borders.
Still, it was hard to respond properly. Alongside the question of my cultural and political alignment—or embedded in it—were analytic and descriptive questions: What would I take the Sha Lo Tung event to exemplify, and what details of the situation would I highlight to draw Sha Lo Tung into relation with other cases? Would my response draw the Sha Lo Tung Valley into comparison with other natural landscapes and other precious centers of biodiversity? The ecologists arguing for Sha Lo Tung's status as an ecologically significant site were doing this. Would I draw the coalition of NGOs into comparison with other environmental groups and whistleblowers that had challenged governmental oversight in other places, as NGO spokespeople tended to do; or would I emphasize their similarity to transnational environmental coalitions that had historically undervalued local concerns and needs in their single-minded quest to preserve green space? Would I compare the villagers' efforts to develop their land as they saw fit with struggles for indigenous sovereignty, or with the efforts of developers to evade environmental regulation?
All of these comparisons were possible. They also felt familiar, not unlike the frameworks I had learned during graduate school to gain some analytic distance, or a metaview, of environmental science and environmental politics. And therein lay the problem, I realized, as I sat open-mouthed while Janet and others waited for my response. The tools that I relied on for taking a step back from controversy in fact located me in it.
Knowledge Practices in Environmental Politics
This book is about knowledge practices in environmental politics and anthropology. It offers an ethnography of the knowledge practices and cultural political negotiations that underlay a surge of environmentalist activity in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, just before and after the region's handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. I describe some of the details, informal occurrences, and biographic and cultural idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong and its environmental arenas, partly because I think they are important as empirical reminders of how environmentalism as a global phenomenon is constituted precisely through such contingencies, and partly to convey how much the terms of debate in Hong Kong's environmental controversies anticipate our terms of analysis—just as they did in Sha Lo Tung. Engaging in this ethnographic work thus prompts me to consider the limits of certain analytic habits leaned upon by anthropologists, social theorists, and others who are thinking through the messy scales of politics in transnational and transcultural situations.
In what follows, you will read about a mobilization to preserve a species of white dolphin (Sousa chinensis) that became the mascot for the Hong Kong handover in 1997; a struggle to protect an aging fishing village from redevelopment; a tale of orchid kinship; the negotiation of "locally appropriate" expertise in an NGO-village collaboration; environmentalists' narratives of environmental awakening; and efforts to substantiate air quality as an object of political and medical concern. As the book moves through these moments, I will ask you to attend to their techniques and politics of specification, exemplification, and comparison.
Specificity, example, comparison: these are words I rely heavily upon in this book. I hope you will read them not as self-evident concepts but as trigger words inviting reflection on the practices of specification, exemplification, and comparison through which such concepts are made real in the world. These words are meant to direct our attention to the ways in which Hong Kong environmental practices draw and conceptualize connections between places, between species and other species, between forms of life and their environs, between what is considered big and what is considered small, between particulars and universals, between particular cases of a common rule, between specificities and generalizations, between grounded details and ambitious abstractions.
You might read this book as an ethnography of comparison. It offers a close view into some of the comparisons, differentiations, and articulations that characterized environmental, political, and social scientific knowledge production in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and it analyzes the forms these acts of relation-drawing took. Its objective is not simply to offer an anthropological diagnosis of Hong Kong or the environmental problems faced there, but to see whether thinking through these politicized comparative acts might help us develop a method for bypassing certain quandaries encountered by scholars trying to theorize politics on a global scale. In particular, I am interested in the roles of universality and specificity in political mobilization and the possibilities they hold for collaboration through and across difference.
Thus, while not a comparative study in the usual sense—I will not draw comparisons, for instance, between environmental arenas in Hong Kong and those in other parts of the world—in its way, this book is decidedly comparative. It juxtaposes and draws relations between the kinds of comparative acts I witnessed among activists, scientists, laypeople, and others in Hong Kong and the kinds of comparative acts used by anthropologists, social theorists, and political philosophers to make sense of the world. In other words, it compares comparisons.
Writing this book from within the discipline of anthropology, I cannot help thinking of Franz Boas, the nineteenth-century anthropologist who famously repudiated the discipline's "comparative method" of distinguishing and locating cultures in a racially segregating evolutionary ladder. Boas, we should remember, never ceased to think comparatively; he simply demanded that we jettison the assumption that comparative differences denote differences in degree of human evolution. In other words, he cautioned us about the frame in which anthropologists emplotted the various cultural specificities they encountered in their work. A century later, I wonder how Boas would respond when American colleagues express surprise that I would study environmental politics in Hong Kong, ask whether environmental politics have caught on "yet," or seek insight into why certain places are more "environmentally backward" than others. Comparison, my time-traveling companion might remind me, is not in itself the problem. But we need to make explicit the stakes and politics that attend particular lines of comparative thinking, bound up in the very concepts and scales through which, seeing an example, we think to draw a comparison.
Ecologies of Comparison
From the get-go, environmental politics in Hong Kong have been thick with comparisons, explicit and implicit. The first of Hong Kong's environmental advocacy organizations, or "green groups" as they are called after the British fashion, was the Conservancy Association (CA), which opened its office in the colony in the late 1960s with a mission to act as a government watchdog. Little change occurred in the environmental NGO landscape in the following years until the 1980s, when there was a proliferation of new environmental groups. In 1981 the World Wildlife Fund opened a Hong Kong office; a few years later, Friends of the Earth followed suit. Soon after, several smaller groups without international affiliations also emerged, such as Green Power, established in 1988 with a charter to promote green lifestyles, and Green Lantau and Green Peng Chau, conservation groups on two of Hong Kong's outlying islands.
There is a striking uniformity to the names these groups adopted, but against the repeated green backdrop we also see marks of distinction, particularly in the scales of authority and claim. Groups charted to work for causes as broad as "nature," "conservancy," and "earth" vie and coexist with groups mobilized for localities like Peng Chau and Lantau. Already one can see the environmental political landscape marked by crosscutting and competing claims for different scopes—planetary universals and place- based specificities—of conceiving environmental problems and environmental activism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ECOLOGIES OF COMPARISON by TIM CHOY Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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