Abstract
Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a ecology of to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.
Highlights
Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way
Based on a census conducted in 2014, the national park is believed to host around 3,300 elephants in the dry season, when wildlife congregates inside the park around a perennial water source, the Tarangire River. This represents the highest density in any protected area in Tanzania (1.2 elephants/km2) and the highest number of elephants recorded in the area since the 1990s (TAWIRI 2015)
Historical shift, given that the protected area was created by the colonial administration to contain wildlife and to control its population in order to protect its colonial subjects from it (Arlin 2011; see Garland 2006). How did it come to a point when rural people living around Tarangire feel abandoned by public authorities, who in return, as I will show, perceive rural livelihoods as threats to Tarangire's survival as a tourism wilderness attraction and as a pillar of national development? How and when did the idea to "roll back the boundaries" for elephants (AWF 2004: 18-19) and to let them roam free become so dominant around Tarangire, and across Tanzania?
Summary
Historical shift, given that the protected area was created by the colonial administration to contain wildlife and to control its population in order to protect its colonial subjects from it (Arlin 2011; see Garland 2006) How did it come to a point when rural people living around Tarangire feel abandoned by public authorities, who in return, as I will show, perceive rural livelihoods as threats to Tarangire's survival as a tourism wilderness attraction and as a pillar of national development? The promise of ecological and economic modernization through landscape conservation builds upon western hierarchies of power and knowledge, and it can hardly escape the colonial legacy of social control in post-colonial societies (Igoe 2017) Under these conditions, the discourse of landscape conservation has the ability to transform areas of rural production into transnationalized spaces of biodiversity value (Igoe and Croucher 2007). A brief history of wildlife preservation and conservation in Tanganyika/Tanzania
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