Moral and Discursive Geographies

Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837 www.elsevier.
com/locate/polgeo
Moral and discursive geographies in the war for biodiversity in Africa

Roderick P. Neumann)
Department of International Relations, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Abstract Since the 1980s, several African governments have responded to declining wildlife populations by issuing shoot-on-sight orders for poachers found within national parks. War is now a common model and metaphor for conceptualizing and planning biodiversity protection in Africa. Consequently, there is a new moral geography wherein parks and protected areas have become spaces of deadly violence. This article seeks to understand the moral justication for shoot-on-sight protocols in African biodiversity protection and examine the ramications for the overall level of violence in national parks. It builds on and extends the political ecology analysis of violence and justice through an engagement with the environmental ethics literature. It concludes that a moral justication for shoot on sight and wartime violence cannot be demonstrated within the various philosophical approaches to environmental ethics. Yet wartime ethics and shoot on sight have become taken for granted in Africa. The article posits that discursive analysis can elucidate why this is so. Through a careful analysis of popular media it shows how key identities are discursively constructed to radically reorder the moral standing of African poachers and wild animals. These discursively constructed identities operate to simultaneously humanize wild animals and denigrate poachers, including impoverished peasants searching for small game or sh. As a consequence, it argues, human rights abuses and deadly violence against humans in the defense of biodiversity have become normalized within African national parks. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Political ecology; Violence; Africa; Environmental ethics; Conservation
) Tel.: C1-305-348-2936; fax: C1-305-348-6138. E-mail address: neumannr@u.edu. 0962-6298/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.05.011
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R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837
In my book, its immoral to be shooting poachers. Somebody should do a prole of the guys who have been shot. Hes an average normal guy, a poor farmer who is trying to feed his family. Garth Owen-Smith, former warden at Etosha National Park, Namibia, quoted in Bonner, 1992: 21 Personally, I dont mind if they shoot a few people, theres too many people anyway. Its the elephants Im worried about. Unidentied white conservation professional in Nairobi, Kenya, quoted in Hilsum, 1988 The 1980s witnessed a steep drop in East Africas elephant population and a near complete collapse of the continents black rhino population. African governments responded to international and domestic pressure to slow the decline by further militarizing the enforcement of wildlife and national park laws. A militarized response was justied by the assertion that a highly organized and heavily armed network of ivory and rhino horn poachers was causing the fall in wildlife populations. Zimbabwe responded in 1985 with Operation Stronghold, a paramilitary action commanded by white former Rhodesian Defense Forces ocers designed to hunt down and kill black poachers. In Kenya, President Daniel Arap Moi issued a shoot-on-sight order in 1988 and sent thousands of police into the national parks suering the greatest elephant losses. In June 1989, Tanzania launched Operation Uhai in an eort to sweep protected areas and adjacent communities clean of poachers using a military strike force comprised of army, police, and Wildlife Division personnel. Military equipment, including automatic assault ries, helicopters, and even sophisticated remote-controlled surveillance aircraft owed to wildlife agencies in these and several other countries in the region. In the context of the increased militarization of African protected areas, war has become a common metaphor for wildlife protection and a model for state conservation practices. Shoot-on-sight orders for poachers and bandits caught in protected areas were issued in Kenya and Zimbabwe (and subsequently in Tanzania, Central African Republic, and Malawi). Entertainment media and news journalists made reference to The Rhino War, the ivory poaching war, and the war against the poachers.1 Richard Leakey, the former Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service during the early years of the shoot-on-sight initiative titled his recent memoir of the period, Wildlife Wars (Leakey & Morell, 2001). Following the 1992 Rio Conference and the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the war on poaching has been reconceptualized as part of a general global war for biodiversity protection, exemplied by World Bank President James Wolfensohns recent co-authored essay Winning the war on biodiversity conservation (Wolfensohn, Seligmann, & El-Ashry, 2000: 39).
Philip Cayford wrote and produced The Rhino War for a National Geographic television special in 1988. Ivory poaching war was part of a headline (The Daily Telegraph Sta, 1989) and the war against poachers is from a British newspaper article (Page, 1989).
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A war on people in defense of wild animals demands a close examination of the moral justication. My interest in the ethical and moral issues of the war for biodiversity in Africa began in 1988 when I arrived in East Africa for the rst time to conduct preliminary research for a doctoral dissertation. I went to Nairobi, Kenya to discuss my research interests with representatives of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the Africa Wildlife Foundation (AWF) at their regional headquarters. My attempts to engage them in a discussion of Mois shoot-on-sight order, then just recently issued, fell at. No one openly expressed the neo-Malthusian, vaguely racist sentiment of the white conservation professional quoted in the epigraph. Rather, my inquiries were met with a general taken-for-granted2 response that yes indeed there was an active shoot-on-sight order in the national parks. It is the taken-for-grantedness expressed by white, expatriate conservation professionalsdand, as I will examine later, in the reportage in popular media in the global northdthat initially drew my attention and has intrigued me since. One need only imagine, for example, a presidential shoot-on-sight order being issued for poachers of endangered bison in Yellowstone National Park, or recall that neither Kenya nor any other of the countries previously mentioned have instituted the death penalty for poaching, to suggest that the ethics supporting such practices in Africa need scrutiny. This special issue on ethics in political ecology provides an opportunity to explore the ethical dimensions of the rise of shoot-on-sight protocols and their eects on the levels of violence in African protected areas. Questions of the moral economy of subaltern groups and who gains and who loses in resource allocation have long been important in political ecology (e.g. Watts, 1983; Blaikie, 1985; Neumann, 1998), but they have been dened and explored in largely socio-political rather than in explicitly ethical terms. The chain of explanation approach (Blaikie & Brookeld, 1987) that has been central to much political ecology writing carries an intimation of normative concerns in the sense that it challenges the xation on proximate causation as a blame-the-victim account of degradation. More recent political ecology studies have begun to explicitly explore the relationships among violence, justice, ecological change, and environmental conservation (Zerner, 2000a; Peluso & Watts, 2001a). The studies in each of these collections, to varying degrees, are concerned with social and geographic contextdhow specic environments and webs of social relations inuence the expression of violencedand with the role of discursive constructions of nature and cultural identity in framing violence and justice. In this article, I want to build on and extend the political ecology of violence and justice through an engagement with the environmental ethics literature. The goals of this analysis are to understand the moral justication for shoot-onsight protocols in African biodiversity protection and examine the ramications for the overall level of violence in the practice of national park and wildlife conservation. My argument runs as follows. A moral justication for shoot-on-sight orders, and
2 This term has been employed in geography in a variety of ways since its introduction by Ley (1977). Here I refer to the intersubjective meanings that shape the practice of everyday life.
