with conservation programs through a case study of the Mapimf Biosphere ...... lack of integrated methodologies or cross-over languages. ...... 1984). IPAL developed out of the activities of the Mount Kulal Biosphere Reserve ...... Ej. La Soledad.
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Common ground: Ranchers and researchers in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve Kaus, Andrea, Ph.D. University of California, Riverside, 1992
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Common Ground: Ranchers and Researchers in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Andrea Kaus December, 1992
Dissertation Committee: Professor David B. Kronenfeld, Co-Chairperson Professor Arturo Gdmez-Pompa, Co-Chairperson Professor Alan G. Fix Professor Alan R. Beals
The Dissertation of Andrea Kaus is approved:
Committee Co-Chauperson Committee Co-Chanperson
University of California, Riverside
Copyright by Andrea Kaus 1992
Acknowledgements
This work is dedicated to the people of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve, who accepted the scrutiny of their lives with good grace, humor, and enthusiasm. I consider the study presented here to be the result of a collaborative effort with them. In particular, I thank Juan Francisco Herrera for his guidance and generosity, including the gift of a horse to keep me out of trouble. The Institute de Ecologfa provided me with a place to stay in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve's field station and has facilitated every aspect of my research involving the Mexican biosphere reserves. I thank the researchers and project directors for their openness during the interviews and for their contributions to the research. Gustavo Aguirre and Maria Eugenia Maury were particularly helpful and provided many insights regarding the Bolsdn de Mapimf and conservation efforts in Mexico. Dr. Jean Pierre Delhoume and Dr. Henri Barral, from the French research institution ORSTOM, loaned me mapping equipment (along with instructions), and Dra. Enriqueta Garcia de Miranda of ESTADIGRAFIA, S.A., was responsible for the map design from which the figures presented here were adapted. Dr. Arturo Gdmez-Pompa and Dr. David B. Kronenfeld, the co-chairs of my dissertation committee, have guided this research over the last few years, and I thank them for their patience. It truly has been an honor to be their student. I also thank my committee members, Dr. Alan Fix and Dr. Alan Beals, as well as the U.C. Riverside Anthropology Department for accepting some abrupt changes in my graduate studies and allowing me to explore the edges of the Held of anthropology.
I am indebted to to Dawn Schmechei, the graduate student secretary, for her gracious guidance through the paper jungle of the University. The field research was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant for Doctoral Dissertation Research, a UC MEXUS Thesis/Dissertation Grant, the U.C. Riverside Chancellor's Patent Fund, and a Humanities Graduate Students Research Grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations are my own and do not necessarily reflect the organizations listed above. UC MEXUS also provided logistical support throughout the writing phase of this project. I am particularly grateful to the UC MEXUS staff—Kathryn Roberts, Yvonne Tevis, Dora Velasco, and Carmen Hemdndez—for their friendship, moral support, and advice over the last two years. Special thanks go to Kathryn Roberts for her diplomatic and entertaining editing under extreme time pressure. Many people have contributed to this dissertation even though they were not directly involved in the research or writing. First and foremost are my parents, Eva and Peter Kaus, who never wavered in their support, although they still wish they could explain what I do in one sentence or less. Conversations with Sally Cole started the seeds of thought for this research, and she also has taken care of one of my horses for the last four years. Many of the ideas and methods presented in this work were formed during discussions with members of the former 'Underground Information Network': Veronique Rorive, Juan Jim6nez Osomio, Denise Brown, and David Bainbridge. Finally, I thank my long-time friend and farrier, Rusty Brown, for explaining to me how the first ecologist he ever met was a rancher and for showing me that a sense of humor provides the best insights into human nature.
v
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Common Ground: Ranchers and Researchers in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve
by Andrea Kaus
Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Anthropology University of California, Riverside, December, 1992 Professor David B. Kronenfeld, Co-Chairperson Professor Arturo Gdmez-Pompa, Co-Chairperson
In the past, environmental conservation has emphasized the protection of the physical environment through the exclusion of humans. As a result, the local inhabitants in and surrounding protected areas often perceive conservation policies to be a threat to their land-use rights and source of livelihood. The objective of this project was to examine the social conditions that contribute to local cooperation with conservation programs through a case study of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve (Durango, Mexico). From 1988 to 1990, baseline data were collected of the spatial and temporal distribution of human populations and land use in the Reserve. Formal and informal interviews were conducted with the local residents and conservation program's researchers regarding their views of the environment, the protected area, and each other. The potential for conflict exists between local
ranchers, who value the land as pasture for their livestock, and the researchers, who view the area in terms of its ecological importance separate from human land use systems. The Reserve management has maintained good public relations in the area directly surrounding the field station and has successfully rescued an endemic species of tortoise from extinction. The local residents accepted the Reserve's presence as a perceived means to protect their land from outsiders, and they have developed long-term friendships with many of the researchers. However, the Reserve's establishment has had little influence on regional forms of land use, with the exception of the local cessation of hunting and poaching. For continued cooperation and increased participation of the local residents, a management plan is needed that integrates basic and applied research and encourages the researchers to understand and confront the land use problems faced by the ranchers.
Contents
page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................iv ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES.............................................................................................xiii LIST OF TABLES................................................................................................xv
INTRODUCTION Social Relations in the MapimI Biosphere Reserve................................... 1 Designing Conservation Programs....................................................... 2 Documenting Social Relations in Conservation Programs................. 3 Perceptions o f the Physical and Social Environment...........................5
I. THE GORDIAN KNOT World Views in Environmental Conservation........................................... 8 Traditions in Conservation.................................................................. 14 Present Dilemmas................................................................................17 The Biosphere Reserve Concept......................................................... 29 Human Ecology....................................................................................39 Ecological Anthropology.....................................................................44 Cognitive Anthropology......................................................................52 Conservation Anthropology................................................................ 58 Levels o f Environmental Management................................................ 67 A Case Study o f Social Relations in a Biosphere Reserve.................72
page Local Cooperation with Conservation P rogram .............................. 76 Methodology........................................................................................81 Ranchers and Researchers...............................
87
N otes....................................................................................................91
II. THE BOLSON DE MAPIMI The Natural Landscape.............................................................................93 Ecological Characteristics..................................................................95 The History o f the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve.................................103 Infrastructure and Zonation...............................................................108 Research Activities............................................................................ 115 Potential Conflicts fo r the Management o f the Biosphere Reserve..........................................................................123 Notes.................................................................................................. 130
HI. FOOTPRINTS IN THE WILDERNESS The Cultural Landscape of the Bolsdn de Mapimf.................................132 Historical Development o f the Region.............................................. 134 Present-day Land Use and Conservation......................................... 140 Livestock Production..........................................................................142 Forage Resources..............................................................................144 Water Resources.................................................................................153 Animal Resources............................................................................... 164 Ranch Management........................................................................... 173 ix
page Horses and M ules..............................................................................187 Small Livestock..................................................................................192 Candelilla Collection........................................................................ 197 Salt Extraction...................................................................................206 Agriculture........................................................................................ 215 The Twilight Zone............................................................................. 218 Drug Traffic....................................................................................... 227 Potential Conflict with the Reserve Management............................ 230 N otes.................................................................................................. 251
IV. RIDING THE FENCELINE Land Tenure in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve.....................................253 Corporate Land Tenure..................................................................... 258 Ejidos in the Bolsdn de Mapimf........................................................273 National Land Tenure.......................................................................278 Private Land Tenure......................................................................... 279 Combined Land Tenure Strategies....................................................283 Potemial Conflict with the Reserve Management............................ 287 N otes.................................................................................................. 293
V. INSIDE-OUT AND OUTSIDE-IN Settlement and Population Characteristics.............................................294 Regional Population Characteristics................................................295 External Population Pressure............................................................297 x
page Settlement in the Reserve.................................................................. 301 Family Enterprises............................................................................314 Housing and Health.......................................................................... 319 Transportation and Communication.................................................323 Education...........................................................................................326 Wealth and Income... ..................................................................... 327 Population Trends in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve..................... 332 Potential Conflicts with the Reserve Management........................... 367 N otes..........................................
377
VI. AN UNCOMMON ALLIANCE Searching for Common Ground in Environmental Protection............. 378 Social Relations in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve..........................380 The Reserve Community....................................................................387 I f You Build It, Will They Come?.....................................................391 Cooperation and Participation.........................................................397 Building a Reserve Based on Social Relations.................................398 Conservation Research and Anthropology....................................... 406 N otes..................................................................................................407
REFERENCES................................................................................................... 409
xi
page
APPENDIX I Corrido de la Reserva de Mapimf..........................................................431
APPENDIX II Corrido de la Reserva de Mapimf, Parte I I ........................................... 432
xii
Figures
page 1.1.
Location of the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve......................................... 11 Insert A: Base Map of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve A rea.............12
1.2.
Guidelines for Biosphere Reserve Zonation......................................... 35
1.3.
The Cognized Environment...................................................................58
1.4.
Social Dimensions of Conservation and Natural Resource Management.........................................................................................69
2.1.
Ecological Units in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve.............................99
2.2.
Biosphere Reserves,in Mexico............................................................104
2.3.
Organizational Structure of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve............. 109
2.4.
Core and Buffer Zones of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve................ 112
2.5.
Zone of Influence of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve........................ 113
3.1.
Annual Cycle for Cattle Production................................................... 148
3.2.
Water Resources in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve...........................156
3.3.
Fencing in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve.........................................177
3.4.
Roads in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve........................................... 180
5.1.
Regional Settlement Patterns..............................................................298
5.2.
Birthplace Distribution in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve................302
5.3.
Previous Residence Distribution in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve............................................................................................... 303
5.4.
Emigration Destinations from the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve............................................................................................... 304
5.5.
Settlement in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve.................................... 305 xiii
page 5.6.
Male and Female Population in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988-1990...............................................................................336
5.7.
Male and Female Population in All Settlements Surveyed, 1988-1989......................................................................... 337
5.8.
Population Composition by Age and Sex in All Settlements Surveyed, 1988...................................................................................343
5.9.
Population Composition by Age and Sex in All Settlements Surveyed, 1989...................................................................................344
5.10.
Population Composition by Municipality,1980 ................................. 345
5.11.
Population Composition by Age and Sex inthe Core and Buffer Zones, 1989............................................................................ 346
5.12.
Total Population in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988-1990 ............. 351
5.13.
Total Population in All Settlements Surveyed,1988-1989..................352
5.14.
Population Composition by Age and Sex in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988..................................................................... 353
5.15.
Population Composition by Age and Sex in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1990 ..................................................................... 354
5.16.
Previous Residence Distribution, 1970-1979...................................... 364
5.17.
Previous Residence Distribution, 1980-1988......................................365
xiv
Tables
page 2.1.
Biosphere Reserves in Mexico............................................................. 105
3.1.
Cattle Enterprises and Production in Mexico by State, 1981............. 143
3.2.
Cattle and Property Census for Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, 1981.....................................................................................144
3.3.
Water Resources in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1989 ................ 157
3.4.
Grazing Pressures in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve..........................166
4.1.
Land Tenure in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1988-1990 .............255
4.2.
Landholdings in and surrounding the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1989 .................................
258
5.1.
Population Density in Northcentral Mexico, 1980............................. 296
5.2.
Municipal and State Populations, 1980 ............................................... 296
5.3.
Settlement Characteristics in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1989 .....................................................................................306
5.4.
Household Composition in the Settlements of the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, All Zones, 1989 .................................................318
5.5.
Relative and Cumulative Population Breakdown for the Core and Buffer Zones of the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1989............. 339
5.6.
Relative and Cumulative Population Breakdown for All Settlements Surveyed in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, 1989 .................................................................................... 340
5.7.
Regional Population Breakdown for the Municipalities of Mapimi, Jim6nez, and Sierra Mojada, 1980.....................................341 xv
page 5.8.
Population Breakdown by Decade for the States of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila, 1980......................................................... 342
5.9.
Population Breakdown for All Settlements Surveyed, 1988-1989 ...........................................................................................355
5.10.
Population Breakdown for the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988-1990...........................................................................................256
5.11.
Cumulative Population Breakdown for All Settlements Surveyed, 1988-1989......................................................................... 357
5.12.
Cumulative Population Breakdown for the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988-1990............................................................................. .358
5.13.
Household Composition, 1988-1990................................................... 359
5.14.
Abandoned Settlements in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve............... 362
xvi
INTRODUCTION Social Relations in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve
In June of 19881 left for Mexico with the idea that conservation was about tracts of land which were legally protected and physically bounded. I thought that conservation focused on the guardianship of wild flora and fauna and the long-term safekeeping of natural resources. In November of 1989, nearly a year and a half later, I returned to the United States thinking that perhaps conservation was not so much about land as about people: people who managed the land, people who lived on it, people who used the land, those that cared for the land and those that did not. Where I lived that year, the lives of people such as these were connected to overlapping pieces of land whose nature and boundaries were forever changing. For better or worse, the fate of this environment was guided by human decisions. There in the center of the Chihuahuan Desert, in a dry desert basin known as the Bolsdn de Mapimf, the residents and researchers of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve showed me how they lived and worked, how they had lived and worked in the past, and how they hoped to do so in the future. My focus on the protected area shifted from the landscape to its keepers and to the points at which the local residents, researchers, and Reserve managers shared a perception of caring for the land.
1
Designing Conservation Programs
What follows here is an examination of environmental conservation from the perspective of those people whose lives are most affected by the establishment of a protected area. Current discussions in conservation revolve around how local people might be included within a conservation program, how development and conservation goals need not be incompatible, and how a conservation program can benefit local human populations. The basic premise underlying many of these discussions, and adopted in this one, is twofold. First, in a populated region, customary conservation practices of putting boundaries around a tract of land to protect it from local use and preserve it for future generations of the world places the cost of conservation on the local people. As a result, the local people often perceive conservation policies as a threat to their access to the land, their way of life, or their basic resources for survival. Second, environmental conservation programs which are developed in cooperation and collaboration with local residents incorporate the realities of the cultural and economic environment and thus are more likely to provide effective management for both the physical and social environment. This is the theory. The problem lies in designing conservation programs which are acceptable to those local inhabitants most directly affected by the programs' policies and activities. What really happens when conservationists try to put these concepts into practice? What happens when a group from 'outside' with powerful connections and attributes (whether in terms of education, material goods, or economic resources), comes into an area and invites local cooperation in the establishment of a protected area? What are the consequences of this gesture if it is 2
accepted? Cooperation is more than a verbal agreement; it requires active negotiation. Accounting for local or regional concerns means more than asking questions; it means listening to the answers and translating them into actions. So the following discussion is not just about the Mapimf Reserve's inclusion of local people and local forms of production in the multiple objectives for research, conservation, and improved resource management. It is also about how the local people perceive and describe their lives, the desert, the tortoises and the cattle, the Reserve, the researchers, outsiders, and each other.
Documenting Social Relations in Conservation Programs
I did not go to the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve for new concepts. The field of conservation is already full of concepts, from practical to poetic. My task was to learn which of the various definitions of appropriate conservation policies and practices could be substantiated via a case study of a partial society which had been defined by the establishment of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve. This group is not a community in the customary sense of a group of people living together. It is also not a group that could name itself or be geographically defined. Instead, it is a collection of several, normally separated, groups of people interconnected into a single population partly on purpose and partly by happenstance. As the foundation for a future community, it needs to share a set of beliefs, rules, traditions, and history to be passed on to the newcomers and to subsequent generations. I was to search for the common threads that held the human aspect of the Reserve together in a place where the local people prided themselves on their independence and where researchers came for their own individual research interests. How did the 3
Reserve then adjust to the external stresses and internal strains that every community must confront? What would be the individual consequences and responsibilities resulting from this alliance between the Reserve management and the local people? Anthropology provided a methodological and theoretical approach for examining the patterns of social relations in this protected area and their effects on the landscape. As an anthropological work, the research needed to deal with the environment in which these people lived, the social organization that structured their management of this environment, the processes by which they adjusted to change, and the beliefs that shaped how they perceived their world and their role within it. However, more than that, the project was intended to be useful for the society being studied. This fledgling 'community' was not yet a finished product but the result of an interactive process between at least two different cultural groups, that of the local residents and the researchers. Together, these two groups were also examining their relationship and expressed the desire to plan its future. The methodology of ethnographic research provided a process which, apart from the academic focus, enabled the people living in the Reserve to hold a mirror to their way of life by explaining and examining their beliefs and actions in relation to each other. The opportunity to observe and participate in such a process is a godsend for anyone interested in social relations. Yet it carries with it the responsibility to return the information to its source and allow those individuals who are portrayed on the written page a chance to evaluate how well a few still words have captured active lives. Beyond this, people can evaluate not only the writer, but their own actions. They have the choice to adjust their behavior and advise others based on a 4
documentation of their own experiences. The idea of the project was not to reiterate the conventional wisdom, sensible or not, found in the current literature on local participation, but to capture instead the insights of those who had actually gone through the process.
