No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Bio-Ironies of the Fractured Forest: India’s Tiger Reserves
... Martin, in press B). Wolf return continues to present a "bio-irony," in which conservation success provokes public opposition and even fatal retaliation (Greenough 2003). My aim here has been to consider why, deploying a relational approach and drawing insights from political ecology and moral economy to better understand this "surplus antagonism" (Ortner 2006), and the durability of the wolf question a quarter century after reintroduction. ...
... The problems of top-down environmental regulation and coercive conservation -including the potentially harmful social reactions such efforts provoke -have long been recognized by political ecologists and environmental historians (e.g. Hays 1959;Peluso 1993;Neumann 1998;Greenough 2003;Jacoby 2003). Insights from such an engagement (the critical "hatchet") however, must be paired with an emphasis on identifying openings for transformation, for ways things might be different (a normative "seed") (Robbins 2004). ...
Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s was widely hailed as one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century, and has become an emblematic touchstone for rewilding – an emerging discourse and set of practices for conservation in the Anthropocene. As wolves have grown in number and range, however, so too has socio-political conflict, particularly around predation as threat to livestock production. Reaction appears to far exceed wolves’ material impacts, however, and persists 25 years after reintroduction despite development and deployment of compensation measures and coexistence strategies. The wolf is thus also an exemplary instance of human-wildlife conflict, an increasingly prominent and intractable concern for megafauna conservation around the world. And while volumes have been written on wolves in Yellowstone, there has been relatively little scholarly attention to Idaho even as it highlights the challenges of shared space across the working landscapes of the American West.
Between 2015 and 2018, I conducted a case study of the Wood River Wolf Project (WRWP), a collaboration between sheep ranchers, environmental organizations, and governmental agencies in Blaine County, Idaho that has pursued wolf-livestock coexistence for over a decade. Grazing thousands of sheep on its project area in the Sawtooth Mountains while boasting the lowest depredation loss rates in the state, the WRWP has garnered international attention as a model of nonlethal management, holding out the possibility of a peaceful end to the wolf wars. Based in ethnographic and archival research and drawing insights from political ecology and critical “more-than-human”
geography, I ask what we might learn from this critical case, guided by two overarching questions: First, how can we account for the persistence and seemingly disproportionate
intensity of conflict surrounding wolves in the American West? And second, what are the necessary preconditions for and obstacles to scaling up and sustaining collaborative coexistence?
In the included articles, I explore the Project’s emergence and practices and how these have evolved over time, as partners have contended with political economic pressures and the delisting of wolves from federal protection and transition to Idaho state management. I highlight the value of qualitative research methods for questions of human-wildlife conflict, and the fundamentally situated and relational quality of risk perception and decision-making. I argue that anti-wolf hostility cannot be read simply as cultural-historical animosity, nor as mere biopolitical concern over an agricultural pest, but rather must be understood amid so-called “New West” transitions and ongoing legal-political tensions over the governance and use of public lands. This story stresses the inseparability of political economic, cultural-symbolic, and environmental concerns, connecting the wolf question to regional transformations, divergent land use priorities, and contemporary right-wing populism. I show how the political-symbolic enrollment of wolves by different social actors through a cultural politics of wilderness in fact perpetuates polarization and undermines on-the-ground efforts at coexistence between conservation and rural livelihoods – even as I highlight alternative political possibilities around themes of commoning and convivial conservation.
... Jodha, N.S. (2000: 466-473) has made a pertinent point in the studies on land degradation in India by stating that wasteland by and large are the common property resources of village communities, who recognize the economic and ecological contributions of these land far better than the policy makers in India. He argued that the public policies and programmes affecting wasteland ignored the fact that they 15 There is an interesting article based on this context: Greenough (2003) studied the relationship of herders to lions and found that they had respect for the beasts and thereby avoided getting killed. These perceptions are unable to fully appreciate the diversity of natural resources and communities dependent on them. ...
Thesis focus on the implications of land degradation on tribal livelihoods in Attappady, located in Palakkad district, Kerala (India).
... Though we have used Chobe and Waza to describe the shifting and relational understandings of security and protected areas, these cases do not stand in isolation. As others (Greenough [2003] and Dunn [2009]) have shown, Waza is not the only protected area that over time has become a site for violence in the absence of effective management. Chobe is also not the only protected area where park management that has been effective in protecting large mammal populations has increased feelings of economic and physical insecurity in surround communities (Hayward & Somers 2009;Muhly & Musiani 2009). ...
This study considers the issue of security in the context of protected areas in Cameroon and Botswana. Though the literature on issues of security and well-being in relation to protected areas is extensive, there has been less discussion of how and in what ways these impacts and relationships can change over time, vary with space and differ across spatial scales. Looking at two very different historical trajectories, this study considers the heterogeneity of the security landscapes created by Waza and Chobe protected areas over time and space. This study finds that conservation measures that various subsets of the local population once considered to be ‘bad’ (e.g. violent, exclusionary protected area creation) may be construed as ‘good’ at different historical moments and geographical areas. Similarly, complacency or resignation to the presence of a park can be reversed by changing environmental conditions. Changes in the ways security (material and otherwise) has fluctuated within these two protected areas has implications for the long-term management and funding strategies of newly created and already existing protected areas today. This study suggests that parks must be adaptively managed not only for changing ecological conditions, but also for shifts in a protected area's social, political and economic context.
