Fields Of Power, Forests Of Discontent: Culture, Conservation, And The State In Mexico
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
For a brief time in the 1990s, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southern Mexico was heralded as a vital example of melding local management, forest conservation, and economic development. Haenn now describes the rise and fall of this conservation program to examine conservation at the intersection of national-international agendas and local political-economic interests, considering conservation's encounter with people's everyday lives--and how those experiences affect environmental management strategies.
From the Inside Flap
Enduring differences between protected areas and local people have produced few happy compromises, but at the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the southern Mexican state of Campeche, government agents and thousands of local people collaborated on an expansive program to alleviate these tensions--a conservation-development agenda that aimed to improve local people's standard of living while preserving natural resources. Calakmul is home to numerous endangered species and raises a common question. How can environmental managers and citizens reconcile competing ecological desires? For a brief time in the 1990s, collaborations at Calakmul were heralded as a beacon of hope in the tropical forests, a vital example of melding local management, forest conservation, and economic development. In Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent, Nora Haenn questions the rise and fall of this conservation program to examine conservation at the intersection of national-international agendas and local political-economic interests. While other assessments of such programs have typically focused on why they do or do not succeed, Haenn instead considers conservation's encounter with people's everyday lives--and how those experiences affect environmental management strategies. Haenn explores conservation and development from two perspectives: first regionally, to look at how people used conservation to create a new governing entity on a tropical frontier once weakly under national rule; then locally, focusing on personal histories and aspects of community life that shape people's daily lives, farming practices, and immersion in development programs--even though those programs ultimately fail to resolve economic frustrations. She identifies how key political actors, social movements, and identity politics contributed to the instability of the Calakmul alliance. Drawing on extensive interviews with Reserve staff, including its director, she connects regional trends to village life through accounts of disputes at ejido meetings and the failure of ejido development projects. In the face of continued difficulty in creating a popular conservation program in Calakmul, Haenn uses lessons from people's lives--history, livelihood, village organization, expectations--to argue for a "sustaining conservation," one that integrates social justice and local political norms with a new, more robust definition of conservation. In this way, Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent goes beyond local ethnography to encourage creative discussion of conservation's impact on both land and people. "A pioneering analysis of the incommensurability of local and global views of environmental conservation and of the challenges of translation between them . . .This is one of the most nuanced efforts I know of to describe the problems of community-based conservation." --Michael Dove, Yale University "One of the great strengths of Haenn's text is that no one factor emerges as the most important: she makes it clear that there is nothing neat and tidy about what happened at Calakmul. And she does not conclude pessimistically, but rather with a series of ideas about how conservation with people might move forward. . . . This book will be of interest to people from a variety of disciplines--anthropology, geography, environmental studies, Latin American studies--[but] the international conservation community will find this a critically important text." --Melissa Johnson, Southwestern University
Fields Of Power, Forests Of Discontent: Culture, Conservation, And The State In Mexico
Fields Of Power, Forests Of Discontent: Culture, Conservation, And The State In Mexico,Nora Haenn,University of Arizona Press,0816523991,Economic aspects,Environmental Conservation & Protection - General,Environmental Science,Environmental Studies,General,Latin America - General,Life Sciences - Ecology - Ecosystems,Mexico,Nature,Nature / Field Guide Books,Nature conservation,Nature/Ecology,Political aspects,Reserva de la Biosfera Calakmu,Reserva de la Biosfera Calakmul Region,Sustainable development,Wildlife
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