Perceptions of the Physical and Social Environment
The verbal compression of the time spent living and working in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve is arranged in the same order that I learned about the different human societies in the area. It starts with the land and its use and works towards more socially-based characteristics. As much as possible, the information is presented here as it was presented to me, within the limits of confidentiality. The observable part was in people's actions, what they said and what they did. Yet land use practices and different aspects of social relations were also the result of a set of decisions. This might mean how many cows to sell or how many to buy, where to put a fence or a water trough and who was available to help, and where to put a scientific apparatus and who was qualified to operate it. Not only were these decisions based on an assessment of the social and physical constraints in the area, the assessment itself was a product of cultural perceptions about appropriate land use in a given situation. This case study, then, became a study of environmental perceptions and corresponding patterns of land-use. I once said I lived in a desert, and a researcher corrected me, saying that the Bolsdn de Mapimf was a semi-arid zone. He had worked in Africa, and in his view, the Sahara was a true desert. Mapimf was lush in comparison. In turn, the local ranchers pointed out that the Bolsdn de Mapimf 5
had vegetation, but only a handful of plants were of use for the cattle. It rained, but not always and not everywhere. The land was "de mala calidad (of poor quality)," the local residents said, "un desierto." The distinctions were drawn by more than a choice of words and implied more than our varied perceptions of that dry, dusty, open place in which we lived. We all saw different constraints, uses and futures for that land, and we all placed our own individual and cultural values on its worth. Out of that sensory continuum called reality, we each picked out such separate sets of characters to construct and substantiate our perception of that environment that sometimes it was difficult to believe that we were talking about the same place. On a particular stretch of road in the northwestern section of the Reserve, a geologist once pointed out the sweep from the barren sierras to the salt flats of the basin's drainage channel and said that this was an ancient landscape. I saw the Bolsdn de Mapimf that day in a way I had never before noticed. A local resident later pointed out the same mountains and sand dunes. He and his brothers and cousins used to ride as far north as this to round up the mares, he said, before they put up the fence to the south. His brother told me to look at the difference between this place— "como la luna (like the moon)"—and that of his own land. Another day, another researcher commented on the evidence for desertification along the same stretch of road. A botanist showed me another species of Yucca. Once, when a local fellow and I were looking for a turn in a fenceline near here, we came across petrified bone and tried to imagine what must be buried there and what the area must have looked like millions of years ago. Each researcher, each resident, pulled something different out of this landscape: a tortoise den, a lizard, a plant, a
6
fenceline, or a tire-track. Each person showed me that stretch of road as if it were the first time I had seen it. It was one of the most barren sections of the Reserve, yet it never looked the same twice. I was neither immune to nor separate from this environment. Nearly all anthropological works and criticisms deal at some point with the problem of the researcher's bias as a participant observer. This caution bears recounting here, because it is a valid concern. As observers, anthropologists are supposed to be objective scientists, but as participants, they are also personally involved. An anthropological investigation is not only a research project. It is also one's own life. The following summary of over a year of living in the Chihuahua Desert during a drought and its wet end is influenced by the daily wait for rain, by the heat, by the cold, by the dust and mud, by accidents and sickness, by those who helped and those who did not—in sum, by daily existence. In addition, it is written by someone who gets as excited over water systems, pasture rotation, tough livestock and skilled horsemanship as others might get over the discovery of a new plant species or kinship system. Is this work completely objective? No. I hope it is honest.
7
Chapter 1 THE GORDIAN KNOT World Views in Environmental Conservation
Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet - and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand. -Wendell Berry (1990:68)
When I was very young, I was taught to respect the wilderness, to be aware of its fragility and beware of its power. I was taught to leave the land the way I found it and that those who would leave a mark on the land were the villains. The National Parks were the protectorates of this wilderness legacy, and conservationists were its moral guardians. At all costs, we, as individuals, as a nation, as a world, were to protect our wilderness heritage from ourselves. It seemed so very simple. What was it that later disturbed my complacent perception of the noble nature of conservation? Somewhere between the moral obligations to the planet and the rights of the individual human being, somewhere between the concept and the reality, the meaning of conservation turned into a political gordian knot that provided little protection for either the land or its inhabitants. The research presented here unravels a portion of this knot in order to examine the relationship between conservation policies and practices and the subsequent consequences for habitat protection and human welfare. An underlying premise of this study is that human societies foster shared perceptions of the
8
environment which not only mediate the choices made for land use but also contribute to conflictive or cooperative social relations for conservation programs. As a result, both a basic and applied perspective are linked in the following discussion in order to understand how different human societies use, manage and/or protect their physical environments within the context of a given social environment and to examine how this affects the implementation process of conservation programs. The research project is a basic ethnography in the field of anthropology, although in an unconventional research arena for anthropologists. However, it embarks on a new path for conservation research by presenting the dual perspectives of local inhabitants and researchers in the design, promotion, implementation and evaluation of conservation programs. That is, the central issues in conservation arise from differing views about the role of humans in the environment and the power of different groups to decide what this role will be. Yet even when the human dimensions of a protected area are considered in various conservation programs, they are presented from an outsider's perspective. Many conservationists have eloquently presented the difficulties and responsibilities of managing a protected area which is subjected also to human pressures to use local natural resources in and surrounding the protected area. However, this argument neglects the reverse perspective of the local residents whose source of livelihood is affected by the establishment of a protected area and the subsequent implementation of a conservation program. Both perspectives are needed to understand the distribution of power, influence, and resources in a conservation program and how human relations affect the conservation goals for species and/or habitat protection.
9
The following chapters document the first phase of this research approach by presenting a case study of the impact of a specific conservation policy, that of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB), in a specific site: the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve (Durango, Mexico) (fig. 1.1). The Mapimf Reserve forms part of an international network of biosphere reserves established by MAB in 1978 to protect in situ genetic and biological diversity in the major biogeographic provinces of the world. In contrast to other categories of protected areas, biosphere reserves encompass representative ecosystems, rather than unique ones, and serve as centers for scientific research showing the value of conservation integrated with human use (UNESCO 1984). The biosphere reserves have multiple functions within each site. They are expected to create refuges for fauna and flora, provide permanent research sites, establish long-term ecological monitoring studies on representative ecosystems, investigate and encourage alternative methods of natural resource use, and develop interdisciplinary research programs which train new conservation researchers. In addition, they are intended to provide current information about the reserves' activities for visitors, administrators, and policy makers in order to aid in regional planning and environmental education. Thus, the biosphere reserves are expected to integrate the objectives of conservation, research, development, and education within the management of a protected area (di Castri et. al. 1980, 1981). This is the biosphere reserve concept as it has been promoted in the international and scientific communities. The question remains as to how to put it into practice. The MapimI Biosphere Reserve was chosen as a research site for this project because it has been presented in the literature as a successful protected area
10
UNITED STATES
rChihuahua g| CoahUil^i
Figure 1.1. Location of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve (Insert A - See following page)
11
WtoH -O O
CHIHUAHUA
' COAHUILA
*
DURANGO'*.*'.Labor* * : D a iia
i>
da los ndidoa
C®>
t
— contour line ■•••water channels Laguna de las Palomas state line *m> railroad
0 1 2 3 4 5 bn
Figure 1.1 (A). Base Map of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve Area
12
in terms of both endangered species protection and local participation in the Reserve’s activities (Halffter 1978). Founded in 1977 under the aegis of UNESCOMAB, Mapimf is one of the few biosphere reserves that added new land to the protected areas of the world instead of providing only a name change for a previously established site (Miller 1984). In addition, the Mapimf Reserve's environment is shared among the local residents, researchers, and Reserve managers, and its boundaries encompass various forms of land tenure and land use activities which predate the Reserve's formation and official establishment. As such, it represents a site where the potential for conflict with local residents existed but apparently has not occurred as a result of the Reserve's presence. Therefore, the key questions are: Why did the local residents accept a new population of strangers with new rules in their midst, and how are cooperative relations maintained among the different resource managers, including the managers of the Reserve? The basic hypothesis taken into the field was that while a conservation program seeks security for the natural resources on the land, local inhabitants seek security for their way of life. Cooperation with a conservation program was expected to increase with locally perceived benefits such as land tenure security, economic gains, and local representation in the conservation program management. The research problem, then, was to determine the important natural resources, their cultural and economic value, the sociopolitical systems in place to control access to these resources, the incentives or constraints for alternative forms of land use, and the subsequent relations between local populations and the Reserve management. A full description of the study area and research results is presented in the following chapters. However, a preliminary discussion of the challenges faced by
conservationists is necessary at the start in order to understand the significance of the human dimension in conservation policies and the role of anthropology in conservation research.
Traditions in Conservation
In the past decades the Western world has presided over a growing conflict over who has the right or the knowledge to manage ecologically valuable or aesthetically pleasing tracts of land. Up until the last half of this century, these lands were protected through formal restrictions or by virtue of isolation (Halffter 1980, 1984; Partridge 1984; Torres et al 1987). However, increased demographic, economic, and political pressures have created conflicting demands on previously 'safe' wild lands. The preservation of the wilderness, which originally seemed to some such a noble cause, is considered misguided idealism by others. Conservationists are now caught between a need to speak out for the wilderness (litis 1970; Meadows 1990; Nash 1988) and a responsibility to provide alternatives that are culturally acceptable and economically viable for those who directly bear the cost of the actions the Western world demands (Dasmann 1984; Gdmez-Pompa 1992; Janzen 1988). Ehrenfeld (1978), Kellert (1986), Ledec and Goodland (1988), and Nash (1988) have categorized the many reasons used to justify the protection of natural areas and wildlife, including the value of wilderness for recreation; scientific research; beauty; lucrative resources; cultural, symbolic, and historic heritage; undiscovered or underdeveloped uses; energy and water supplies; public health; biodiversity and ecosystem stability; and education. Ehrenfeld and Nash argue 14
further that it is anthropocentric to even question the need for conservation, that wilderness has an intrinsic value and right to exist: "From this perspective wilderness is not fo r humans at all, and wilderness preservation testifies to the human capacity for restraint (Nash 1988:200)." In the United States, the central controversies in these different perspectives of the value of conservation have arisen out of a conceptual dichotomy defined by Ehrenfeld as "the conservation dilemma." This polemic divides the environmental world into conservationists and humanists, where the former perceive Nature as a whole greater than its parts and the latter consider the individual parts in relation to their usefulness to human society. The difficulty is that the humanistic world accepts the conservation of Nature only piecemeal and at a price: there must be a logical, practical reason for saving each and every part of the natural world that we wish to preserve. And the dilemma arises on the increasingly frequent occasions when we encounter a threatened part of Nature but can find no rational reason for keeping it (Ehrenfeld 1978:177).
Norton (1991) further defines this philosophical split (renamed the "environmentalists' dilemma") as the difference between economic aggregation and moral values. The aggregationist approach, also known as 'wise-use environmentalism1, "emphasizes avoidance of waste in the present pursuit of economic well-being (p. 7)." This view of the physical environment as a bank of resources held in trust for humanity was promoted by Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the National Forest system in the United States. It was John Muir, a contemporary of Pinchot, that fought for the protection of Nature in its entirety as a fundamental moral responsibility and championed the cause of conservation exemplified in the U.S. system of National Parks. Muir is the spiritual father of
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the modem conservation movement, and his perspectives on Nature have been incorporated into the policies advocated by preservationist and 'deep ecology1 groups. Followers of these overlapping environmental views contend that all things in the universe are considered to have an inherent right to exist; all human interference is harmful and disruptive to the ecosystem; and, therefore, wilderness areas should be preserved as they now exist, untouched by human hands. This perspective is accompanied by a belief in the moral correctness of environmental preservation despite other claims to the land. In 1908, Muir wrote, "But apart from getting a living, the true ownership of the wilderness belongs in the highest degree to those who love it most (in Engberg and Wesling 1980:8)." In terms of U.S. conservation policy, the bipolar views of the humanists and the preservationists have fragmented the united front needed to bring more land under protection from unchecked and unregulated removal of soil, water, species, and ecosystems for the short-term gain of a few individuals and corporations. The preservationists fight the moral fight in a political world better swayed by economic forces and are thus relegated to society's fringes to embrace rattlesnakes (Norton 1991) or things "cold and squirmy" (Chambers 1992). The humanists, the wise-use resource managers, replace the tree-hugging philosophy with hard-edged economic arguments and, as Norton points out, are then reduced to just another interest group in the political arena. The humanists' arguments must be weighed against stronger, immediate economic interests and U.S. jobs. In some cases, the justification of conservation based on economic values places natural resource managers in the middle of the crossfire between preservationists and resource users, such as is occurring with the fight over habitat for the Spotted Owl in the National Forests of the Pacific Northwest. 16
Aldo Leopold was one of the early U.S. conservationists whose conservation philosophy merged Pinchot's economic and Muir's moral perspectives (Norton 1991; Callicott 1991). Leopold did not reject human use of natural resources, but incorporated the concept of resource management into the concept of an ecosystem. Resources were considered in the context of the environment and ecological relationships which contributed to their existence and relative abundance. Therefore, resource protection also meant protection of the environment as a whole entity. In addition, conservation did not stop at the boundaries of the national parks and forests, but was a necessary part of farmers' and ranchers' daily and life-long use of the land. Land use represented the link between ecological and cultural systems: "Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization (Leopold [1949] 1966:264)." Leopold's most well-known work, A Sand County Almanac, was published posthumously in 1949. Over forty years later, his concept of conservation still remains as the guiding definition for the research presented here: A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity (Leopold [1949] 1966:258).
Present Dilemmas
Concepts of what conservation is, what it is for, and how it is to be carried out are more diverse today than they were one hundred years ago. Despite present environmental awareness, little progress has been made in stopping or reversing
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current trends of environmental degradation as the result of increased demands for land and natural resources. Increased deforestation, desertification, and wetland conversion now threaten the land base that the world depends upon to sustain life and present lifestyles. In Mexico and the United States alone, deforestation rates are estimated respectively at 615,000 hectares and 159,000 hectares per year (Gdmez-Pompa et. al. n.d.; WRI 1990). Desertification figures indicate that 27 percent of arid lands in North America are severely desertified (Dregne 1986). According to the South Commission (1990), 80% of the rangelands in Africa and the Near East are under risk of desertification and overgrazing. Little data is available on wetland conversion, but some estimates place the global rate even higher than that of tropical deforestation. In the United States alone, 56 percent of wetlands have disappeared, and conversion continues at a rate of 190,000 hectares per year (WRI 1990). These alarming figures are tied to economic trends in the last half of this century. In developing nations, economic growth since the 1950s has been at the expense of the environment, coupled with increased imbalances of wealth distribution, a rising demand for imports, and a lag in export capacity (South Commission 1990). Unfortunately, the environmental costs from economic development and crisis were not accounted for because GDP figures (Gross Domestic Products), used to assess economic progress, do not reflect environmental subsidies such as water, soil, oil, timber, minerals, and other naturally occurring resources (Repetto 1992). As a result, advances in agriculture and technology for increased production are implemented without an adequate understanding of the consequences. For example, record-level grain surpluses throughout the world in the 1980s were accompanied by a loss of an estimated 24 billion tons of top soil per 18
year in crop lands (Brown 1991). In addition, the neglect of small farmers led to worse conditions for the rural poor, where production and income did not keep pace with population growth. Developing nations which were previously self-sufficient in food production became net importers of food (South Commission 1990). In Mexico, for instance, com imports increased 17-fold from 1966 to 1987, and wheat imports increased nearly 300-fold during the same time period (Gdmez-Pompa et. al. n.d.). At the same time, external debt burdens and the fall in commodity prices in the 1980's led national governments and international lending and development agencies to encourage increased land use and resource extraction to boost production. According to the South Commission (1990), the prices of 33 commodities (excluding oil) important to developing countries were 30% lower in 1988 in comparison to their average value for 1979-81. The prices of food and tropical beverages fell 37%, and oil dropped 64%. The result is, on the one hand, that developing countries are forced to overexploit their resources, harming the environment, and, on the other, to accept environmentally damaging deals with the North, e.g., deals for the disposal of toxic wastes (South Commission 1990:118).