... Forests can facilitate or prolong conflicts through providing valuable timber and game resources for financing and provisioning conflict (as has been the case in Burma and Cambodia), for patronage (as a reward for loyal followers), transport of weapons by loggers, creation of uneven logging, agriculture and hunting pressures, and deterioration of forest management systems (De Jong et al. 2007;Peluso and Vandergeest 2011;Woods 2011). Forests have become social and economic buffers functioning as refuges for insurgents or refugees who also take advantage of forest resources (Peluso 1992;Richards 1999;LeBillon 2001;Peluso and Watts 2001;Greenough 2003). When the agriculture ...
Migration is not new. In recent decades however, human mobility has increased in numbers and scope an has helped fuel a global shift in the human population from predominantly rural to urban. Migration overall is a livelihood, investment and resilience strategy. It is affected by changes across multiple sectors and at varying scales and is affected by macro policies, transnational networks, regional conditions, local demands, political and social relations, household options and individual desires. Such enhanced mobility, changes in populations and communities in both sending and receiving areas, and the remittances that mobility generates, are key elements of current transitions that have both direct and indirect consequences for forests. Because migration processes engage with rural populations and spaces in the tropics, they inevitably affect forest resources through changes in use and management. Yet links between forests and migration have been overlooked too often in the literature on migration as well as in discussions about forest-based livelihoods. With a focus on landscapes that include tropical forests, this paper explores trends and diversities in the ways in which migration, urbanization and personal remittances affect rural livelihoods and forests.
... Through recourse to several other Foucauldian concepts, this paper provides a reading of events that reveal the manner in which the person of the 'criminal' figures in the making and unmaking of the 'endangered' from one species to another, as part of what we refer to as animal-criminal processes. Such processes are explicated within a broader historiography in which Cohn (2004) mildly serves to situate our initial concerns, the theses of Sivaramakrishnan (1995) and Philip (2004) help us to maintain the tension between the workings of racial science and colonial discourses of nature, the assertions of Roy (1998) lead us over aspects of implied criminality in the colony, and the works of Lewis (2005) and Greenough (2011), by speaking for more contemporaneous developments in respect of the tiger, help us to establish our own argument for a more protracted period of time. We operate within the meta-narrative of the colonial and postcolonial state, believing this to be the appropriate scale for any history on endangerment worth its name. ...
The concerns of the present paper emerge from the single basic question of whether the available histories of the tiger are comprehensive enough to enable an understanding of how this nodular species comprises/contests the power dynamics of the present. Starting with this basic premise, this paper retells a series of events which go to clarify that a nuanced understanding of the manner in which a species serves certain political purposes is not possible by tracking the animal alone. A discourse on endangerment has beginnings in the body and being of species that are remarkably cut off from the tiger-the elephant, birds, and the rhino (and man if we might add)-and develops with serious implications for power, resource appropriation, and criminality, over a period of time, before more directly recruiting the tiger itself. If we can refer to this as the intermittent making and unmaking of the endangered, it is by turning to the enunciations of Michel Foucault that we try to canvas a series of events that can be described as animal-criminal processes. The role of such processes in the construction of endangerment, the structuring of space, and shared ideas of man-animal relations is further discussed in this paper.
... It must be remembered here that the forests of Kuno are part of the infamous Chambal region, frequented by various gangs of bandits or dacoits, and this restricts mobility of the frontline forest staff quite severely. This is the "bioirony" of PA management that has been highlighted by Greenough (2003), who, in a study of Indian PAs, observed that "large, depopulated and (barely) protected reserves …. function as magnets that draw in a range of illegal actors: crimilas, rebels, poachers, or simply poor people looking for subsistence". That poachers virtually have a free run of PAs like Kuno and Ranthambor, as disclosed by the Moghiya hunters arrested from Ranthambor, is yet another manifestation of this larger "bio-irony" inherent in the highly exclusionist Protected Area based model of conservation, where the "inviolate spaces" meant for wildlife are routinely violated by illegal actors, especially poachers. ...
Designating national parks and sanctuaries as "protected areas" involves the elaborate relocation and resettlement of communities once resident within these areas. However, as an instance of community relocation from the Kuno sanctuary bears out, resettlement has not led to improved living standards for the affected community; neither has it afforded a measure of protection for the threatened animals.
In what follows, I explore a few ways in which wolves have been materially and meaningfully
“bounded” by humans as part of particular socio-environmental projects, and how these link with a
history of political economic and land use change in the Northern Rockies/American West. As
“rambunctious” biophysical entities with their own (natural) history, needs, and behaviors, wolves
also flavor the conflict in important ways.8 I will argue that wolves’ transgression of human claims
on them forces us to unpack assumptions underlying conservation policy today, and I conclude with
an argument for the “re-commoning” Western lands as a way to build political alliances that unite
environmentalist and rural livelihood concerns.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.