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Overview
Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nationwide who suffered from degraded environments and faced accusations that they were destroying nature. Celia Lowe argues that biodiversity, in 1990s Indonesia, implied a particular convergence of nature, nation, science, and identity that made Indonesians' mapping of the concept distinct within transnational practices of nature conservation at the time.
Lowe recounts the efforts of Indonesian biologists to document the species of the Togean Islands, to "develop" Togean people, and to turn this archipelago off the coast of Sulawesi into a national park. Indonesian scientists aspired to a conservation biology that was both internationally recognizable and politically effective in the Indonesian context. Simultaneously, Lowe describes the experiences of Togean Sama people who had their own understandings of nature and nation. To place Sama and scientist into the same conceptual frame, Lowe studies Sama ideas in the context of transnational thought rather than local knowledge.
In tracking the practice of conservation biology in a postcolonial setting, Wild Profusion explores what in nature can count as important and for whom.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400849703 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2013 |
| Series: | In-Formation |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wild Profusion
Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian ArchipelagoIntroduction
BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE WILD PROFUSION
[The naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is, therefore, an important object, which governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonized by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where they may be available for study and interpretation. -Alfred Russel Wallace, "On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago"
IN APRIL OF 1996, I hiked through the upland forest that runs along the narrow central crest of Malenge Island with two biologists from Jakarta, Yakup and Budi, and with Pak Ahmad, a local ranger hired by the scientists to work at their research station, Camp Uemata. We were there to collect new forms of herpefauna: lizards, snakes, and frogs. Together we scrambled up muddy slopes, grabbing hold of verdant branches and shrubs to pull us up, breathing hard. We scanned the trees for pythons and the ground for lizards. In the clearings we stopped to gaze at the vistas of the coast, and we rested against the architecturally fabulous buttress roots of the forest's huge dipterocarps. When we began to be bitten by red ants, which never seemed to take very long, we would move again, eyes fixed on the trail and underbrush, poking through bogs with sticks, constantly on the lookout for tiny eyes peering back at us.
Species uniqueness and endemism were the salient features of place delimiting a Togean nature the biologists wanted to claim as "biodiverse." To do this they needed to observe, record, and document species that were only found in the Togean Islands. Yakup spotted some lizards with blue tails that he suspected were "new to science." We dove with our hands out-to the left and to the right of the trail-trying to grasp the elusive electric-blue tails. We placed the lizards in plastic bags with air holes to let them breathe, although later they would end up in a formaldehyde bath, and Budi would send them traveling to the Smithsonian Institution for confirmation of their uniqueness. Laboratories in Washington, D.C., and other EuroAmerican scientific institutions were important for determining the specificity of this place and for confirming Yakup and Budi's acts of discovery and nature-making.
We passed through Budi's plots marked off with strings, where he had kept track of three thousand trees of various sizes for the past several years. Through his marking, measuring, and counting, he was developing a scientific record of the trees in the forest. He knew their species names, when they would flower, and how fast they were growing. Further on down the trail, we descended into a cave that Yakup had found. The ceiling was lined with hanging bats awakened by our movements, and the floor was layered in guano. Yakup reminded me that it is not only human agency that is capable of transforming a place-bats are important for pollinating the trees of the Malenge forest. When we continued on Budi noticed a striped spider, ten centimeters long, hanging in its web between some leaves and vines. He took a photograph, a close-up still life that would later trigger memories of the walk, coding this place as nature and reminding us of its aesthetic perfection down to its smallest details.
In our movements through the Togean landscape, scientists' stories of species endemism vied with the narratives of plants and animals Togean people wanted to tell. Whereas biologists were most cognizant of the fig trees that provide food for the Togean macaque, an unusual monkey living on the island, Pak Ahmad was aware that the dipterocarps scientists value as signs of a "wild" forest are excellent trees for canoe-building. Walking along the path, Ahmad, who was born on Malenge Island, told us of snakes. Togean pythons have been known to eat deer, pigs, and even small children. Sliding his hand rapidly through the air, he showed us how a snake strikes. He and several others had once rescued a boy in a garden. A python had wrapped itself around the child and was beginning to take his breath away when they discovered him. They unwound the snake, tail first, before attacking it with their machetes.