At the same time, conservation programs have encountered increased resistance and resentment at both local and national levels, particularly in developing countries. Part of the problem is that national or international development or conservation programs are often politically motivated at high government levels and contribute to the weakening of local cultural systems and rules for the allocation and use of commonly held resources such as pasture areas. As these systems are removed to implement state-governed policies, usufruct rights
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are allocated to outside state agencies or usurped by entrepreneurs and corporate business interests (e.g., mining, logging, and cattle ranching). Local inhabitants must then conform to new systems of land allocation and access in which they are either alienated from their lands or placed in the position of working for the new 'owners' (government or otherwise). In colonial Kenya, for example, Lusigi (1981) notes that the establishment of a system of national parks pushed native Africans out of their homelands and prohibited the hunting of game. Post independence policies have restricted hunting in all parts of Kenya with little consideration for the reliance of local populations on subsistence hunting. "As a result the national parks are surrounded by a hostile population which has little sympathy for the park system or for conservation efforts (Lusigi 1981:88)." In Kenya and other developing countries, conservation programs have been based primarily on the U.S. experience, and the transfer of the national park system to other countries resulted in the imposition of the conceptual division between conservation and development. The Muir/Pinchot polemic is thus perpetuated where the long-term benefits of environmental protection are weighed against the more immediate needs of economic growth. At the national level, external political pressure for conservation programs in developing countries has led to the establishment of "paper parks" which officially designate protected areas such as national parks or wildlife refuges but which lack adequate management and surveillance on the ground (Leland and Goodland 1988). Often, the official protection of these areas is contradicted and overridden by other programs and incentives for resource extraction or colonization developed by the government to finance external national debts and resolve the growing demands of landless citizens. 20
Where has conservation policy gone wrong? The international conservation community recognizes the social problems mentioned above, and many new programs such as the Man and the Biosphere Programme have arisen to bridge the gap between conservation and development. Yet the resultant recommendations for policy or the changes in conservation programs have done little to alter land use practices or prevent the loss of habitat. The conservationist is still pitted against the developer, the rancher, the farmer, the colonist, big business corporations, and, at times, the national government. Part of the problem is that the conservationist is also the outsider. Even in the case of many conservation programs which claim to be 'grass-roots' or 'developed-from-below', policies are designed by outside advocate groups and imposed from above to help people solve the problems they did not even know they had. Until the interest groups themselves are the ones advocating environmental protection, conservationists remain outside the social system that governs the environment they wish to protect. As a result, they are locally perceived as spoilers or 'imperialistas' who stand in the way of individual or sovereign rights and externally percieved as idealists crusading against sociopolitical windmills. Present conservation efforts are also hampered because they are based on culturally-constructed perceptions that are not accurate representations of reality. Gdmez-Pompa and Kaus (1992) point out that the conservation dilemma is principally a dichotomy bom out of Western society's conceptual confusion about 'wilderness' as a realm that is both uncivilized and pristine, both a resource and a responsibility. Yet, the land now under official protection from human use is not pristine in the sense of being untouched by human hands. According to Hecht and Cockbum (1990) and Methven (1989), parks have commonly been established in 21
already disturbed and threatened ecosystems, and "preservation, protection and resource management have been applied to only features, selected species and individual resources (Methven 1982:22)" rather than focusing on ecosystems or ecological processes. The concept of wilderness as pristine is also accompanied by a belief in the balance of Nature where ecological processes act as equilibrating forces to bring a perturbed system back to its 'natural' state. Change is perceived as abnormal, and the goal of environmental protection is preservation: the absence of change. Yet, little evidence exists to support ecological models based on equilibria in natural systems or natural succession to climax vegetation types: "Wherever we seek to find constancy we discover change (Botkin 1990:62)." In fact, the current paradigm shift in ecology supports a non-equilibrium model in which relationships between ecological components may be determined, but many of the events that drive these relationships occur randomly. Change is then part of natural processes and stability is found in the ability of an ecosystem to adjust to change. A contradictory perspective of wilderness areas as uncivilized territory or untapped resources often reflects a mechanistic view of natural processes. A belief in Nature as a machine reveals a faith in technology as ultimately capable of mitigating the negative effects of human use. The earth becomes an entity which supports life but is not alive itself. In turn, humans occupy a living sphere where the surrounding physical environment produces resources and processes waste. It is only a matter of harnessing these processes by substituting human engineering and ingenuity in the place of ecosystem components. Unfortunately, the confidence of this anthropocentric view has failed to prevent or predict ecological disasters precipitated by human interference. Technological achievements such as dams, 22
roads, canals, or hybrid crop strains provide electricity, infrastructure, and economic competitiveness to a small sector of the world's population. However, these advancements have not been matched with equivalent technologies which alleviate the ecological or social costs of their implementation. These perceptions of the environment are not academic distinctions; they are reflections of the worldviews of developed countries and urban centers, and they form the basis of conventional conservation policies and strategies. The real and present effect of these policies was evident in the concerns voiced by developing countries and indigenous peoples during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Yet, neither the users nor the preservers acknowledge that the majority of wilderness areas are already inhabited and that the economic growth envisioned by a national or international plan has few provisions for local economic or social benefits. Most conservation and resource management policies have ignored alternative perceptions of the environment in which humans are not detached from Nature but are an integral part, for better or worse, of the natural world. Instead, a perception of wilderness as pristine has been used to justify setting aside or expropriating land to be untouched for the benefit of posterity. In turn, the reverse perception of wilderness as a resource has been used to justify clearing land of previous vegetation or people for conversion into commercial enterprises such as logging, mining, or cattle ranching. The world's wilderness areas are met with an assault from friend and foe alike, and few of their defenders see the reality: that one person's wilderness is someone else's land. The costs of protecting this wilderness for the benefit of humanity are then borne by the local inhabitants, landholders, and users of this land (Gdmez-Pompa 1992); they are being required to donate the source of their 23
livelihood for a greater good about which they know little (and which cares little for them). In addition, what we admire or covet about that land is the result of its inhabitants' past or present actions (see Gdmez-Pompa and Kaus 1988), however happenstance or consciously implemented these actions might be. Most of the land we designate as formal wilderness or set aside in national parks is land passed on to us by people who consider it to be, in part at least, their homeland. We consider it to be of national park quality because they did not treat it the way we have treated land (Dasmann 1984:668).
In the world's tropical forests, for instance, botanical and anthropological studies indicate that the composition of mature vegetation reflects local practices of planting or sparing useful trees in cultivated areas and subsequently protecting these species as part of the management of secondary succession in 'fallow' sites (GdmezPompa and Kaus 1990). In the Sonoran Desert, Nabhan et. al. (1982) report a decrease in the biodiversity index of an oasis habitat after the establishment of a national park. An equivalent habitat, separated by only 54 km. and the U.S.Mexican border, showed no equivalent decrease in the same indices despite continued use and periodic burning by local inhabitants. In the Sierra de Manantldn of Mexico, the recently discovered wild species of perennial maize (Zea diploperennis), of great potential use to commerical com production (litis 1988), has survived along the borders of cultivated fields because the local form of shifting agriculture provides the disturbed habitat in which the species grows. Its in situ protection as a biosphere reserve also implies the continuation of the local land use practices which maintain the species. Throughout the world, the protection of single species and ecological relationships is also encoded in the ritual practices and
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religious beliefs of different cultural groups (e.g., Anderson 1990; Denevan et. al. 1984; Klee 1980; Posey et. al. 1984; Rappaport 1968; Swezey and Heizer 1982). Therefore, 'conservation1 may not be a word or cognized concept but part of a creed and worldview that governs human relationships to the land and neighboring groups. This is not to say that all indigenous people, small farmers and ranchers, or wilderness inhabitants are folk conservationists. The presentation of a dichotomy between rural and urban as the difference between environmental good and evil promotes an image of the "ecologically noble savage (Redford 1990)" which is as much a myth as the pristine image of wilderness. Little reason exists to expect one human group to behave differently from another given the same opportunities and incentives. Wilken (1989:47) points out that "traditional managers past and present have proven quite as capable of destroying their resource bases as modem commercial farmers (although lacking powerful equipment, they are perhaps less efficient at it)." Traditional land use practices which are ecologically sound are not always the result of conscious choices based on an understanding of their long-term environmental benefits, but also an indirect consequence of differential access to various technologies, markets, and capital (e.g., Brush 1986; C. Gladwin 1980). Promoting traditional land use practices as the basis for biodiversity conservation also raises the ethical dilemma of expecting many small farmers to retain the lifestyle of poverty that accompanies many traditional systems in the present economic environment. It would be equally erroneous to say that all Western traditions and worldviews of resource management or conservation promote a disharmonious and unrealistic relationship between humans and Nature. Clearly, the land use practices 25
of many farmers in the United States and Europe allowed productive use of the land over many generations. Beliefs in earth's creation for human dominion have been countered by the more benign teachings of St. Francis de Assisi and St. Benedict of Nursia who symbolize an interactive and respectful relationship with Nature (Dubos 1972). This dualistic image of Nature in Western society prompted White (1967) to blame environmental overexploitation on the inheritance of Western religious beliefs, but also recommend St. Francis as the patron saint of ecology. His suggestion was recognized by the Pope in 1980 (Thomas 1983). However, Dubos counters that: "Benedict of Nursia, who is certainly as good a Christian as Francis of Assisi, can be regarded as a patron saint of those who believe that true conservation means not only protecting nature against human misbehavior but also developing human activities which favor creative, harmonious relationships between man and nature (Dubos 1972:168). "1
The problems in conservation policy and practice are not so much a reflection of the differences between Western and non-Western beliefs, but the imposition of one belief over another through the political structures by which conservation policies are designed and implemented. The international conservation community is primarily composed of individuals and organizations from developed countries, including U.S.-based organizations such as World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute, and Conservation International (all with headquarters in Washington, D.C.), and European-based organizations such as the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and the UNESCO Man and 26
the Biosphere Programme (MAB). This elite collection of organizations is a necessary watchdog for environmental abuses by developed and developing countries alike, but their policy recommendations and programs also reflect the concerns and belief systems (with all their internal contradictions) of developed nations about the environment. Developing nations are then caught between the environmental conditions placed on external aid (as pressured by conservation groups), the need to stimulate economic growth through the extraction of natural resources, and a desire for national autonomy from outside interference. The injustice of this situation is that the limited and imposed views of the environment and its worth perpetuate inappropriate and inadequate conservation programs because they assume homogeneity in environmental problems. As a result, potential solutions and alternative approaches often are overlooked because they are outside the conventional model of conservation: environmental protection through the absence of people. In addition, the international conservation community (along with development agencies) continues to perpetuate a belief that poverty, ignorance, and overpopulation are the major culprits for environmental crimes such as deforestation or desertification. Yet, the evidence shows that the richer nations, with the lowest population growth, provide the demand for the overexploitation of natural resources that support the Western consumer lifestyle and, in turn, are the major contributors to environmental pollution (South Commission 1990). The irrevocable damage to the environment is also at the hands of multinational mining and timber companies, wealthy cattle ranchers, and highlevel politicians who are not ignorant of the consequences of resource extraction but choose immediate gain of commodities, land, and political support over future reserves. 27
Pointing an accusatory finger at the inhabitants (recent or otherwise) of endangered environments oversimplifies the multiple causes and consequences of environmental degradation and places the blame on only the most visible, the poorest, and the weakest sectors of the world's population. This view neglects to acknowledge the contributions that these same groups have made to environmental protection and the maintenance of biodiversity, despite the evidence for local-level stewardship of the environment (e.g., Alcorn 1990; Altieri and Merrick 1988; Bal£e 1987; Brokensha 1989; Brush 1986; Gdmez-Pompa 1985a; Kunstadter 1978; Nabhan 1985; Oldfield and Alcorn 1987; Reganold et. al. 1990). It also neglects to recognize that the land use practices of past civilizations were able to support much higher population densities in environments that only support sparse populations today (Denevan 1976; Gdmez-Pompa 1987; Hecht and Cockbum 1990; Roosevelt 1989). Most important, it neglects the scientific value of local level experience, good or bad, with different techniques, crops, or livestock. Conservation research still lacks baseline data and long-term studies. As a result, conservation programs are based on a limited understanding of the environment or the social systems which govern its use and protection. 'Traditional' practices, in the sense of ways of doing things that persist through time, are the results of generations of field trials and provide the kind of long-term experimentation that is hard to replicate in laboratory situations. "A rough and dirty field experiment is worth a thousand logics (Janzen and Vdsquez-Yanes 1986:18)." The point to be made here is that conservation and natural resource management are not modem phenomena or concepts restricted to Western society. It is the models and terminology for conventional conservation policy that exclude alternative models more appropriate for local application. The conservation 28
community has now begun to realize the necessity of combining local knowledge and concerns with scientific research in conservation programs. As wild areas have become increasingly less isolated, as tourism or wildlife have increased, and as the undesired effects of excluding human intervention have been realized, the emphasis has moved from preservationism to the intensification of protected area management and its extension beyond national park boundaries (Eidsvik 1985). The call is for the formation of a new type of resource manager and the development of management policies that incorporate ecological, economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of the environment (Lusigi 1988; McNeely and Pitt 1985; McNeely 1988).
The Biosphere Reserve Concept
In international policy this phase of integrated management was initiated in 1970 by the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB), formed from the experiences and recommendations of the International Biological Programme (IBP). MAB arose out of the environmental concerns voiced at the UNESCO Biosphere Conference in 1968, where ecologists pointed out that environmental problems were parts of interactive processes involving different knowledge sets, different resource users, and different countries. Resolution of such problems therefore required research programs and conservation policies that were interdisciplinary, international, and intergovernmental. From the outset, MAB was not intended to replace other forms of environmental protection, only to complement them by recognizing the human element in the ecological setting and providing a scientific basis for conservation policy. Its objective was "to predict the consequences of 29
today's actions on tomorrow's world and thereby to increase man's ability to manage efficiently the natural resources of the biosphere (di Castri 1976:237)." Each member nation defines its own research priorities within the guidelines of MAB, and the major emphasis has remained heavily in the natural sciences. By 1985, 105 countries were participating in the MAB programme and had their own national MAB committees. At the international level, the MAB secretariat facilitates and coordinates the research and conservation activities of its member nations through the Science Sector of UNESCO's Division of Ecological Sciences, headquartered in Paris, France. At the outset, the research strategy established at the international level focused on 14 project areas of which eight (1-7, 11) concentrate on the ecology of specific environments and six (8-10, 12-14) focus on human impacts or ecological processes in the biosphere (di Castri 1976; Dyer and Holland 1988; Gregg and McGean 1985): Project 1 - tropical forest ecosystems Project 2 - temperate and mediterranean forest landscapes Project 3 - savannas and grasslands (grazing lands) Project 4 - arid and semi-arid zones Project 5 - aquatic ecosystems Project 6 - mountain and tundra ecosystems Project 7 - island ecosystems Project 8 - conservation Project 9 - pesticides and fertilizers (cultivation systems) Project 10 - engineering works Project 11 - urban ecosystems Project 12 - human genetics and demography Project 13 - perceptions of environmental quality Project 14 - environmental pollution
These projects continue to operate through the research activities of the national MAB committees. At the international level, however, the projects have been grouped into 6 major areas: coastal areas and islands; humid and subhumid 30
tropics; arid and semi-arid zones; temperate and arctic zones; urban systems; and biosphere reserves (Robertson Vemhes 1988). In 1974, a UNESCO task force developed the theme of Project 8 ("conservation of natural areas and the genetic material they contain") into critieria and recommendations for an international network of biosphere reserves. The overriding goal was to protect representative sites of the major biogeographic provinces of the world, following the classification prepared by Udvardy (1975) for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The first biosphere reserves were officially established in 1976, and by December of 1990, the biosphere reserve network included 293 sites in 74 countries (UNESCO 1991). The principal characteristics of biosphere reserves are outlined in the 1984 Action Plan for Biosphere Reserves (UNESCO 1984). These include:
■ protection of representative terrestrial and coastal environments of value to conservation and scientific research, including the support of sustainable development; ■ establishment of a global network to facilitate the exchange of information regarding the conservation and management of natural and managed ecosystems; ■ delineation of each biosphere reserve to include core areas of natural or minimally disturbed areas combined with other types of areas, such as centers of endemism, experimental sites, land under traditional use, or restoration sites;
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■ inclusion of sufficient land to be an effective conservation unit and allow long-term monitoring of ecological change; ■ development of research, training, and education programs with demonstration sites; ■ official designation that affords long-term legislative, regulatory, or institutional protection, including overlapping existing or proposed protected areas such as national parks or protected research sites; ■ inclusion of local inhabitants in the management of the biosphere reserve; and ■ coexistence with pre-existing forms of land tenure or resource regulation except for needed changes to protect the core area or specific research sites.
The Action Plan emphasizes the need to link conservation with development as one of its main thrusts for making the biosphere reserve concept more effective. Not only are humans and human activities perceived within their social and ecological milieus, the MAB programme recognizes the necessity and equity of honoring prior usufruct rights, present needs, and future goals of local inhabitants and landholders. People should be considered as part of a biosphere reserve. People constitute an essential component of the landscape and their activities are fundamental for its long-term conservation and compatible use. People and their activities are not excluded from a biosphere reserve; rather they are encouraged to participate in its management and this ensures a stronger social acceptance of conservation activities (UNESCO 1984:2).
