Narratives Of Environmental Change Research Articles

Visual narratives of environmental change: collective memory and identity at New Zealand heritage sites

This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a ‘heroic’ narrative of ‘progress’ – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes three important contributions to the literature on the visualization of environmental and climate change. First, the empirical case study demonstrates that visual narratives shape our social identities in relation to nature. Second, the article adds a rare socio-semiotic analysis to the environmental communication literature, highlighting that photographs have to be examined through multimodal methods and in relation to wider discursive processes of meaning making. Third, by borrowing ideas from the literature on collective memory, the article shows that, even though they depict scenes that are set in the distant past, historical photographs can still influence environmental attitudes and behaviours in the present.

Speaking Power to “Post-Truth”: Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism

Given a history in political ecology of challenging hegemonic “scientific” narratives concerning environmental problems, the current political moment presents a potent conundrum: how to (continue to) critically engage with narratives of environmental change while confronting the “populist” promotion of “alternative facts.” We ask how political ecologists might situate themselves vis-à-vis the presently growing power of contemporary authoritarian forms, highlighting how the latter operates through sociopolitical domains and beyond-human natures. We argue for a clear and conscious strategy of speaking power to post-truth, to enable two things. The first is to come to terms with an internal paradox of addressing those seeking to obfuscate or deny environmental degradation and social injustice, while retaining political ecology’s own historical critique of the privileged role of Western science and expert knowledge in determining dominant forms of environmental governance. This involves understanding post-truth, and its twin pillars of alternative facts and fake news, as operating politically by those regimes looking to shore up power, rather than as embodying a coherent mode of ontological reasoning regarding the nature of reality. Second, we differentiate post-truth from analyses affirming diversity in both knowledge and reality (i.e., epistemology and ontology, respectively) regarding the drivers of environmental change. This enables a critical confrontation of contemporary authoritarianism and still allows for a relevant and accessible political ecology that engages with marginalized populations likely to suffer most from the proliferation of post-truth politics. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmental policy, political ecology, post-truth, science.

Land-Use Planning, Digital Technologies, and Environmental Conservation in Tanzania

Participatory land-use planning (LUP) is often promoted as a solution to various environment-related challenges. In Tanzania, planning processes often represent a stage in the conversion of village lands to different uses, such as wildlife conservation or large-scale farming. LUP in Tanzania is frequently dominated by powerful local, national, or international elites, resulting in loss of rights over village land despite the opposition of many villagers. Contemporary planning involves digital technologies such as global positioning system units, which enable easier storage and sharing of geospatial data. Using assemblage theory, and based on key informant interviews conducted in Arusha and Kilimanjaro Regions of Tanzania in 2015, this article shows that LUP, particularly when it involves digital technologies, is used to not only to change land uses but also to strengthen linkages between different organizations, reinforce certain narratives of environmental change, and legitimize particular forms of external intervention.

The REDD menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania's mangrove forests

Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is being proclaimed as “a new direction in forest conservation” (Anglesen, 2009: 125). This financial incentives-based climate change mitigation strategy proposed by the UNEP, World Bank, GEF and environmental NGOs seeks to integrate forests into carbon sequestration schemes. Its proponents view REDD+ as part of an adaptive strategy to counter the effects of global climate change. This paper combines the theoretical approaches of market environmentalism and environmental narratives to examine the politics of environmental knowledge that are redefining socio-nature relations in the Rufiji Delta, Tanzania to make mangrove forests amenable to markets. Through a case study of a “REDD-readiness” climate change mitigation and adaptation project, we demonstrate how a shift in resource control and management from local to global actors builds upon narratives of environmental change (forest loss) that have little factual basis in environmental histories. We argue that the proponents of REDD+ (Tanzanian state, aid donors, environmental NGOs) underestimate the agency of forest-reliant communities who have played a major role in the making of the delta landscape and who will certainly resist the injustices they are facing as a result of this shift from community-based resource management to fortress conservation.

De-Globalisation and Deforestation in Colonial Africa: Closed Markets, the Cattle Complex, and Environmental Change in North-Central Namibia, 1890–1990**

Models of environmental change derived from the Nature–Culture dichotomy posit a pre-colonial state of Nature subsistence economy that is penetrated by a colonial market economy Culture. In the modernisation paradigm of environmental change, the interaction is seen as positive: (natural) resources are more effectively used. In the declinist and inclinist paradigms, the result is environmental degradation. The history of cattle in the Angolan-Namibian border region between 1890 and 1990, however, complicates the resulting unilinear Nature-to-Culture narratives of environmental change. In fact, the region's cattle were a global market commodity before the colonial conquest; only during and because of colonial rule did cattle become a resource for local subsistence. Colonial officials and experts who by their own admittance were unwilling and unable to ‘modernise’ the cattle sector raised the alarm over overgrazing, deforestation, and desertification. Yet there is little evidence to support their claims of serious environmental degradation. Moreover, the record does not support the assertion that traditional indigenous management and cattle use in north-central Namibia was stable and naturally sustainable because pastoralism in the region was subject to dramatic upheavals caused by war, disease and migration.