Ahmad's ways of knowing Togean flora and fauna called biodiverse nature into question. Bees will pollinate and snakes will wind, yet what is deemed important in a landscape depends on who is looking. Biologists found monkeys and lizards intellectually gratifying, while Sama people found the monthly flowering of the sea grasses-an event overlooked by Togean biologists-to be aesthetically alluring. Natures are "made" at the intersection of humans with their particular social histories, and plants and animals with their unique evolutionary and ecological histories. Neither "science" nor "society" will tell us all the interesting things one might want to know about these natures. To proceed further, one must travel along a path between the human and the wild profusion. This is the path we will follow here.
The Togean Islands and Biodiversity
The Togean Islands a small archipelago in the middle of the eastward facing Gulf of Tomini, harbor a volcano, which erupted as recently as 1983, and six raised limestone islands. Small, craggy, thinly soiled islets bordering the shores of the main islands create anchorages, mangrove-lined boat passages, and resource collecting sites for Togean Island peoples. Small settlements intermittently punctuate the shoreline; houses built from cement, wood, and other forest materials lie at the edges of the land, or on stilts over the fringing coral substrate. There are no telephones or newspapers, and the only road is in Wakai town on Batu Daka Island. Coconut palm and vegetable gardens spread from coasts into the interiors. Forests in the midst of these encroaching cultivations supply Togean people with canoe timber, sago palm, medicinal plants, and other useful vegetation. Togean forests are also home to many insects, herpefauna, and mammals of interest to biologists, who are concerned by evidence of forest clearing. Upon first glance, many signs of habitation in the landscape are hidden, however. One tends to notice only the overwhelming verdancy.
Surrounding Togean waters reflecting a violent equatorial sun contain coral reefs, sand banks, sea grass beds, and azure depths. Togean people collect subsistence and market-oriented marine goods in these waters, of which fish and sea cucumber (trepang, S:bale) are the most important. Beyond the reef, in deeper waters, pelagic fish school, drawing local fishers and commercial boats from the mainlands of North and Central Sulawesi. Ferry boats make irregularly scheduled rounds between the islands and the mainland towns of Gorantalo, Poso, and Ampana. To the south of the islands, the mountains of Central Sulawesi are visible. To the north, only the waters of the Gulf of Tomini are in view. Biologists are concerned with the health of Togean reefs and waters. People have fished the surrounding reefs with both dynamite and cyanide, and several kinds of sea creatures, like the Napoleon wrasse fish, are threatened with local extirpation. But when one looks out at the expanse of Togean waters, coral reefs, ferry routes, and fishing sites are obscured. One notices, at first, only various shades of blue.
What do these expanses of primary colors interspersed with rare habitations offer us as a site for understanding biodiversity and its conservation? The term "biodiversity" emerged as a new mode of biological and social organization in the United States in the mid-1980s. Coming, as it did, after several decades of heightened attention to environmental risk, biodiversity, as a particular framing of nature and culture, began to reorganize earlier notions of natural history, wilderness, taxonomy, ecology, natural variety, species, and the like. Biodiversity was not so much a solution to the problem of environmental risk, however, as its problematization. It instigated a new form of critical inquiry into the relationship between entities conceived of as "nature" and "the human." Thrust into the light was, on the one hand, nature, understood as the linkages between genetic variation, species populations, communities and ecosystems, and land and marinescapes and, on the other hand, humanity, with its ability to instigate what biologist Michael Soulé has termed the "sixth great extinction."
Simultaneously, biological science itself was restructured around the biodiversity problematic. The task of protecting and restoring biodiversity was articulated with the sciences of population genetics, evolutionary biology, systematics, landscape ecology, and the study of ecosystems to form the new field of conservation biology. Unlike nineteenth-century natural history, or twentieth-century wildlife biology, conservation biology is self-consciously "mission-oriented" and sees itself as comparable to medical research in its goal of intervening in ailing systems. Conservation biology is unusual among the natural science disciplines in that its value orientation-identified in terms of biodiversity's utilitarian and inherent worth-is explicit. This new science sees its object of study as threatened, and describes the state of plants and animals in terms of crisis. As a scientific practice, it is focused on intervention and is self-consciously directed toward solving its urgencies.