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As a result, biosphere reserves accept an implicit responsibility to take account of the social impact of conservation policy in a given region and to consider the needs of the local human inhabitants as equal to those of the nonhuman components in the surrounding environment. "Biosphere reserves offer a 'humanistic' approach to nature conservation in a manner such that plants and animals are not a priori considered more important than man (Robertson Vemhes 1989:15)." This is directly counter to preservationist and deep ecology approaches, although MAB does not reject the importance of establishing areas protected from human activities. Rather, the MAB approach is to use the buffer zones as a link between the protected areas and the surrounding social systems and thereby reduce the potential for direct conflict with local residents. Second, the MAB approach does not require that its participants abandon their worldviews of conservation and embrace a purely humanistic view. Instead, it encourages that recommendations for management and land use be based on the research undertaken in situ, thereby reducing conflicts arising from the imposition of one belief over another. To integrate the many elements of the biosphere reserve concept, MAB developed a system of zonation based on the degree and form of human impact on a site (fig. 1.2). Ideally a biosphere reserve contains a core area of minimally disturbed ecosystems with outlying "buffer zones" which may include local, traditional, or research use, or even degraded areas for comparison and restoration (von Droste and Gregg 1985). The buffer zones fulfill several functions: a) protection of the core area from potentially destructive human activities in the areas peripheral to the reserves; b) inclusion of the local human populations in the biosphere reserves' conservation and research activities for the mutual benefit of the 33
habitat and its residents; and c) development of applied research programs and multiple-use areas where the activities are oriented towards improved resource management in the region (Batisse 1982; di Castri and Robertson 1982; Goodier and Jeffers 1981; Gregg and McGean 198S; Institute de Ecologia 1988; Maldague 1984; UNESCO 1984). The area surrounding the buffer and core zones is called the "transition area" to denote "a dynamic, ever-expanding cooperation zone where the work of the biosphere reserve is applied directly to the needs of the local communities in the region (Robertson Vemhes 1989:9)." The outer boundaries of this area are not marked; instead, the term corresponds to the extension of a biosphere reserve's regional recognition, and the transition area is sometimes referred to as the 'zone of influence'. The inclusion of these outlying zones as part of the biosphere reserve increases the amount of land connected to a conservation program, thereby increasing the protection of the core area. At the time when the Erst biosphere reserves were established, the integration of conservation and development in the goals of environmental protection was unique, although the biosphere reserve concept was not a new idea. According to the Nature Conservancy's handbook on "bioreserves," the concept of multizoned protected areas dates back to the establishment of the Adirondack Park (New York) in 1892. In the 1980s, the concepts of sustainable development and international systems of conservation, inherent to the biosphere reserves and the MAB programme, were reformulated in many other environmental programs, including the first (1980) and second (1990) IUCN/UNEP/WWF World Conservation Strategies; the FAO initiative for the Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP); the UNEP/WRI/IUCN Global Strategy and Action Programme for 34
T R A N SIT IO N ZONE*
CORE ZONE
Core Zone - restricted access and baseline monitoring area Buffer Zone - regulated nondestructive activities, including research sites, education, training, tourism, and recreation Transition Zone (Zone of Influence) - multiple use area including experimental areas, restoration sites, and traditional use areas ♦ Monitoring Sites ■ Human Settlements x Research Station or Experiment Figure 1.2. Guidelines for Biosphere Reserve Zonation. Source: Robertson Vemhes (1989); Peine (1985)
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Conserving Biodiversity; the World Bank/UNEP/UNDP Global Environment Facility; and the Nature Conservancy's Bioreserve program. 'Sustainable development' became the buzzword of the 1980's, particularly after the United Nations commissioned report, Our Common Future, brought the linkage of conservation and development into the global limelight: "Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED 1987:8)." However, the sustainable development movement was generated in the upper echelons of conservation and development organizations (e.g., UNEP, UNDP, UNESCO-MAB, IUCN) and remains poorly supported by action or research at the ground level. Despite the lofty goals of MAB, the integration of conservation and development in the biosphere reserves "never passed to the next step of actually putting the concept into practice (Gdmez-Pompa 1985b:21)." Participating countries have for the most part incorporated the biosphere reserve designation into already existing management programs and protected areas (Eidsvik 1985; Goodier and Jeffers 1981). According to Miller (1984), only 1.6 percent of the total biosphere reserve surface area places new land under protection. Of the 115 million hectares with biosphere reserve status in 1982, 82.5 percent already was legally protected under national park or other official status. The difficulties in protecting the integrity of the ecosystem or providing viable alternatives for the local inhabitants are also tied to the lack of a strong scientific community in developing countries and the absence of good demonstration projects for appropriate resource management (Gdmez-Pompa 1985b). The biosphere reserves were envisioned as ecological laboratories for the scientific 36
community (von Droste 1989), where long-term research projects could be set up for comparison in different sites of the global network and combined within a specific site to solve local problems. MAB has encountered many obstacles in developing this type of applied and interdisciplinary research in the biosphere reserves. Funding is limited in the MAB programme, and many research programs must seek external or government backing. Researchers also have found MAB's interdisciplinary approach appealing but difficult to implement, particularly for research that crosses the boundary between the natural and social sciences. Thus, the actual research undertaken is largely sectorial without the interdisciplinary emphasis needed for viable solutions (Bourlidre and Batisse 1978). Most important, there is little integration of local knowledge and land use practices with research activities or documentation of the effects of different forms of land use in the buffer zones. Only a limited number of biosphere reserves provide examples of local participation in their management programs (di Castri and Robertson 1982). Reports of local participation are often more representative of good public and labor relations rather than local involvement in management decisions and research activities. However, as Robertson Vemhes (1989) points out, biosphere reserves are a "young" approach to environmental conservation and still in the formative stages of integrating conservation and development concerns. The view taken here is that the concept of a biosphere reserve is not one to be placed in a given area, but a basis from which to develop a workable management plan compatable with local lifeways and conservation interests specific to the region. The problem is that local lifeways, needs, and perspectives are basically unknown and only superficially accounted for in most research programs, whether in biosphere reserves or other 37
protected areas. MAB continues to promote and encourage long-term environmental research and monitoring of global change in biosphere reserves. Yet, little attention is given to equivalent long-term monitoring of social variables such as population, land tenure, or land use, although these variables directly affect other ecological processes and the environmental conditions in and surrounding the biosphere reserves. Instead, the emphasis is on "demonstrating approaches to sustainable development (UNESCO 1991)" without considering the research gap between basic ecological research and applied social science. Whyte (1984) points out that the structure of the MAB programme itself contains institutional constraints for the integration of natural and social sciences. First, the program is part of the Natural Sciences Sector of UNESCO in the Division of Ecological Sciences. Activities that cross sectoral divisions are hard to administer since they must deal with the hierarchical organization of each sector separately. Second, MAB developed out of the International Biological Programme, and hence retains many of its scientists and its strong biological emphasis. Third, only two of the project areas (genetic variation and demography, and perceptions of environmental quality) are oriented towards the social sciences, and most national committees cannot afford to adopt and develop all 14 project areas. However, Whyte credits the international MAB secretariat for continuing its efforts to overcome these institutional barriers and for facilitating the research of individual social scientists. "Within their constraints, the Secretariat exemplify [j /'c] an adaptive response towards the interdisciplinary needs of MAB (Whyte 1984:303)."
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Human Ecology
The domination of the natural sciences in conservation research and programs is much deeper than the history or structure of the MAB programme. Rather, it is an inherited problem. The fundamental division between the natural and social sciences in conservation lies in the very concept that MAB has tried to replace: the belief that conservation means humans apart from Nature. The social sciences are then perceived as inappropriate for conservation research since conservation is primarily concerned with 'natural1, i.e., nonhuman, things. In turn, many social scientists have avoided the conservation arena, except for political activism, because the conventional goal of a protected area is the absence of people. That leaves little to study in the long-term. Thus, social scientists have been relegated to the fringes of conservation research, mainly as advocates for the rights of indigenous groups or promoters of the value of traditional knowledge. Communication between the natural and social sciences is also difficult due to the lack of integrated methodologies or cross-over languages. As a result, social science research, especially that of anthropologists, is often considered folkloric or descriptive and not included in the 'hard-science' approaches to conservation policy and research. Yet the conservation movement of the 1990s is struggling to define a unified position with which to confront the causes and resolve the consequences of increasing environmental degradation. Part of the gordian knot is that the philisophical and moral dilemmas are not between good and evil, but between good and good (West 1991). The new conservationists find themselves sorting through the intertwined issues of resource management and human rights and trying to form 39
an opinion based on the relative merits of (and beliefs about) limited or intensive use; preservation or restoration; pristine or perturbed environments; and native or scientific knowledge and practices. The central issues in every one of these various controversies revolve around humans: the role of individual humans in the environment and the power of different human groups to decide what this role will be. Even when the human dimensions of a protected area are considered in conservation policies such as that of MAB, they are represented from the outsider's perspective. As such, 'local people' are often portrayed as a homogeneous, selfcontained group with one opinion and one way of reacting to a situation. They may be viewed as conflictive (in the case of preservationist policies) or cooperative (in the case of multiple-use policies). But the bottom line is that no one really seems to see them at all, not as individuals, not as societies, not as realities. And this leads to unrealistic policies which set up the very conflicts the managers of protected areas wish to avoid, such as poaching, plant extraction, burning, or colonization. This is not to say that human impact on the environment has been completely ignored in the natural sciences. The writings of the geographer Carl Sauer, in particular, greatly influenced natural and social scientists alike, including Julian Steward, the founder of the method of cultural ecology in anthropology (Orlove 1980). In ecology and biology, an approach known as human ecology, more specifically referred to as the "population-resource-environment dilemma" (Ehrlich 1985), was developed specifically to account for the effect of human actions in the environment. The Held concentrates on human demography, human resource use, human impacts on the environment, and the interactions between
40
these three aspects of the human role in ecological relationships. Its principal contribution to conservation research lies in its integration of the human species in the ecological setting. Ecology, at its most fundamental level, is concerned with how living organisms acquire the resources needed for reproduction and survival. In this sense, humans are resource-users just as other non-human species that consume food, oxygen, and water. The main difference is that humans live in more highly complex societies than other social species. Each individual organism has a complete or partial ability to secure the resources needed for life. The individuals of most species spin out their lives with few interactions with others of their species apart from events related to sexual reproduction. The social species, on the other hand, have evolved behavior patterns that allow them, through social interactions, to secure resources and protection more readily. These patterns, complex in many of the insects, reach a peak in our species. Today few human beings can or do live wholly independent lives. The chances for survival and the ability to obtain resources increase progressively with the family unit, the tribe or village, the city, the state, and the nation (Moore 1985:490).
Human ecology research does not deny that the evolution of the human species is a recent phenomena in the biosphere's history or that human impacts in the environment have been overwhelmingly negative, but it also acknowledges that humans are not 'unnatural1, only innovative beyond the control of standard Malthusian checks. Yet, some basic biological premises are challenged by the route the human species has chosen for survival. Human adaptation, for instance, is extremely rapid in comparison with other species. In biological theory, two mechanisms drive adaptation: 1) proximate mechanisms, which are ontogenetical behavioral or
41
physiological modifications within an organism's lifetime; and 2) evolutionary mechanisms, referring to changes in gene distribution over generations. Organisms and species develop and survive through the interaction of both mechanisms for survival. For instance, behavioral changes can alter mating patterns and reproductive fitness, and in turn, evolutionary changes may alter possible behavioral alternatives. In this context, humans have developed proximate mechanisms for survival to such an extent that they appear to defy a Darwinian view of an environment which passively culls unfit individuals from a species' reproductive pool. That is, the social collective of shared knowledge, beliefs, and values that we call culture can be seen as a way of bypassing biological limitations. Its inherited material, in the form of cognized cultural perceptions and concepts, is cumulative, maleable, and can be passed from one individual to another independent of biological parentage, thereby allowing for rapid adjustments to changing environmental conditions. In addition, humans can change their short-term behavior based on long-term predictions. Their strategies for resource use change based on their expectations for future situations based on current trends. Humans, therefore, do not only survive because of change, they change to survive. In the management of protected areas, this distinct human adaptation becomes more than an academic point. Humans live a long time in comparison to other organisms, leading to relatively longer individual interactions with their surrounding environment. Their proximate behavioral adaptations thereby affect many generations of other species, in effect altering, even interrupting, the evolutionary processes of adaptation in nonhuman organisms. Such environmental influence may be the result of deliberate manipulation of ecological processes, such 42
as in agricultural enterprises, or the result of unconsciously created and unforeseen long-term effects from the presence of humans. It is the latter type of human influence that is of particular concern for environmental conservation and the management of protected areas. With the exception of deliberate efforts to exterminate culturally perceived 'noxious' or 'dangerous' species, humans do not usually set out to eliminate a species or habitat; it often occurs as a secondary consequence during the pursuit of other goals. The problem faced by conservationists, then, is to determine whether such pursuits are considered immediately necessary or desirable despite their eventual environmental effects and whether is it possible to tip the balance towards increased incentives for long-term resource use, including the establishment of protected areas of limited human interference. The "population-resource-environment dilemma" thus arrives at the basic conservation dilemma mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. The approach of human ecology is only one piece in the puzzle, and further advancement in conservation research must account for human behavior which is not simply the result of interactions with the natural environment. Humans are overwhelmingly influenced by the society which surrounds them, by the social norms, the political systems, economic realities, and cultural beliefs that define their lives and personal motivations. Though some aspects of these social "externalities" to the humanenvironment relationship are at least partially based in the "natural" world (i.e., physical realities), many are responsive to purely social interactions among and between different human societies. If these externalities so greatly affect human
43
behavior, and if human behavior so greatly affects the environment, then the social sciences have a key role to play in environmental conservation and the future of the biosphere.
Ecological Anthropology
Unfortunately, the perspective of anthropology has played a peripheral role in conservation policy and practice, though it is the Held of anthropology, in particular, which views these externalities as social intemalities that influence human behavior. Instead, the conservation movement has suddenly 'discovered' cultural diversity among biodiversity and embraced the concept as if it were its own. This ignores the tradition and developed procedures in anthropology that investigate, document, and analyze the role of humans in the environment and the effect of the environment on human societies. The inherent qualities of anthropological research have the potential for direct application in current conservation issues regarding local conflict with protected area management, economic and political equity in conservation policy, and the continued use of natural resources. Ethnography, as the standard procedure for initial anthropological analyses, provides several theoretical and methodological approaches for discerning local use and distribution of the natural resources needed for subsistence, the socio-political mechanisms that control resource access and use, and the cultural values and perceptions which guide individual resource use within a given society. A second anthropological procedure, that of ethnology, emphasizes the comparative analysis of sociocultural variables in different human societies, an analytical perspective 44
which is of particular importance for the national or international conservation programs and policies that affect many regionally-separated human groups. In addition, anthropologists typically study cultures which have followed a different developmental path from that of the Western world, and as a result, many ethnographies provide insights regarding those human groups which have inhabited or been pushed into marginal lands and the margins of Western society. Thus, anthropology provides the viewpoint of the smaller society in the face of a more powerful, engulfing society with separate rules and values. This perspective is critical for understanding or predicting local reactions to officially-sanctioned conservation programs, but represents one of the biggest information gaps in protected area management and planning. Within the field of anthropology, the theoretical approach of ecological anthropology provides a well-developed foundation for studies specifically oriented towards understanding the linkages and integration of human culture with the environment. The more recently developed subfields of natural resource anthropology and political ecology, essentially combinations of ecological anthropology with other anthropological research areas, are discussed later with the specific theoretical approach for this study. Most simply stated, ecological anthropology is "the study of relationships between humans and their environment (Hardesty 1977:289)." The ecological perspective (now referred to as the "ecosystem approach" (Moran 1990) was a departure from the fundamental approaches of environmental determinism and possibilism. The former holds that human society directly reflects adaptations to the surrounding natural environment and the latter that the natural environment places constraints on the possibilities of alternative cultural traits in human societies. 45
Although possibilism and environmental determinism each represent separate views of the human/environment relationship, Hardesty points out that they share an Aristotelian view of the world in which humans and Nature are considered to occupy different spheres. This perspective is reflected in conservation policy as well, where Nature exerts a passive force while humans are an active element. According to Bennett (1976), the environmental danger of this conceptual dichotomy is that "once the passive-active oppositional mode developed, humans were free to exploit and use Nature however much they might love, admire, hate, or be indifferent toward it (p. 11)." Early in the development of ecological anthropology, the method of cultural ecology as defined by Julian Steward represented an effort to bring the two 'worlds' of Culture and Nature together. Steward viewed the human/Nature relationship as an interactive process which over time could explain the presence or absence of given cultural characteristics in different human groups: Cultural ecology differs from human and social ecology in seeking to explain the origin of particular cultural features and patterns which characterize different areas rather than to derive general principles applicable to any cultural-environmental situation. It differs from the relativistic and neo-evolutionist conceptions of culture history in that it introduces the local environment as the extracultural factor in the fruitless assumption that culture comes from culture. Thus, cultural ecology presents both a problem and a method (Steward 1964:431).
The problem was to determine whether human adjustments to the environment require certain modes of behavior or whether the environment allows a range of behavior patterns. Steward's method emphasized the comparison of subsistence patterns and technological developments in different cultures, and his corresponding procedures were to study the interplay between resource exploitation and the 46
environment, the behavior employed for such resource use, and the effect of these specific behavior patterns on other cultural traits. Steward thus opened up the field of ecological anthropology to detailed case studies for comparative purposes of cultural similarities ("culture cores"), caused by the environment. However, critics of Steward's method point out that correlations between cultural traits and environmental conditions do not automatically infer causality or an inevitable relationship (Vayda and Rappaport 1968). It cannot be denied that the environment places certain restrictions on the wide array of possible subsistence patterns for humans, but the extent of agriculture, irrigation, or environmental manipulation in hunter-gatherer societies has been greatly underestimated because of preconceptions of the limits of the environment on agricultural practices as they are known today. In arid environments, for instance, Lawton et. al. (1976) have reported that the Great Basin Paiute of Owens Valley irrigated and cultivated yellow nut grass (Cyperus esculentus) and wild hyacinth (Dichelostemma pulchella). This finding refutes previous assumptions that agriculture had not extended into this part of the Great Basin because crops from the complex of cultivated plants of other Southwestern indigenous societies were not found in Owens Valley sites. In addition, human actions that affect the environment need not be a way of adapting to a biological niche (if such a structural thing exists), but the result of more social considerations such as group conflict, state government policies, economic constraints, or individual whim. For this reason, Steward's emphasis on cultural technologies draws some criticism (Hardesty 1977). Technologies may be the physical evidence of behavior patterns that connect humans to the environment, but they do not indicate the whole of the cognized environment that also affects 47
human behavior that affects the natural environment. Not only do political and economic factors influence individual resource use and access, human societies also structure, code, and regulate environmental relationships through compelling beliefs and rituals about environmental features and ecological processes (Posey 1984; Rappaport 1971b). This is particularly apparent in traditional resource management of commonly held resources where the cumulative effect of unregulated individual use can be detrimental to the group as a whole, as suggested by Garrett Hardin's (1968) "Tragedy of the Commons." In such cases, powerful motivational factors such as a religion with salient environmental components are needed to instill an internalized social ethic that overrides personal desires, though Anderson (1990) notes that it is a combination of material and religious motivations that best governs individual behaviors on common properties. The limitations of the causal approach for developing a holistic understanding of the complexities involved with human-environment interactions led to the development of ecological anthropology as defined by Clifford Geertz. Rather than concentrating on environmental causation, Geertz's work is more concerned with the constant interplay between human societies and specific environments and the comparative effect on social organization: The guiding question shifts from: "Do habitat conditions (partly or completely) cause culture or do they merely limit it?" to such more incisive queries as: "Given an ecosystem defined through the parallel discrimination of cultural core and relevant environment, how is it organized?" "What are the mechanisms which regulate its functioning?" "What degree and type of stability does it have" "What is its characteristic line of development and decline?" "How does it compare in these matters with other such systems?" (Geertz 1963:10).
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Geertz is credited with the integration of ecosystems as units of analysis in anthropological theory (Moran 1990). The holistic nature of the systems approach, especially attractive to anthropologists, shifted the research emphasis from documentation of subsistence patterns and technologies to an emphasis on stabilizing feedbacks between the environment and human populations. As a result, the unit of study changed from cultures to local populations, and the integration of biological principles and methods increased the rigor of the research tools employed by ecological anthropologists (Orlove 1980). Rappaport's (1968, 1971a) careful calculations of energy flow with the Maring of New Guinea and Lee's (1968, 1969) records of caloric consumption and energy requirements of the IKung San of Botswana are perhaps the most well-known (and criticized) examples of the emphasis on equilibrium and cybernetics in anthropological theory, although Vayda and McCay (1975) note that energy is not the limiting factor for cultural or physiological adaptations in either case. Netting (1981) also notes the difficulties and utility of accurately measuring variables of energy and cautions against using biological models to explain social phenomena: "The anthropologist's major concern is with distinctively cultural behavior: kinship and marriage, the division of labor, rights and duties in the household, access to resources, political conflict and cooperation (p. 223)." Netting follows Steward's tradition by examining how human environment relationships affect cultural features and patterns, but uses the household as the fundamental unit of study instead. His approach, termed "neofunctionalism" by Orlove (1980), seeks to explain human:land ratios through social mechanisms of
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demographic change such as marriage and household formation, and, in turn, to look for feedback links from the environment that serve to regulate these mechanisms. Netting's work is firmly based on the premise that cultural rather than biological mechanisms serve as the basis for human behavior. However, his writings also perpetuate homeostatic concepts of a dynamic equilibrium between humans and the environment where social structures serve to regulate population growth on a limited resource base2. Though concepts of equilibrium and carrying capacity provide general orienting principles towards counteracting forces and their constraints (Hardesty 1977; Netting 1990), they present difficulties as working concepts. The assumption of an equilibrium implies a balancing point, a certain value that can be attributed to the ratio of population to surface area. Given the many examples (including Netting's own study of the community of Tdrbel in the Swiss alps) that document constantly expanding human populations on a set resource base, the logical conclusion is that the balance point for an equilibrium is constantly changing. Yet, there is no way to know when a point exists around which the system is changing, what that point is, or when the system and the point are in flux. The alternative explanation, that the balance is part of a dynamic system which at any given time has an equilibrium point, requires an assumption that a self-regulating population at any given time is at or below carrying capacity, rendering the term useless. So the ''dynamic equilibrium" concept is rejected here and also later corrected by Netting himself:
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I may well have been guilty of the ecosystematic fallacy. This common anthropological error involves an overemphasis on functional integration, stability, and regulatory mechanisms within the community and a relative neglect of disequilibrium, changes emanating from more inclusive political-economic systems, and instances of evolutionary maladaptation (Netting 1990:229).
Despite the objections to Netting's heuristic approach, his emphasis on the importance of socio-cultural mechanisms for regulating the relationship of humans to the resource base has heavily influenced the study presented here. In particular, his research design integrates fine-grained analyses of household structures into wider social structures and focuses on the fluctuations in population and settlement from patterns of kinship, land-tenure, inheritance, and marriage. These are social factors which, in turn, affect the intensity of land use in a given environment. Netting's carrying capacity is not the ecological capacity of the environment under a given social system, but rather the capacity of a social system under given environmental constraints. Yet, social systems are considered here to follow a "non-equilibrium'' path of change similar to the current concept of ecosystem change, where the parts of the system and their relationships can be studied, but the relative quantities or existence of these components are unlikely to be the same at any given point in time. Social systems are also not isolated, and individual components may change due to external events independent of the internal system. Predictions of future conditions must then account for an element of randomness, of nonbalancing factors, in the same way that Botkin (1990) cautions against the use of homeostatic predictive models in ecology: "At the level at which organisms respond to and affect their environment, the world is one of risk, predictable only to probabilities. Nature as perceived by living things is a nature of chance (p. 124)."
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Moran (1990) also notes that a homeostatic assumption neglects processes of change which are not necessarily stabilizing. Twenty years ago, Anderson (1972) noted that since the dominant resource-based world economies did not account for ecological costs, they did not include balances for resource protection which lead to ultimately unbalancing ecological behavior. An allowance for long-term maladaptive, disequilibrating political or economic strategies provides a new set of provocative questions for conservation research: Now, in energy cost, and obviously in ecological cost, it is better to be efficient and conservationist than to be wasteful and destructive. Under what circumstances is more economical to be uneconomical? Under what circumstances can the wasters afford to go on, and the economy become based on throughput, while conservers are unable to compete? Obviously this occurs when real ecological costs of production are much greater than economic costs, or at least those economic costs reckoned on the balance sheets (Anderson 1972:267268).
These questions point to the beginnings of a theoretical approach in ecological anthropology which includes the factors that govern decisions made about resource use, not only at the household or community level, but also at the level of the individual. Two types of time scales also are involved by looking at the different incentives which influence decisions made for short-term or long-term resource use. Orlove (1980) refers to this approach as "processual" ecological anthropology, referring to the integration of processes of change with synchronic social phenomena and changes between individual and group activities. Most important, it incorporates decision-making models into the research design, thereby including the cognitive dimensions of human behavior and individual management strategies which influence resource use.
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Cognitive Anthropology
Within the household and within the community, individual members must make decisions which balance those actions perceived as appropriate for group membership against the actions desired by the individual and the incentives for being a maverick. For a study of resource use in human societies, it is the relationship between individual decisions and group activities that is critical. Though political, economic, and ideological systems influence individual decisions about resource use, these systems themselves are the cumulative and aggregate effect of individual decisions made about cooperative, economic, or ethical behavior. Such a distinction cautiously follows Durkheim's concept of a "social fact" as: . . . every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations (Durkheim 1938:132).
The danger of perceptualizing social phenomena in this manner is that social facts are sometimes reified to the point where they are attributed with organic properties such as self-regulation, optimization of human resources, or survival strategies3. However, there need not be a mystical gap between an all-powerful social fact and the individuals who live by its light (or darkness). Collective representations are ultimately tied back to the individual group members who create and maintain them. "A collective representation does not require a metaphysical
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collective consciousness, only a set of shared and interacting cognitive structures (schemas) both formed and maintained by similar external constraints (Kronenfeld and Kaus 1991:3)." Kronenfeld and Decker (1979) consider this connection between individual and social behaviors to be similar to the Saussurean concept of langue and parole. The understanding of language by a group of humans is one of the best examples of a collective representation of a shared social schema. Humans that speak one tongue share enough of a common conception of the rules and meanings of their language to understand one another, but each practices speech as an individual. Thus, language exists as a dynamic entity that embodies shared individual perceptions of the connections between speech and concepts, but also changes over time to incorporate persistent and pervasive individual variations of pronunciation, syntax and semantics. Conservation policy and practice can also be perceived as an extension of Durkheimian/Saussurean distinctions. Conservation policies are management agendas which are implemented as a unit in various locales, but they also represent the consensus of a group of individuals, each with a personal agenda and cultural bias regarding 'appropriate1 land management. When policies are implemented from outside the environment in which they are conceived, they affect people whose beliefs, motivations, and perceptions they may not represent. The issue to be examined is whether the introduction of conservation policies that contain little to no local representation contributes to local resistance in their implementation and whether local-level cooperation increases with the accommodation of local collective schema in the political agenda of the conservation agency. The answer requires first determining which ideas regarding the environment are held in 54
common between and among individuals in the different groups (from the local residents to outside conservationists), and secondly, how these concepts are connected to individual actions or group policies. Decisions constitute the connections between these perceptions and their associated behaviors. In this particular situation, the key decisions are about how the land is to be used and who is going to use it. Analysis of the decision-making processes for land use and for consciously-realized relations between local residents and conservation agencies requires eliciting the ideas people have in their heads about the environment and how they sort and value varied decision outcomes. The objective in these analyses is not necessarily to determine the route to the "best" answer, but to identify the criteria and alternatives perceived by the individual making the decision. Though the initial assumption is one of rationality, in that individuals do not make choices completely at random (Simon 1957), the anthropological approach assumes that these choices are also culturally mediated. Thus, the mechanisms of the "natural" decision making process are borrowed from traditional economic theory, but the goals, alternatives and criteria are all elicited from within the sociocultural system itself (C. Gladwin 1980; H. Gladwin and Murtaugh 1980; Quinn 1975; Young 1981). This approach allows for the consideration of contributing factors embedded in social norms or ideologies which indirectly influence the decision-making process via the saliency and relative worth attributed to the criteria and alternatives. The importance of a natural decision making approach is not purely academic. Current international concern in agricultural development and environmental conservation looks towards the potential combination of short- and long-term goals where the values are not mutually exclusive. For example, a 55
decision-making study undertaken by Schoepfle et. al. (1984) showed that Navajos have culturally consistent measures for weighing development incentives such as wage work against the potential disruption of "the way we live." The development of a viable policy that matches the goals of both the program and local inhabitants requires an understanding not of what people ought to do, but of the criteria on which they are actually basing their decisions. As a result, natural decision-making approaches are complemented by other research areas in cognitive anthropology, such as ethnobotany, ethnosemantics, or ethnoecology, which piece together the cognized environment4 of different cultural groups. Most important, these anthropological approaches present human relationships to the environment as they are perceived by the participant, not the scientific observer (Fowler 1977; Frake 1962; Tyler 1969). Categorizations, taxonomies, and paradigms are some of the cognitive means that human beings use to organize, understand, and communicate about the continuum of sensory perceptions surrounding them (Conklin 1969; Frake 1964; Metzger and Williams 1966; Tyler 1969). In this way, human societies are tied together not only by sociopolitical rules and norms, but by shared perceptions of how the world works and the relevant 'units' in the environment that allow this process to continue. The combination of culturally-mediated perceptions and decisions influences both land use and social relations in a given area, and an understanding of the cognized environment is of utmost importance for the protection of the physical environment. The conceptualization of what is perceived about the land and its resources unconsciously governs the decisons regarding land use by rapidly sorting out the salient alternatives and culturally appropriate critieria for a decision via unconscious preattentive processes: "information processing that is outside of a 56
decision maker's ordinary attention and awareness (H. Gladwin and Murtaugh 1980:117)." The task of the cognitive anthropologist is to make these implicit thought processes visible to others who have never thought about the world in quite that way. In the case of inhabited protected areas, the cognized environments as perceived by local residents, absentee landholders, or administrators can be strikingly different although they might be looking at the same physical environment. Tyler (1969:3) points out that "people of different cultures may not recognize the same kinds of material phenomena as relevant, even though from an outsider's point of view the same material phenomena may be present in every case." Conservationists and environmental researchers may see only the biodiversity and the internal and external factors that contribute to or threaten the uniqueness, beauty, or scientific value of a protected area. However, local residents and landholders may be concerned about the abundance of only a handful of natural resources. These resources have an economic value, demographic pressures for their extraction and use, sociopolitical systems to govern resource access and control, and ideological representations in religions, myths, or social norms that guide ethical behavior regarding resource use. All these conditions influence the perceptions held by an individual about the environment within the protected area and in turn affect the decisions made regarding land use (fig. 1.3). Thus, shared concepts of the threats and alternatives for sustainable resource management within a given social system are essential for the biosphere reserve concept to work.
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External Factors Social
Physical
/
Decisions
Land Use
Natural Resources
Figure 1.3.
The Cognized Environment
Biodiversity
Perceptions
\
Conservation Anthropology
The anthropological approach to environmental conservation thus incorporates and integrates many perspectives and units of study to examine environmental behavior in different cultural groups. However, not all of the anthropological approaches discussed previously can be encompassed in one case study. The research problem for this study was defined within the context of interand intragroup relations involved in protected area management rather than the human/environment relationships. The term 'manager' is not used here as an indication of the value of resource use (e.g., 'sustainable resource management') but to denote those individuals or groups who make the decisions about observable land use, sustainable or not, and who thereby have control over resource availability and consumption. In addition, Bennett (1982:4) points out that "management is not defined as a restricted or specialized economic decision-making process, but includes dealings with relatives, friends, neighbors, the community, and national institutions." So resource managers in protected areas are considered as subsets of larger populations, each with different organizational structures, histories, knowledge, economies, and political clout. An officially-designated protected area which is also inhabited implies the coexistence of different groups of resource managers, whether administrators, researchers, residents, or landholders. As a collective within the boundaries of the protected area, however, resource managers all share one thing from the outset: the land itself. Two extreme options thus exist for human relations: conflictive relations where the various groups fight for access to and use of the land and its natural resources, or cooperative relations where they work together for the mutual 59
benefit of all participating groups. It is the latter which is the goal of the biosphere reserve concept, but the problem remains in how to achieve this goal. What factors contribute to cooperative or conflictive relations between and among the different populations of resource managers? What are the environmental consequences of these factors and corresponding human relations? In addition, which of these factors represent fixed constraints, and how can alternative situations be developed to encourage cooperative relations? The research approach developed here contends that the social environment (in terms of sociopolitical realities and shared ideologies) mediates what is perceived regarding the potential or desired use of the physical environment and also the power to implement and enforce the decisions, regulations, or customs for resource use and distribution. Though the fieldwork described in later chapters emphasizes the specific importance of land use, land tenure, settlement and population, and environmental perceptions, each of these components is considered to be part of a given human society in which the whole may not equal the sum of the parts. For instance, A. R. Beals' (1974) concept of village ecology stresses the interaction among world views, community plans and environmental realities within the village boundaries. The research design for conservation anthropology must necessarily be eclectic to account for the broad view of village ecology merged with protected area management. The objective is not so much to create a new paradigm within anthropological theory, but to emphasize the power and applicablity of anthropology as a social science to provide insights into the human dimension of environmental conservation. Regrettably, anthropological studies are not common in conservation research, and the non-anthropological literature indicates a myriad 60
of human behaviors as the determinants in environmental conditions. For this reason, ethnographic descriptions of spatial and temporal patterns of settlement, population, subsistence, kinship, household structure, economic production, resource distribution, adjudication, language, or socially-mediated perceptions are all considered relevant variables, with the hope that long-term ethnographic research combined with ethnological study will determine which variables hold the most insight and predictive value for human behavior in protected areas. The theoretical approach of this study borrows from the fields of natural resource anthropology and political ecology, which together combine the concerns discussed previously regarding the human role in the environment, environmental perceptions and natural resource management. As defined by Burton et. al. (1986), natural resource anthropology is an applied field which combines cultural ecology, cognitive anthropology and economic anthropology in the study of natural resource management systems. The relevance of cultural ecology (as a synonym for ecological anthropology) and cognitive anthropology for conservation research have already been discussed with respect to the integration of social and physical environments and the selection of land use alternatives based on individual perceptions of these environments. Economic anthropology is included in natural resource anthropology in order to investigate the linkages of local social systems to the external economies that affect incentives for differing forms of land use. However, two difficulties arise in applying natural resource anthropology to conservation research. Natural resources are typically defined in terms of their value to humans, whereas, for conservation puiposes, not all resources have a productive value in the marketplace. In other words, natural resource management implies a Pinchot-like worldview that resources are to be used, albeit wisely. 61
Protected areas, as envisioned by MAB, are sites where some resources are to be protected from use while others are to be used with caution and with respect for future generations. The focus and value is placed instead on the ecosystem (habitat) in which both natural resources and humans form an integral part. Second, natural resource anthropology does not account for sociopolitical factors except as they affect economic activities. Yet, the central source of conflict in protected area management stems from the displacement of power, in terms of usufruct rights, from politically weak societies to groups with stronger political backing. As a result of these underlying differences between natural resource and protected area management, the framework of political ecology is used to assimilate the economic focus of natural resource anthropology while accounting for the differing and overlapping organizational units with vested interests in a designated protected area. Sheridan outlines the approach of political ecology in his study of resource management and distribution in the rural community of Cucurpe in Northern Mexico: The ecology of any human community is political in the sense that it is shaped and constrained by other human groups. The exploitation, distribution, and control of natural resources is always mediated by differential relationships of power within and among societies. At the same time, however, the resources being exploited impose certain constraints as well—constraints that modify the political force fields emanating from outside the community in question. Peasant societies are neither isolated "little communities" nor helpless pawns in an international power struggle. On the contrary, they are constantly engaged in a creative dialectic between both local and external forces (Sheridan 1988:xvii).