Biodiversity also encompasses an important geographic dimension. Conceptualized through the variety and uniqueness of species, diverse life is not uniformly distributed. Rather, regions with large numbers of species, where many unique life forms are found, tend to be concentrated in the tropics. Conservation biologists recognize roughly twenty-five "hot-spots" as having this hyperdiversity. Since most hotspots are located in the rainforests and on the coral reefs of the global South, the peoples of tropical nations-both non-EuroAmerican biologists, and those who live in close proximity to tropical flora and fauna-have taken on a particular significance within the biodiversity problematic.
Several elements have made this particular assemblage of nature and culture under the sign of biodiversity possible. First, biologists observe an exponential reduction in the diversity of species forms across the globe.
They identify habitat loss, degradation, fragmentation, the introduction of non-native species, and over harvesting as metacauses of a new rate of extinction. While a conservative estimate of the current rate of species loss is 27,000 species per year, far more species are considered endangered, vulnerable, or rare (Wilson 1992:280). Conservation biologists use the language of apocalypse, hemorrhaging, and holocaust to describe the decline in the abundance and variety of life forms.
The emergence of biodiversity as a new form has also coincided with the global rise of the nongovernmental organization (NGO). NGOs are non-state institutions that nevertheless affect policy and aim to transform debates across national borders. Keck and Sikkink (1998) have described the influence of what they call "transnational advocacy networks." Activists forming these transnational networks (scientists along with women's, labor, and human rights advocates) are motivated primarily by values rather than economic gain. Networks of scientists and others concerned with the value of biodiversity and its loss link activists across borders; the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Conservation International (CI), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) are three of the largest advocacy NGOs forming the institutional backbone of this transnational assemblage.
Further, biodiversity has emerged at a contingent moment in postcolonial history. Under the logics of natural history and wildlife conservation (at least until the early 1990s), EuroAmerican experts held the important positions of authority in scientific nature-making projects across the tropical world. This condition is increasingly rare, however. For example, when I first began working in Indonesia in 1994, the Jakarta offices of WWF, CI, and TNC all had EuroAmerican administrators, while by the time I left in 1997 each organization had hired an Indonesian director to oversee its domestic programs. Positions of leadership and authority in field biology and conservation management are now occupied by scientists and other experts from the South. The conjuncture of biodiversity's tropical geography, the emergence of indigenous scientific expertise, and increased assertions of domestic bureaucratic authority in the realm of nature conservation, have shaped the particular understanding of biodiversity that this book will explore in detail.
Biodiversity conservation in the 1990s often proposed a particular solution to the problem of nature and the human in the form of the Integrated Conservation and Development Program (ICDP). Noting the ubiquity of conservation failures, the ICDP was premised on an understanding that previous efforts at wildlife conservation had not taken into sufficient consideration the needs of the people who live around conservation areas. These needs were interpreted in rational economic terms (by the biologists and economists who environmental NGOs tend to employ) as the ability to derive income from surrounding natural areas. If alternative income sources could be found, the theory went, then people would stop hunting, fishing, gathering, felling, burning, planting, and all the other activities that threaten rare plants and animals in and around protected areas. Increased access to markets, land privatization, and ecotourism were key components of this neoliberal solution.
As a cultural formation, biodiversity conservation can be tracked globally. In order to understand conservation in a generative way, however, rather than as a set of established discourses, it is necessary to graph it at its specific sites of production. WildProfusion is an ethnographic account of the rationalities surrounding a particular instance of mid-1990s biodiversity conservation. It concerns how biodiverse nature was made in the Togean Islands of Sulawesi, Indonesia between 1988 and 1998, how the main actors in the Togean conservation project (Indonesian biologists and Togean people) constituted and were constituted through projects of nature-making, and how the nation was critical to both the particularity of the Togean biodiversity project itself and to the subjectivities formed within the context of Indonesian science. Examining the ensuing configuration in a specific locality allows us to understand the emergent rationalities and identities, and the multiple natures, resulting from the project to conserve Togean biodiversity.
The Togean Islands first appeared as a potential conservation area in the early 1980s. Following upon traces in the scientific literature written by late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century natural historians who had documented bird and coral varieties there, Indonesian and Euro-American scientists arrived to establish the potential of the site for a nature reserve. Then in the early 1990s, through the work of conservation biologist Jatna Supriatna and his students, the Togean research station, Camp Uemata, was built and an enduring project of conservation research and management commenced. Two institutions, the new Indonesian Foundation for the Advancement of Biological Sciences (IFABS) based in Jakarta, and Conservation International based in Washington, D.C., then jointly set their sites on turning the islands into a national park.
I call this work a multisited ethnography in a single locality because of what the Togean Islands as a singular site can reveal of the travels of cultural meanings, objects, and identities across wider fields of engagement. Although biodiversity was a transnational practice, it took on shape and specificity through the work of Indonesian biologists to document species and implement a program of conservation and development, and the islands and their biophysical properties always meant different things to different people. The project collapses easy definitions of "nature" since Indonesian scientists, EuroAmerican biologists, commercial traders, bureaucrats, and diverse Togean people each engaged with Togean land and marinescapes in discontinuous ways-producing the archipelago as contrastive and contested "sites." Rather than the "conventional mise-en-sce'ne of ethnographic research" (Marcus 1995), the Togean Islands should be understood as a locality generative of cosmopolitan imaginings of science, nation, and biodiversity conservation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wild Profusion by Celia Lowe Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiAcknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xvii
INTRODUCTION: Between the Human and the Wild Profusion 1
PART ONE: Diversity as Milieu 27
CHAPTER ONE: Making the Monkey 33
CHAPTER TWO: The Social Turn 53
PART TWO: Togean Cosmopolitics 75
CHAPTER THREE: Extraterrestrial Others 81
CHAPTER FOUR: On the (Bio)logics of Species and Bodies 106
PART THREE: Integrating Conservation and Development 129
CHAPTER FIVE: Fishing with Cyanide 135
CHAPTER SIX: The Sleep of Reason 154
Appendix: Scientific, Military, and Commercial Explorations in the Togean Islands and Vicinity: 1680-1999 167
Notes 171
References 181
Index 193
What People are Saying About This
"Wild Profusion is a beautifully crafted ethnography of natures in the making in the Togean Islands of Indonesia. Through lively prose and a brilliantly executed analytics of power, Lowe takes the reader into the complex world of biodiversity conservation in action. Along the way, we meet Indonesian scientists who promote national development projects and negotiate their relations to Euro-American conservation experts, Togean subjects who struggle to assert their own place in the landscape of biodiversity knowledge, and all of the flora and fauna brought to stunning visibility in the dream world of a national park. Lowe also provides us with a bold philosophical meditation on questions of universalism and the particular, the natural and the social, the nation and the colony. Wild Profusion will quickly emerge as a classic text in the new ethnography of conservation science and contested environmentalisms."—Ralph Litzinger, Duke University"This is an extraordinary book: both eloquent and elegantly argued. It presents a clear and compelling argument about 'reason' at the boundaries of the West, and striking portraits of scientists and lay people working at this boundary."—Anna L. Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Friction and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
This is an extraordinary book: both eloquent and elegantly argued. It presents a clear and compelling argument about 'reason' at the boundaries of the West, and striking portraits of scientists and lay people working at this boundary.
— Anna L. Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of "Friction" and "In the Realm of the Diamond Queen"
Wild Profusion is a beautifully crafted ethnography of natures in the making in the Togean Islands of Indonesia. Through lively prose and a brilliantly executed analytics of power, Lowe takes the reader into the complex world of biodiversity conservation in action. Along the way, we meet Indonesian scientists who promote national development projects and negotiate their relations to Euro-American conservation experts, Togean subjects who struggle to assert their own place in the landscape of biodiversity knowledge, and all of the flora and fauna brought to stunning visibility in the dream world of a national park. Lowe also provides us with a bold philosophical meditation on questions of universalism and the particular, the natural and the social, the nation and the colony. Wild Profusion will quickly emerge as a classic text in the new ethnography of conservation science and contested environmentalisms.
— Ralph Litzinger, Duke University