These local and external forces are precisely what need to be examined in conservation research to understand the socially-mediated incentives for
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environmental protection or degradation. An international conservation program such as MAB is an externally-conceived concept superimposed in the form of a biosphere reserve on sites which are also subjected to local human pressures. As such, the interaction between local and international levels of organization, each with different degrees and spheres of political influence, determines the regulation of land use for the individuals working and living in the Reserve. Sheridan's work in Cucurpe also provides a point of comparison for this study, and some of the description and analysis of the Mapimf region mirrors the data organization of Sheridan's study in order to begin an ethnological comparison of lifeways in semi-arid and arid environments. Although the anthropological literature contains many case studies of traditional forms of natural resource management, very little information exists for Northern Mexico. The research by R. L. Beals (1932), Nabhan (1987), Felger and Moser (1985), and Nugent (1988) provides historical, ethnobotanical, and political insights for the semi-arid environments of Chihuahua and Sonora, and the theses of Espfn Diaz (1981) and Castillo Foncerrada (1979) present studies of agricultural, mining, and wax-making groups in the fertile Lake District (La Comarca Lagunera) of Gdmez-Palacio (Durango) and Torredn (Coahuila). A reference series published by the Institute Nacional de Antropologfa e Historia (INAH 1988) contains reviews of the anthropological (mostly historical and archaeological) literature of Northern Mexico, but, to date, Sheridan's study stands alone as a study of social structure in relation to natural resource management in the region. The political ecology approach cannot be wholly adopted for the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve, however. The emphasis on small peasant communities exemplified in Sheridan's work, itself developed from the theoretical orientations of 63
Robert Netting and Eric Wolf, does not match the situation found in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve or other protected areas that were reviewed as part of this project. A protected area may include small communities which control the use and access to land, but its resources are just as likely to attract the individual entrepreneur, the multinational corporation, the homeless colono, the scientific researcher, the sport hunter and thrill-seeker, or any number of individuals or partial societies with vested interests in the land but not in each other. As a result, the human populations affected by the establishment of a protected area are not necessarily communities, per se, but subsets of larger societies. These partial societies are made up of individuals with common interests, such as cattle ranchers, hunters, or researchers, but do not constitute local social units which hold themselves separate from wider economic or political settings. This situation does not fit within Wolf's (1957) concept of closed corporate communities that maintain privileges of wealth and power for insiders and limits them to outsiders as part of a defensive mechanism to protect peasants from elites. Instead, the distinction between insider and outsider populations is blurred in protected areas, though land use is influenced by local to external forces. A community which demonstrates closure, in terms of restricted access to land and natural resources, or corporatism, in terms of collective management of commonlyheld land, may crosscut levels of political organization or social standing. The U.S. National Parks, National Forests, and Bureau of Land Management systems provide examples of corporate restrictions for land use on sites which are held in trust and administered by the U.S. government on behalf of its entire citizenship, many of whom have never seen the land in question. In addition, lobbyists for the environmental sector of the U.S. public fight against local-to-multinational private 64
corporations for control over these public lands, as seen in the current debates over cattle ranching enterprises on BLM rangelands or the logging industry in the National Forests of the Pacific Northwest. In the case of the biosphere reserves, the land in question may legally belong to local residents under local land tenure systems while being simultaneously managed and held in trust for humanity by the Reserve management as a representative of the international conservation community. Yet, the role of communities, small or otherwise, as a mediating force in human relations remains unexplored in protected area management. Communities have qualities which can provide a social buffer for conflicts over resource use where the desire to become or remain a member of the "conservation group" ameliorates the potential anger against restrictions for individual resource use. The difference between the conventional ethnographic study of a small community and the approach taken here is that a sense of community is more of a normative goal inherent in the biosphere reserve concept rather than a reality found in the different groups which use a protected area. In conventional protected areas such as national parks, the administration serves as a policing agent that guards against environmental misuse. In contrast, the biosphere reserve concept calls for coexistence and cooperation between the reserve management and those individuals with rights or needs to use the land and its resources. As a result, the establishment of a biosphere reserve in an inhabited area implies the corporate use of the shared environment and marks the beginning of new social and political ties within a reserve's boundaries. This situation provides a basis for the potential formation of a partial society with some of the qualities of a community. These include: a commonly-held physical domain needed for 65
subsistence; a shared understanding of the real and potential threats to this environment; a form of social organization that regulates and enforces environmental protection in this domain; continued reaffirmation of the benefits of participation in the research and conservation programs of the managing institution; and education and research programs to transfer knowledge and train the next generation of resource managers. The complication is that corporate systems of researcher-resident land use such as envisioned by MAB overlay already existing laws and customs for using and allocating land in a given area. Unlike traditional communities, the individuals who constitute the biosphere reserve 'community1 have no shared past, and their lifeways operate within social units that are not necessarily equivalent. Managers of a protected area such as the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve are thus faced with implementing a unilateral conservation policy for limited resource use that applies to this collection of individuals as a group. As will be seen for the Mapimf region, the Reserve group includes ranchers, farmers, absentee landholders, researchers and visitors, all of whom carry out their lives within the spheres of their different households, projects, landholding units, research institutions, business organizations, or government bureaus. In such a composite group, the role of the individual and individual perceptions within the conservation community becomes of utmost importance. Each individual makes his or her decisions regarding land use based on individually-held perceptions of the physical and social environment. In turn, these perceptions are formed from the combination of personal experience and cultural heritage. While the political ecology approach of Sheridan and the cultural ecology approach of Netting both examine the relationships between different levels of 66
social organization and forms of land use, greater emphasis needs to be placed on the cognized environment as well to determine which concepts are shared between individual resource users and the potential for establishing common ground on common lands between an uncommon assortment of people. For these reasons, the multi-level and processual approach of natural resource anthropology, which includes cognitive anthropology, is retained for this study, but the economic concerns regarding subsistence and resource distribution in natural resource anthropology are embedded within the approach of political ecology.
Levels of Environmental Management
In order to understand the underlying conditions for human relations in protected areas, one of the objectives of this line of research is to examine the relationship between the perceived and actual environments in which decisions about land use and protection are made. Burton et. al. (1986) describe natural resource management systems in terms of organizational levels of increasing power and distance from the local environment and in terms of processes by which the decision making and control over natural resources shifts away from the local level to "higher bureaucratic settings." Similarly, the official establishment of a new protected area moves the locus of land use/protection decisions from local socio political systems into the framework of the research institution or government agency in charge. This situation not only sets up the possibility for conflictive relations between official and local managers or landholders, it also changes the information and experience used by the managers to make decisions.
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This perspective fits into one of the original MAB concepts of the "human use system" as a unit of research. Using this model, research projects were to consider space, time, and perception as dimensions which influence the decisions made about resource management. In the spatial dimension, specific on-site problems were placed within the context of the wider social and economic levels of organization used to govern land and resources. Resource management was also viewed from different time dimensions: from short-term survival to long-term planning. The perception dimension included the different concepts held by individuals and groups from region to region, and from one historical period to another. In this way, the concept of a human use system directly connected human activities to ecosystem functioning and thereby included the social sciences in ecological research (di Castri et. al. 1980, 1981). Whyte (1984) also emphasizes the importance of the spatial dimension in the human-use system and presents a more complex model that organizes perception variables along two axes—the individual to collective resource managers; and distance from the point of human/environment interface. This model has been simplified here and a third axis added to include the time dimension (fig. 1.4). As one moves along the x axis, the information used to make decisions becomes increasingly removed from specific knowledge of local conditions and gradually incorporates wider considerations, including global rates of environmental deterioration or the power base of an individual or group to enforce their decisions. Moving upward along the y axis, the number of people involved in making the decisions increases as their inclusion of individual goals decreases within the decision-making process. Larger scale decisions include such things as the development of regional to international conservation policies. Though locally
multistate state region Environment
Society settlement household individual
process Strategy x = distance of the individual or group from the physical environment y = collectivity of the decision or perception about the environment z = time Figure 1.4. Social Dimensions of Conservation and Natural Resource Management
implemented, such decisions may be more responsive to national politics than to local needs or be based on the perceived benefits to humanity, the global population, rather than to local populations. Therefore, this study takes several overlapping levels of organization and knowledge into consideration for both the residents and researchers in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve. For the local residents, these units of study include households, kinties, landholding units, and the origin and destination populations for migration in and out of the Reserve. At the top levels are the Mexican government bureaus which officially allocate land and influence production and marketing decisions. In
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turn, the researchers and managers of the Reserve operate within the administration and overriding objectives of their research projects and institutions and the governance of MAB at the national and international level. A more fine-grained analysis reveals that population composition as well as the level of organization affects conservation policies and practices. Part of the detective work for anthropological research is to determine the various populations that affect a protected area. Misperceptions of the relevant populations in protected areas are common and lead to misunderstandings of the mixed behaviors or reactions of what might appear to be a homogeneous group. For instance, from the perspective of the managers of a biosphere reserve, 'local people' are usually those individuals who live in or directly adjacent to the protected area. Yet, from the perspective of these residents, they may be part of a much wider network of social relations and kinties. In addition, all may not be part of the same socioeconomic network or even the same regional population. In fact, it is quite unlikely that the ecologically-based boundaries of a biosphere reserve will also demarcate socially perceived population boundaries. For these reasons, three different populations are described and compared in this study: the resident population; the regional population; and the land management population. Another objective in the research design is to examine patterns of decisions about land use, that is, to understand the development of and relationships between management systems. Each slice along the xy dimensions of figure 1.4 represents only a single pattern in time since components of the perceived environment are likely to change at different rates. As a result, it is unlikely that they will ever be at exactly the same configuration at any two separate points in time. Following Bennett (1982), the view along the xy dimension is then considered to be a 70
management strategy, where the cumulative effect of such strategies along the xz dimension is a management process. Bennett points out that the time dimension is critical not for the length of elapsed time but for the relative timing and sequence of events during that time period. Time is also relatively defined, and the time periods perceived as important by different resource managers affect their ability to communicate with each other and coordinate activities. The ecologist may think in terms of generational relationships between species; the conservationist may look at future generations of humanity; while the local residents' concerns center on presentday survival. Time is also important because the anthropologist is interested in a trajectory of experience—an evolution of institutions—not merely a one-time slice of data. If we view agricultural management or the agrifamily system over time, we can perceive a series of cycles and rhythms that differentiate one subsystem from another....Thus, the cycle of the enterprise may be quite different from the cycle of the family, and when they coincide or clash, important consequences will follow, i.e., the manager will need to make adaptive decisions (Bennett 1982:14).
The separate rhythms and needs of these cycles are of utmost importance to protected area management. The goal for environmental conservation cannot be just the establishment of protected areas. The real challenge lies in the survival of the conservation "enterprise" in the face of the stresses and strains of ordinary life, of other enterprises and subsystems over time. One of the key goals of the biosphere reserve concept (and of similar conservation programs) is local participation in conservation efforts both as a matter of equity for resource control and as "insurance" against destructive activities. Yet, this idealized situation cannot be attained unless the managers of a protected area take into consideration the
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smaller time scales and subsystem cycles that are necessarily embedded in the long term vision of a conservation program. Given that a biosphere reserve involves many human subsystems, the reserve managers need to be adaptive not only to their own enterprises but to those of others. That is, environmental conservation does not require only the maintenance of protected areas, but the cultivation of cooperative human relations as well.
A Case Study of Social Relations in a Biosphere Reserve
Hundreds of examples can be found of conservation programs which have failed to reach the objectives of cooperative local relations or research integrated with local development concerns. Only a handful of sites are considered to be model biosphere reserves, and only three reserves in arid or semi-arid environments were consistently mentioned throughout the 1980s as successful cases of local participation with research activities in biosphere reserves. The first of these was the Integrated Project on Arid Lands (IPAL) in Northern Kenya, independently funded by the Federal Republic of Germany (Lusigi 1984). IPAL developed out of the activities of the Mount Kulal Biosphere Reserve as a program of research and training "to reverse the trend of land degradation and sustain land production for the needs of a growing (and partially sedentary) pastoral population of northern Kenya (Glaser and Damlamian 1985:147)." The resource management plan included strategies for water distribution, livestock dispersal, artificial material for temporary fencing, livestock marketing improvements, and the transport of milk from outlying herds to the settlements (Glaser and Damlamian 1985; Lusigi 1989; Lusigi and Glaser 1984). IPAL was transferred to the Kenyan 72
government in 1987 and restructured as the National Center for Arid Zone Research as part of the Kenyan Agriculture Research Institute. The government adopted several of the IPAL recommendations, including a call for an institutional framework for arid zone research. A new Ministry for Arid Zones was created, and the research agenda inherited from IPAL continues as a long-term monitoring program for arid zones. Many of the socio-economic programs were adopted by international donor agencies (Lusigi, pers. com. 1992). The second two sites considered as models of the biosphere reserve concept were the La Michilfa and Mapimf biosphere reserves in northern Mexico (e.g., Batisse 1982; Ezcurra 1984; Gilbert 1984; Gregg and McGean 1985; Halffter and Ezcurra 1989; von Droste 1989). The desert reserve of Mapimf was considered particularly noteworthy because local participation with the Reserve's policies had saved an endangered species of desert tortoise from extinction (Halffter 1980, 1981): Ranchers and peasants of the region sense that the reserve is a project of their own, where not only studies are made of scientific problems which interest the researchers, but also new solutions are sought to their own problems. The outcome has been total collaboration in the protection of the integral reserve areas and the experimental work, as well as of species in danger of becoming extinct, such as the great tortoise (Halffter 1980:276-277).
In the recent update on the MAB programme (UNESCO 1991), the Mapimf Reserve is commended in two separate sections for its research and conservation programs, and the general international image of Mapimf is one of the biosphere reserve concept in practice:
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The Mapimf experience suggests that a major virtue of the biosphere reserve concept is its potential for reconciling conservation and development goals within the overall objective of land and species protection. By explicitly emphasizing the importance of local values and socioeconomic needs, the biosphere reserve strategy attempts to make land protection a socially familiar rather than alien concept (Kellert 1986:66).
The Mapimf Reserve continues to be presented as an example of the "Mexican modality," which is the conservation strategy for the Mexican biosphere reserve system. The guidelines of the Mexican modality call for the incorporation of local people and institutions in germplasm conservation and the reciprocal incorporation of regional socioeconomic objectives into the research and development projects of the biosphere reserves (Halffter 1984). As a result, Mapimf appeared to be an ideal starting point for research on local participation and cooperation with conservation programs. Why had this protected area succeeded where others had failed? However, the reputation of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve as a model site has been challenged in roundtable discussions at scientific meetings, and the Mexican biosphere reserves have been criticized for what Nigh (1989) calls "la fantasia de laparticipacidn local:" Las dreas naturales protegidas, incluyendo a las reservas de la biosfera, son creaciones burocrdticas que, en su naturaleza bdsica niegan a la autonomla local. El discurso de la participacidn local en el manejo de las reservas (loable en teorla) no se confirma en la realidad al examinar reservas especlflcas, tanto en M ixico como en otrospa(ses....Nopuede haber unaparticipacidn real en las reservas de la biosfera por parte de la poblacidn local, porque ista carece de una participacidn en las decisiones sobre el uso de los recursos en su regidn.
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[Protected natural areas, including the biosphere reserves, are bureaucratic creations which in their basic nature deny local autonomy. The discussion of local participation in the management of the reserves (laudable in theory) is not confirmed in reality upon examination of specific reserves, as much in Mexico as in other countries....It is not possible to have had true participation of the local populations in the biosphere reserves because this requires participation in the decisions regarding the use of resources in their region]5 (Nigh 1983:3).
Given these different perspectives of the effectiveness and equity of the biosphere reserve concept, the research in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve changed slightly during the fieldstay (when Nigh's article first appeared in the Mexican periodical La Jornada). From the outset, the basic motivation of the research was to determine what is indeed true about cooperative relations "in reality upon examination of specific reserves" (see above). The original emphasis for the Mapimf Reserve was on the circumstances that contribute to local cooperation in a successful biosphere reserve. During the period from 1988-1990, however, the term 'local participation' became a buzzword in conservation lingo, to be used alongside the popular term of 'sustainable development'. Yet, the versions of local participation presented in the literature or described in scientific meetings appeared as autocratic as indicated by Nigh and others. As a result, the original research emphasis for the Mapimf study shifted from the simple documentation of a model to an evaluation of the forms of local cooperation and/or participation in the Reserve's research, conservation, and management activities (including the decision making processes). This broader and more analytical perspective meant that a picture of reality in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve needed to be developed that was independent from the motivations of critics or promotors of the Reserve or the biosphere reserve
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concept. In addition, the applied research goal was to provide substantiated recommendations for the consideration of specific social variables in the formation and maintenance of integrated conservation programs. Thus, the specific research objectives were to document and examine:
■ the various human enterprises, populations, and subsystems that occupy and use land within the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve; ■ the organizational levels in which land use decisions are made in these partial societies; ■ the relationships between and among the Reserve management and other resource managers in the Reserve; ■ the similarities and differences between various perceptions of the Reserve's environment and policies; ■ the effect of these relationships and perceptions on present land use patterns in the Reserve; and ■ the conditions that contribute to the establishment and maintenance of local cooperation with Reserve policies and practices and/or direct participation in Reserve activities.
Local Cooperation with Conservation Programs
Before the first field stay in the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve, a set of hypotheses was developed to provide a means of evaluating the research design
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along with the data. Based on the subsequent fieldwork and data analyses, revisions for the original research expectations and assumptions will be discussed in the final chapter. The success of a conservation program is taken here to mean the longevity of a program in an area and its ability to reach established goals of habitat protection or ecological stability in terms of such measures as biodiversity or demographics of threatened species. Cooperation levels can be considered in terms of the time and money that a given conservation program must put into enforcing its policies. Cooperation is considered low when repressive policies are instituted to force compliance, either by increasing the number of formal restrictions on land use or by enforcing existing policies through increased fines, surveillance, or litigation. When few formal restrictions exist or the numbers of infractions are few, the degree of cooperation is considered to be high. The first, perhaps obvious, assumption is that local residents are more likely to cooperate with environmental conservation programs that they perceive as being beneficial for them. Conservation programs seek long-term protection or security for the land and its resources, but local residents seek security for the way of life that allows the land to support them. This security can be divided into three major areas for investigation: rights to land use, economic gains, and avenues for local participation within the conservation program. 1.
Land use: The first concern involves security of land tenure, used here
to mean the guarantee for inhabitants to retain control over resources and land use on a given tract of land. This includes some provision for protection against appropriation of land not only by the conservation program itself but by other outside interests as well. Such security may be provided through formal policy, 77
determined by legal restrictions, or implemented through informal policy such as providing necessary information, counseling, or support for protection of land tenure rights. However, no form of land tenure in Mexico is absolutely secure. Under the 1917 Constitution, all land inherently belongs to the nation. As a result, various forms of land tenure in Mexico, such as privately-owned land, ejidos, comunidades, colonized land, rented land, and federal land, can be ranked in order of decreasing security for either the conservation program or the local residents, in terms of the lands' vulnerability to expropriation by the state or outside business interests. An increase in the security of land tenure provided under the management policy of a conservation program is expected to correspond to an increase in the degree of cooperation, all other things being held equal. However, a cross-cutting variable involves the size of the landholding (regardless of the type of land tenure) with respect to the type of economic production. Management policies within the conservation program which also work towards continuing or intensifying production on the same parcel of land by improving the stock or crop or investigating alternative production techniques are expected to increase the degree of cooperation, and thereby contribute to the success of the program. 2.
Economic Gains: Security with regard to economic gains refers to the
ability of the household to survive and profit under the management policies of a conservation program, and thereby strengthen the economic base of the surrounding community as well. Direct and indirect economic benefits can be considered, including jobs generated from research or conservation activities; increased production levels resulting from applied research efforts; business generated by the 78
protected area; direct funds available to the local residents; and access to external markets. In turn, restrictions to valued resources or activities which limit household income are expected to contribute to conflictive social relations between local residents and a conservation program. Another consideration involves the length of time the local residents have lived in the area. Older communities, in terms of generations on the land, are expected to have a deeper attachment to a specific tract of land. As a result, households within older communities may make decisions based on long-term experience and towards long-term goals despite, perhaps, lower immediate capital gains. Such decisions can offset incentives for short-term exploitation of resources so that older communities may be more accepting of the long-term objectives of a conservation program. They are therefore more likely to accept restrictive policies that limit land use or resource extraction. Another consideration is not the land itself, but the value and amount of resources within the various managed areas. The fewer the resources to be controlled by the conservation program, the less potential for conflict with either local residents or outside interests. In addition, the economic or ecological values of natural resources should be considered alongside their cultural values, as evidenced in local customs and land use practices which have contributed to the survival (or even abundance) of these resources. Conservation programs which seek to protect these resources are expected to be compatible with local concerns provided they do not restrict traditional uses. However, increased land value is likely to negatively affect cooperation since the long-term benefits offered by the conservation program may be overridden by incentives for short-term gain, especially if the land contains a resource of current value to an external market. 79
3.
Local Participation: Considered here to be the most important
condition for cooperation, although perhaps the most difficult to operationalize, local participation refers to the avenues available to local residents for an active role in the conservation program's management and activities. These avenues include some form of political organization to mediate land use, access to relevant information, and a voice within the conservation program management itself. In this situation, political organization refers to a council or authoritative body which binds together a community by controlling access and use of natural resources and by mediating land use conflicts. Since the underlying goal of such an organization is community stability and unity, conservation programs which work with existing political structures or local authorities are more likely to reduce conflicts with local residents and thereby extend their policies beyond the boundaries of the protected area. Local residents cannot be expected to participate in conservation programs unless they are aware of outside issues, proposed management decisions, and the consequences of these decisions. This requires local education programs and the distribution of information (in the language of the local residents) on research and conservation activities . However, conservation programs also need to provide opportunities in which the knowledge and views of the local residents are incorporated into the researchers and administrators' general understanding of the area and their plans for protected area management. These avenues include collaborating with local residents on research projects or including residents in meetings about the activities in the protected area. Most important, conservation programs need to insure that local residents have a voice within the managing
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institution's organization, so that residents do not perceive themselves as powerless against the decisions made about their land and livelihoods.
Methodology
The results of the work conducted during two fieldstays (July, 1988—November, 1989, and July—August, 1990) in the Mapimf Reserve are presented in this study. During this time, baseline data was collected regarding the spatial and temporal distribution of human populations and land use, within and bordering the Reserve, as well as the views of researchers and local people about the Reserve and the surrounding area. The Reserve's field station was used as a main residence site due to its central location. A family from the area and a Spanish researcher also lived there during 1989. Part of the fieldstay (a few days out of each week) was spent living in two of the settlements, though principally in the settlement of La Flor. Overnight visits were also included to the settlements or towns that were outside the Reserve. A survey and census was conducted of the properties in and surrounding the Reserve, including 71 households, 16 settlements, and 9 different properties covering over 3,000 sq km. The questions solicited information on the type of property, the amount of land, the number of residents and landholders, their principal place of residence, the date the property was bought or established, property boundaries, administration and management, cattle brands, type of economic production, water resources, infrastructure (buildings, roads, electricity), and access to social services (schools and medical help). The interviews were carried out with the person in charge of the property, but whenever possible, the 81
same questions were informally directed to other residents and neighbors. Though at first the amount of livestock on the property was requested, this was a touchy subject and the answers were unreliable. Instead, information on livestock was gathered later from roundups in three separate properties and informal questions directed to the ranchers, vaqueros, and government extension agents. The census included the entire population of the Reserve's core and buffer zones from 1988-1990 and a portion of the zone of influence (transition area) from 1988-1989. Census interviews were conducted principally with the women of each household while property survey interviews were carried out with the men. This division was not intentional from the researcher's standpoint. It was at the suggestion of the local residents interviewed and reflects the local perception of the division of labor and knowledge in the region. In the census, information was requested for all household members regarding their names, age, sex, dates of birth, length of residence in the settlement, previous residence, education, occupation, and the residence of their parents. Once again, questions regarding the number of animals owned by each individual household were dropped out of the interviews after the first few weeks because the answers were uninformative. Later interviews included residence and work histories for 25 individuals. Participant observation in both residents' and researchers' daily work was used to determine work patterns, land use and resource management techniques. This involved everything from working with the students, research assistants, and managers in the Reserve's field station to transporting local residents back and forth to town or other settlements, riding many dusty miles as a drag rider5 on roundups (the easiest and most boring job), or riding/driving fencelines and waterlines with the ranchers. However, because of the wide dispersion of the human population in 82
the Reserve, it was impossible to be everywhere at once and intensive study was concentrated on three contiguous properties: Ejido La Flor, Rancho San Ignacio, and Ejido Vicente Guerrero (Las Lilas). Some time was also spent working with a single family in the southern settlement of Las Tortugas (Ejido Granja Morelos). Five individuals (3 women and two men) from La Flor, San Ignacio, and Las Lilas (faithfully) kept daily diaries of their work activities from 1989 through 1991 as part of this project. Visits were made to all the settlements regularly throughout the fieldstay. Informal interviews with five ranchers from different properties were also conducted regarding annual cycles of livestock production. Data on perceptions of the environment and the conservation program proved more difficult to obtain. Detailed ethnobotanical knowledge was limited to a few individuals, and informants did not respond well to standard techniques to elicit folk taxonomies or categorizations. Instead, a map was made (commissioned by the Institute de Ecologfa) under the guidance of the local residents. This was an extremely successful method for eliciting information not only on local names and perceptions of land divisions, but also regarding plant resources and range management, local history, and opinions regarding the Reserve. Informal interviews were conducted throughout the fieldstay, and towards the end of the 1989, a round of formal interviews was undertaken with researchers (16 interviews) and residents (18 interviews). Selection of researchers to be interviewed was nonrandom. The directors of research projects and the researchers with management positions were all interviewed (except for one who was on vacation at the time). The research assistants and students who worked regularly at the field station during the fall of 1989 also were interviewed. All of the researchers (from the managers of the Reserve to the research assistants and students) were extremely
responsive to these taped interviews. Only one researcher refused on the basis that it was too reminiscent of Peace Corps techniques. The residents interviewed were the adults living in La Flor, San Ignacio, Las Lilas, and the field station in the fall of 1989. However, the residents were less comfortable with the formal interview situation. Their answers changed from the assured declarations heard during the informal interviews to more tentative responses that reflected a desire to answer the questions "bien (well)." The second fieldstay in 1990 was to begin the second phase of investigation by setting up a long-term study that monitors the social variables of land tenure, land use, and population in the Mapimf Reserve as well as initiating equivalent case-studies in other reserves. The majority of time was spent updating the original census and map, although the summer rains prevented travel to the settlements outside the Reserve boundaries. Several follow-up interviews were conducted to clarify past environmental conditions and land-use before and after the establishment of the Reserve. On the side, a small scale project on alternative irrigation techniques and gardening was begun in collaboration with two households. This project subsequently expanded in 1991 at the request of the local residents and has sought funding separately. A fieldstay in the sister biosphere reserve of La Michilfa (Mcpo. Suchil, Durango) in 1989 was used for comparative purposes and to explore the possibility of setting up a similar study there. A month at the field station of Piedra Herrada was spent riding with the men who were in charge of managing the cattle of one of the cattlemen's associations from the neighboring property of Ejido San Juan de
Michis. Some of the researchers working at the field station and in San Juan de Michis were also interviewed. Another visit in 1990 was cut short due to the summer rains. Several gaps still exist in the overall data set. One of the original objectives was to develop a predictive decision-making model for acceptance and cooperation with conservation programs. After the first field stay, Christina Gladwin kindly helped develop a preliminary questionnaire with the objective of complementing some of her own findings for local acceptance of agricultural programs' recommendations. However, an attempt to administer this questionnaire in 1990 met with several difficulties and regrettably, this area of investigation has been left for future research. Part of the problem in developing this predictive model lies in the complexity and multiple contingent factors involved in a decision to cooperate (or not) with a conservation program. In fact, the concept of a decision in this matter may have been more of an imposition of my own perceptions than a reality. Cooperation is not necessarily decided upon at a certain point of time, but rather is part of a process that accompanies the developing relationships between the local residents and the researchers in the Mapimf Reserve. Second, the local informants, already uncomfortable with formal interviews, stiffened or withdrew when asked about several changes in their own behavior that resulted from their good relations with the Reserve management, especially since these behaviors involved activities that are presently illegal. So their reactions to the restrictions on hunting, tortoise consumption, and plant extraction, the major policies of the Reserve, were off-limit subjects for direct questioning unless spontaneously initiated by the informants (which occurred more often in informal interviews). 85
A better data set for the economics of land use and subsistence also needs to be developed for the Mapimf region. The demographic pressures on the Reserve land cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the economic forces that push or pull people to the area. However, the small amount of economic data gathered from 1988-1990 allows only a preliminary evaluation of the economic factors which govern human behavior in the Reserve. It was both troublesome and awkward to determine what people earned in a year. In response to direct questions about annual income, most informants said they did not know, which may have partly truth and partly polite evasion. A more practical approach would have been to determine approximate income by a measure of household production and sale figures balanced against the cost of production, including household or ranch needs and bank debts. Unfortunately, few of these transactions are recorded; some are part of corporate tenure negotiations (where costs and benefits are shared, though not always equally), and some are accomplished by trade. In addition, the local residents, mostly ranchers, have an inherent distrust of banks, and money gained from cattle sales was typically invested immediately in more cattle, vehicles, equipment, or feed. It did not appear that any annual assessment was made of gains or losses. Those private landholders and ranch administrators that did agree to provide production and sale figures continually forgot or missed appointments, and govemmentand bank officials provided data on everything but the properties in the Reserve area. The information may not have existed or may have been withheld for other reasons. Several ranchers politely warned me to stop asking for official records or private property data, and I immediately did so, though I never knew
86
whether my questioning had been a perceived danger or just a real bother. A household questionnaire with a better economic emphasis is presently in preparation for a 1993 survey.
Ranchers and Researchers
The description and analysis of the Mapimf fieldwork is discussed in the following five chapters. The next chapter presents the conservationists' and researchers' view of the Bolsdn de Mapimf. This is the image of the region as portrayed through the research and articles on the natural history, the establishment of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve, and the Reserve's research program. Chapter 3 describes the same environment from the viewpoint of the social history of the region and presentday land use in and surrounding the Reserve. The description is long and detailed in order to provide the context for the Reserve's establishment and some baseline documentation for future research. However, each chapter in the dissertation may be read independently of the others, and for those who are less interested in the details of cattle ranching, chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on land tenure, settlement, and population characteristics of the Mapimf region and their significance for the management of the Reserve. The final chapter examines the juxtaposition of the worldviews of the local residents, principally the cattle ranchers, and the Reserve's administrators and researchers. These perspectives and the information in the foregoing chapters are then used to evaluate the initial hypotheses and suggest alternatives for the Reserve management and future conservation efforts in the area.
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Several groups that influence the patterns of land use and social relations in the Reserve are referred to throughout the text, although they are not considered to be discrete units:
Researchers: the group of scientists and scholars who have ongoing research projects in the Mapimf Reserve. Some researchers also hold administrative positions in the Reserve's managing institution, while others are affiliated with collaborating institutions in Mexico or other countries. Reserve management: the group of administrators responsible for overseeing the affairs of the Mapimf Reserve, including maintenance of the infrastructure, directing the research program, and coordinating its collaborative ties with other programs and institutions. Some of the administrators for the Reserve are also researchers; all are part of the Reserve's managing institution and all are from Mexico. Local residents: the group of inhabitants who live in the central region of the Bolsdn de Mapimf where the Mapimf Reserve is located. The group is divided into temporary residents, who live in the Reserve area for less than three months out of the year, and permanent residents, who live there three months or more. All are part of households which maintain a residence in the Reserve area. Ranchers: the group of residents who are heads of households and have land use rights to a part of the Mapimf Reserve. Not all ranchers own the cattle on their land, but all are involved in cattle ranching enterprises where labor and capital are invested in producing beef from range resources. With the exception of one individual, all the ranchers are men. 88
Cattlemen (ganaderos): the group of cattle owners who graze their livestock in the Reserve region. Many of the cattlemen are not local residents, and they do not necessarily have usufruct rights to the land. All are men. Ejidatarios: the group of Mexican citizens who hold federally-bestowed usufruct rights to federally-owned or expropriated properties called ejidos. The minimum number of ejidatarios per property is twenty, and the term refers to the representative, man or woman, of a household. In the Mapimf Reserve, most ejidatarios are men, but the term is also used here to refer to the ejidatarios and their households as distinct units in land tenure discussions. Candelilleros: the group of regional inhabitants whose primary source of income comes from the collection and sale of crude wax extracted from the candelilla plant (,Euphorbia antisyphilitica). Some candelilleros still maintain a traditional nomadic lifestyle, but in the Mapimf Reserve, the majority are sedentary and alternate their wax-making activities with seasonal agricultural work. Salineros: the group of regional inhabitants whose primary source of income comes from the extraction and sale of salt from the saline lakes in the Bolsdn de Mapimf.
Thus the 'local people1of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve are neither a homogeneous nor typical grouping of individuals. They are also not indigenous or, as will be seen, 'traditional' in the sense of using transgenerational knowledge and rituals to guide their relationship with the physical environment.
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Anthropological studies have already documented some of the contributions of indigenous societies to environmental protection, but other groups, some equally impoverished, misinformed, or persecuted, are ignored or labelled as villains. These groups include colonists, land squatters, poachers, ranchers, and miners, even though not all of these individuals are land speculators, cattle barons, resource brokers or sport hunters. Little is known about the constraints and opportunities that shape their lives and their environment. Yet, in many cases, these are the groups which most determine, albeit negatively, the condition of the land. . . . There is a danger we will confuse ourselves by our own terminology. If we designate some people as "indigenous" and consequently worthy of special consideration, we leave other people in the category of "non-indigenous" and consequently not worthy of special consideration. I do not believe we can risk such a dichotomy, which from the outset establishes two classes of citizens, one with special privileges, and the other presumably to be kicked around as usual (Dasmann 1984:668).
In addition, if the purpose of conservation research is to champion environmental protection, then even the powerful and pampered sectors of society are worthy of study, given the real and potential effect they have on both the physical and social environment. By conventional wisdom, cattle ranchers are uniformly enemies of conservation, the cause of tropical deforestation, desertification, and cultural displacement for the sake of economic greed, land speculation, and social status. Yet, the ranchers' choice of production is a necessary but not sufficient component for overgrazing. This study describes a small group of cattle ranchers who are neither wealthy nor politically powerful, but who, by their actions, have contributed to the cause of conservation without ever knowing what the term means. The managers of the land and natural resources in 90
protected areas may not be indigenous, wise, or poor, but they have a powerful effect on the environment and the decisions made about its future use. The following chapters examine the cross-cutting social factors that make politically weak groups environmentally powerful and vice versa by examining the actual patterns of land use and social relations between groups with disparate social, political, and economic opportunities.
Notes 1.
This aspect of Christian tradition in conservation philosophy and Dubos' quote was pointed out to me by Eugene Dehner of the Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
2.
This continued theoretical thread in Netting's research (see Netting 1968) stems from Boserup's (1965) causative model in which increasing population densities lead to more intensive land use practices and consequently increase the carrying capacity of the system. Bronson (1972) offers an excellent criticism of Boserup's model by showing the relative efficiency of intensive agriculture as opposed to extensive agriculture in similar environments and time periods. He concludes that shifts between intensive and extensive systems are related more to economic, cultural, and political pressures than to population driven forces.
3.
These organic properties were taken from Moran's (1990:16) discussion of similar approaches which reify the ecosystem. It is interesting to note that many of the theories about the mechanisms of population regulation and optimal resource use rely on an underlying premise of superorganic selfregulation, which Hardin (1991) claims is really a euphemism for an underlying belief in "Providence."
4.
The 'cognized environment' is a term taken from Rappaport's (1963:159) distinction between the operational environment as the sum of phenomena that affect individual development and the environment as perceived and ordered into meaningful categories by a population. This parallels Found's (1971) dichotomy between the 'decision' and 'extended', or 're d ', environment. The former represents the information available to the decision maker as opposed to the 'real' environment which represents the complete set of information, assumed in rational choice models. 91
5.
My translation.
6.
The drag rider is the person who trails along behind the main herd to keep the cattle moving and urge on the stragglers.
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Chapter 2 THE BOLSON DE MAPIMI The Natural Landscape
On a late summer day magnificent fo r its cloudiness, we are riding along a pasture fence that cuts the eastern section o f this property in h alf The Bolsdn de Mapimi stretches before us, the infinite view intensified by the seemingly endless low scrub found in this section o f land called "El Llano (The Plain) . " We are to fin d cattle missing from yesterday's roundup. The man riding a half-horse length in front o f me is in charge o f this land, its livestock, and its people. He is smiling. This week, these clouds, have brought thundershowers to an area suffering from a year o f no rain following a year o f little rain. A week ago, every footstep, every hoofbeat, kicked up the dust, adding to the haze created by the footsteps before. Although the earth is now dry, the pasture grasses have already responded, their green shoots appearing between the blackened dry blades. The man rides into small patches o f dense scrub and points out long trenches, a meter deep and sometimes three meters long, where people dug out tortoises to eat or sell before this land formed part o f the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve. We come across ten such trenches. He tells me that people used to come from the outlying areas and take out truckloads o f tortoises, ten or more at a time. Even after the area was declared a refuge fo r the tortoises, outsiders still poached, though people living within the Reserve boundaries tried to monitor who passed through the small settlements scattered through the area. Eventually this too stopped. More and more people were informed by the Reserve management and the
93
local residents that the tortoises were under danger o f extinction, under government protection and under local vigilance. The tracks o f a tortoise are barely visible in the hard soil between the grass tufts. The man points them out, follows them a ways and then shows where the tortoise may have fed on the new grass shoots. One by one, he locates new dens in this section o f El Llano. The entrance to each tunnel has been shaped and smoothed by the shell o f the tortoise inhabiting it. We count five in all, although we are not looking systematically. Last spring we counted eleven ju st on the other side o f this fence. At the last den on this day, the man dismounts and on his hands and knees, peers into the den, throws a pebble in and then listens. He motions fo r me to dismount and look as well. 1 can ju st make out the tail end o f a small tortoise in the tunnel, though it is a large tunnel. The man remounts and says, "That was the male. The female is further inside," and he smiles. "It is Sunday. They are courting. ”
The first impression of the Bolstin de Mapimf is of a land that history forgot, a land where perhaps centuries passed outside the ring of barren mountains without including this land in their rumblings, leaving the basin to its silence. Part of the strangeness is the stillness that accompanies the silence, creating a dramatic stage for even the smallest of spectacles. Perhaps it is the immensity of this stillness that fosters hyberbolic descriptions and tales of the Bolsdn de Mapimf. Frank Dobie ([1935] 1975), writing of his travels through North Mexico, once wrote, "Somehow, I know not why, the long, lone cry of a Bolsdn coyote in the night suggests human destinies as eloquently as the broken arches of the Coliseum
94
ever spoke to Byron. By day the omnilucent glare of the sun palpitates an Iliad of vanished races, vanished centuries, and vanished ways of life (pp. 242-243)." History has not forgotten the Bolsdn de Mapimf. The emptiness is just an illusion, one of the many mirages in the desert landscape, and centuries of use have left their mark on the land. In addition, the land has placed demanding constraints on its inhabitants, human or otherwise. So it has swallowed many lives unnoticed and unrecorded by the outside world. Sheridan (1988) writes that the history of Mexico has one common theme: the struggle for land. The history of the Bolsdn is also one of struggle, though not so much against political forces as much as with the environment itself. The basin's open terrain and grasslands have attracted people with visions of occupying and dominating large sections of land, away from the control of others. But for each battle to gain a part of the range, there has been a battle with the land for its support.
Ecological Characteristics Immense and mysterious, appallingly barren and yet productive of a fantastic life, maddeningly monotonous except for one who can "read infinity in a grain of sand," terrifying but enthralling, the Bolsdn de Mapimf stretches out an irregular elevated basin hemmed around by low naked mountains that infringe upon and crumple it and are always in sight. These shed the sparse rainfall into arroyos that are bone dry a few hours after a rain and that, without coming to a terminus, sink into the parched solitude. -Frank Dobie ([1935] 1975:239-240) Much of it is still a wilderness land, known intimately only by miners and cattlemen, the monotonous domain of creosote bushes and other strictly desert shrubs. Salt bushes (such as Atriplex canescens), inkweed, mesquite, and other alkali-tolerant plants grow sparsely to thickly around the edge of the seemingly endless sunblistered flats and playa deposits of fine-textured calcareous clays.
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Groups of dust devils, or tomillos, rise frequently all during the heated days, carrying the white and brown alkaline dusts majestically upward and across the land in giant spiral columns. - Edmund Jaeger (1957:45)
However one might classify the Bolsdn de Mapimi, it is a harsh environment. Morafka (1977:174) refers to it as a "huge, dry, hot lowland system," considered to be the hottest portion of the Chihuahuan Desert. The average elevation is 3,630 ft (1100 m), and temperatures range from an average winter low of 39°F (3.9°C) to average summer highs of 97°F (36.1°C) (Comet 1988). In 1989, the extreme maximum and minimum temperatures ranged from 21 °F (-6°C) to 107°F (41.5°C) in the Mapimf Reserve's field station. The local inhabitants say that the area is a desert or desertified, but the region's climate is more technically categorized as highland tropical arid, receiving an average of 11 inches (264 mm) of rain a year. The majority of the rain (71 %) falls between the months of June and September. The rain is usually in the form of brief, localized thundershowers and varies greatly from site to site and year to year (Comet 1988; Comet et. al. 1988). The annual rainfall in 1988 and 1989 was approximately 8 inches (198 mm) and 7 inches (168 mm) respectively. These dry years were followed by a very wet 1990 in which 13 inches (325 mm) fell, with 90% of the rainfall occurring between June and September. The Bolsdn de Mapimf is actually a series of bolsones, or closed watersheds, that form part of the internal drainages for the central portion of the Chihuahuan Desert. It has been described as the expanse of internal drained lake basins that extends from south of the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) on the U.S.-Mexican border into northeastern Durango, southeastern Chihuahua, and southwestern Coahuila (Van Devender 1990). Bury et. al. (1988) acknowledge the convenience of the broader 96
definition, but note that this is not a locally recognized landscape unit and that the endemic species also differ between the various basins. They consider the Bolsdn de Mapimf to be part of the Mapimian subprovince of the Chihuahuan Desert and confine its boundaries to three contiguous basins just north of the Rfo Nazas and the Comarca Lagunera (comprised of the tri-city, Durango-Coahuila complex of Gdmez-Palacio, Torredn, and Lerdo). The core area of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve is located in the basin which includes the drainage for the ephemeral salt lake known as Laguna de las Palomas, but the buffer and transition zones include the drainage for a northern salt lake called Laguna del Rey. The geomorphology of the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve is characterized by these internal watersheds bordered by low mountain ranges (sierras) and interspersed with large hills (cerros). The sides of the basin are formed by gently sloping alluvial plains (bajadas) which drain into an extensive, level bottomland (playa). The watersheds extend down to a bottom floodplain and the drainage channels iyegas) for the Laguna de las Palomas and Laguna del Rey (Barbault and Halffter 1981; Breimer 1985; Morafka 1977). The landscape is basically a limestone plain interspersed with low dunes and volcanic outcroppings. Soils are low in organic material, phosphorous, and calcium but highly saline and sodic, especially in the lower sections of the floodplains (Breimer 1988a; Morafka 1977). Soil samples taken in April, 1991, from the garden areas of three of the settlements in the Mapimf Reserve showed high to extremely high salinity levels with low levels of phosphorous and nitrogen. The soil pH ranged from 7.6 to 8.11. The natural vegetation is desert scrubland dominated by gobemadora (Larrea tridentata; creosote), nopal (Opuntia rastrera, O. microdasys, O. violacea; prickly pear), ocotillo (Fouqueria splendens), palma (Yucca elata, Y. rigida; 97
yucca), and maguey (Agave asperrima; agave). More open grasslands found interspersed through the bajadas and floodplain contain pasture grasses such as sabaneta (Hilaria mutica; tobosa grass) and pajdn (Sporobolus airoides; dropseed grass) and low shrubs such as chamiso (Atriplex canescens; fourwinged salt bush) and saladillo (Suaeda nigrescens). Thickets of mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) and hojasdn (Flourensia cemuar, tarbush) with an understory of sabaneta are common and locally referred to as mogotes. They are more technically called 'striped vegetation patterns', referring to their approximately parallel formations that run perpendicular to the internal bajada watersheds of the Bolsdn (Comet et. al. 1988). They serve as small catchments for rainfall runnoff and provide shelter, shade, and forage for livestock and wild fauna alike. Other common trees and shrubs in the surrounding dunes and foothills include: huizache (Acacia constricta, A. famesiana, A. greggii), chaparro prieto (Cordia parvifolia), garambullo (Lycium berlandieri), cuervilla (Ziziphus obtusifolia), and granjeno (Celtis pallida). A lower stratum of plants such as sangre de grado2 (Jatropha dioica), flor de pena (Selaginella lepidaphila), and candelilla (Euphorbia antisyphilitica) can be found at the base or along the rocky slopes of the hills and sierras (Breimer 1985; Comet 1985; Martinez and Morello 1977; Montana 1988; Ruiz de Esparza 1988). Breimer (1985), and Montana and Breimer (1988) have identified and defined seven ecological units in the area encompassed by the Mapimf Biosphere Reserve by using a combination of geomorphological and vegetation elements (fig. 2.1). These categorizations also partially define the Reserve's zonation in terms of representative environmental units (Aguirre n.d.). The characteristics of the ecological units are summarized below based on Montana and Breimer's descriptions: 98
Dunes Zone
Northern Playa \-v Transition Zone
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2 1 0 1 2 Population (Thousands) nsSSI
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Figure 5.10. Population Composition by Municipality (Municipalities of Mapimf, Jimenez, and Sierra Mojada)
Age 90-95 85-89 80-84 75-79 70-74 65-69 60-64 55-59 50-54 45-49 40-44 35-39 30-34 25-29
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Figure 5.11. Population Composition by Age and Sex in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1989
30
After finishing primary school, boys typically leave town to help their fathers care for the cattle. In two cases, a 14 and a 16 year old boy were the only ones in charge of their fathers' herds for most of 1989. However, the teens and young adults living in the Reserve are not always the sons and daughters of the ranchers. There is little chance of young adults gaining or inheriting land in their immediate future, and most do not have the money or the right to run cattle on ejidal land. Ejidal rights are limited to the head of the household (or one per household). Many young people simply get bored with life in the Bolsdn and leave to seek jobs, independence or excitement elsewhere. As a result, many ranchers are left short-handed at critical times of the year, such as during the roundups or the end of the dry season, when the workload is the heaviest. The solution is to hire someone temporarily at minimum wage or less. So as the young men of the Reserve area leave for town, the young men in town move in to work in their place. The young women have less choices over their own residence. They usually stay in town after finishing school or marry, moving out of their parents' homes to their husbands' residences. They may live temporarily in the Reserve area to take care of the houses of unmarried male relatives or help their mothers take care of dual duties in the towns and settlements. In several cases, the mothers have moved back out to the settlements in the Reserve, while their daughters remained in town to take care of younger siblings still in school. The scarcity of older people living in the Reserve is not easily explained. With only seven individuals over 60 years of age (6% of the total population) to be considered out of 127 in the core and buffer zones of the Reserve, it is hard to determine whether this is typical or atypical of the regional population makeup. It is at least consistent with the regional data where only 5% of total population in the 347
three municipalities of Mapimf, Jimdnez, and Sierra Mojada is over 60 years of age. A more specific explanation for the low percentage is that the Reserve population itself (not just the individuals) is relatively young. With the exception of one ejido, the present land-tenure units were formed in the last few decades, and only one family has more than four generations in the Reserve area. The average length of residence in the Reserve is 11 years. Most people have moved to the Bolsdn to begin, not finish, their lives as adults, and not many older adults have, stayed. In addition, the combination of the workload with poor living and work conditions often requires the stamina and strength of youth. Older residents must rely on sons, daughters, or hired help, and these individuals are not always available, reliable, or affordable. The harshness of the environment and the lack of medical services make life risky for older residents. Most residents over 65 are temporary residents, although they previously may have been permanent residents. They move to the towns to live with or close to their children or relatives. It seems that there is virtually no death in the Reserve, only emigration. The few deaths reported to have occurred in the Reserve in this century have been from accidents or murders of much younger individuals. The core population of the Reserve is made up of those individuals who have a stake in the land. These are men between 25 and 40 years of age who have acquired cattle or ejidal rights and are trying to build up cattle ranching enterprises in the Bolsdn. Only one woman is also a cattle owner and ejidataria. Other women listed as ejidatarias on the SRA forms are there in name only. It is their husbands or fathers who use their ejidal rights. To say the core population consists of individuals who are building a life in the Bolsdn is a deliberate choice of words. It 348
is never entirely clear whether any one group of people is going to stay through the next ten years, and it is precisely this challenge that holds or attracts some men. The period of time from 1988 to 1990 was a good example. The result of the 1988-1990 drought was a wide-spread loss of investment (of both capital or livestock) for the local residents. Cattle died, few calves were bom, and savings from previous years went for extra feed or supplies to maintain the remaining livestock. The animals required extra surveillance and care for survival. Ranchers watched the sky constantly, taking any change as a sign of imminent rain, and day by day watched the pastures wither and the cattle grow weaker. Gradually, people gave up and moved out. The results of the census show a corresponding population drop from 1988 to 1990, especially within the Reserve proper (Tables 5.9, 5.10). In 1988, a total of 282 people resided in all the settlements surveyed; 168 of these people were living in the settlements of the core and buffer zones of the Reserve. By 1990, the number was reduced to 97 people in the core and buffer zone. The drop in the number of permanent residents was even more drastic, from 116 people in 1988, to 91 in 1989 and finally 57 permanent residents in 1990 (figs. 5.12, 5.13). The exodus from the Reserve area left a distinct imprint on the composition of the Bolsdn resident population (figs. 5.14, 5.15). The population characteristics discussed previously became more marked, as can be seen in the relative and cumulative percentages in Tables 5.9-5.12. As women and children left or stayed in the towns, the ratio of men to women increased from 1.6 in 1988 to 2.3 in 1990, and the relative and cumulative percentages of children ten years of age and below dropped. The core resident population shifted from a population where the highest relative percentage was of children to one where the older boys predominated, and 349
that was made up of a proportionally higher percentage of adults. The cumulative percentage figures also indicate an older population in the core and buffer zones, where 82% of the population in 1990 is under 50 rather than 40 years of age (Table 5.12). These remaining residents were the representatives of those families that had a stake in the area and intended to stay as long as possible. The situation of protecting family claims to the area becomes even more clear when the household figures are seen over the three year period (Table 5.13). Although the population dropped dramatically, the number of households increased from 1988 to 1989. Three households left and were replaced by five others. From from 1989 to 1990, when the effects of the drought were most severe, 14 households left and eight households replaced them. In the core and buffer zones of the Reserve, the total number of households dropped by only two. This is not inconsistent with the population data, since the number of single family households decreased while the number of divided and solitary households doubled. So the people left, but the household rights and their caretakers remained.
350
Population
200
Population 300
200
-
150
-
1988 Permanent residence
1989
V/A
Temporary residence
Figure 5.13. Total Population in All Settlements Surveyed, 1988-1989
Age 90-95 85-89 80-84 75-79 70-74 65-69 60-64 55-59 50-54 45-49 40-44 35-39 30-34 25-29
K K 3
«
KV A
E3 S
KWWS ' / \ R\V\^
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10-14 5-9 0-4
30
20
10
^
0 Population Male
V/A
10
|
20
Female
Figure 5.14. Population Composition by Age and Sex in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1988
30
Age
Ui Ln
90-95 85-89 80-84 75-79 70-74 65-69 60-64 55-59 50-54 45-49 40-44 35-39 30-34 25-29 20-24 15-19 10-14 5-9 0-4-
Nv
a
X
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b^vWSWN zm
/////A
K W \ \ \ \ \ 7773
Lvwww
30
20
10
10
20
30
Population Male
Y//A Female
Figure 5.15. Population Composition by Age and Sex in the Core and Buffer Zones, 1990
Table 5.9. Population Breakdown for All Settlements Surveyed, 1988-1989 Age
Population 1988
Relative Percent
Population 1989
Relative Percent
0-4
44
16%
38
15%
5-9
47
17%
33
13%
10-14
29
10%
22
9%
15-19
33
12%
25
10%
20-24
30
11%
28
11%
25-29
34
12%
35
14%
30-34
11
4%
14
6%
35-39
8
3%
9
4%
40-44
15
5%
13
5%
45-49
7
2%
5
2%
50-54
10
4%
11
4%
55-59
4
1%
6
2%
60-64
3
1%
3
1%
65-69
4
1%
4
2%
70-74
1