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the treatment of biodiversity conservation as the conduct of war more generally, cannot be demonstrated within the various philosophical approaches to environmental ethics. This determination then raises the question of how the war on poachers has become normalized in African conservation practice and been left, for the most part, publicly unexamined by conservation organizations and popular media centered in the global north. The answer, I argue, lies in the way that people, places, and things are discursively constructed as dierent or similar and the context this creates for determining moral worthiness and standing. Finally, I argue that discourses are not simply a set of ideas. By dening categories and creating and limiting possibilities a discourse has historical, material consequencesdin this case a ratcheting up of violence in wildlife conservation in Africa. The article is organized around three questions that are raised by the declaration of war against African poachers in defense of biodiversity. First, how is the protection of biodiversity by means of militarized defense of wild animals made the moral equivalent of war? Stated dierently, how can what are essentially battle ordersdblanket shoot-to-kill/shoot-on-sight ordersdbe morally justied for the case of people found illegally inside protected areas? In answering this question, I deliberate on the important philosophical and legal dierences between intrinsic value and moral standing of nonhuman species. I will also explore the notion of moral community to illuminate how the allocation of moral rights and obligations are bound up with the establishment of metaphorical and spatial boundaries. Second, what role does discourse play in making the extra-judicial killing of poachers more morally acceptable? The analysis concentrates on the discursive practices through which the boundaries of moral communities and the identities of their members are established, and how ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity, and family inform these discursive practices. A goal here is to show how biodiversity protection operates within a discourse that identies victims and villains and establishes the relative moral positions of wild animals and human groups. Third, to what extent does the war for biodiversity have the eect of generally ratcheting up the level of violence in and around national parks? Here I explore the idea that in the context of standing shoot-to-kill/shoot-on-sight orders and the widespread deployment of the metaphor of war there has been a normalization of violence in the enforcement of conservation laws. I conduct this exploration by presenting three illustrative cases from Tanzania, Malawi, and Botswana where domestic African and international human rights groups have accused African conservation ocers of murder, rape, and torture of local residents caught inside protected area boundaries.
Moral questions in the war for global biodiversity The broader context for the turn toward war metaphors and models in conservation is the rise of environmental security (e.g. Homer-Dixon, 1999) thinking in domestic policy circles and international aairs, much of which is informed by a deep fear of the poor and their claims on resources that is grounded in neoMalthusian understandings of scarcity and conict (Peluso & Watts, 2001b: 78).
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That is, it is rooted in Malthusian ideas of the relationship between population and resources that project a future of misery resulting from unchecked geometric growth of human population. Scientists resurrected these ideas in the mid-twentieth century and by the end of the 1950s the population problem became key in scientic discussions about nature-society relations (Adams, 2001). In the 1960s and 1970s, neo-Malthusianism was prominent in environmentalist thinking on the environmental crisis in the Third World and gures prominently in the formulation of the sustainable development paradigm (Adams, 2001). The environmental security literature represents the most recent application of neo-Malthusianism ideas about resource scarcity, positing a simple (and simplistic) linear causal relationship among population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. Critiques of neo-Malthusian models of nature-society were prominent in early political ecology (Neumann, 1992) and remain central to its critiques of environmental security (Peluso & Watts, 2001b). Environmental security encompasses a range of ideologies and theoretical perspectives, but a prevalent theme is an emphasis on the militarization of environmental concerns accompanied by increased possibilities for authoritarian controls. Authoritarianism is a logical outcome of the extension of certain moral philosophical stances to questions of environmental sustainability (Harvey, 1993; Adams, 2001). For example, Garrett Hardins (1974) articulation of lifeboat ethicsda neoMalthusian ethic based on the reasoning that it is more ethical to let some people die in situations of scarcity rather than risk the destruction of the resource base that supports all of humanitydis arguably part of the intellectual lineage of contemporary environmental security and the war for biodiversity. Biodiversity in all its forms has been constructed as a scarce resource, conceived of as ecologically and economical vital, limited in supply, and threatened by human activities, thereby appearing to force us into painful choices about sacricing some humans of this generation for the benet of future human generations or nonhuman species (Byers, 1994: 124). One of the aims of this article is to probe in biodiversity conservation the ethics supporting the painful choices of deciding which people get pushed into the water and which stay on the lifeboat. The analysis presented here explores the moral geography (Smith, 1997, 2000) of the war on biodiversity and highlights the importance of moral and spatial boundaries in structuring and justifying militarized interventions. Geography is central to establishing the moral rights of certain groups and the morality of violence in war for biodiversity. National park boundaries have long-served as the physical and symbolic divide between nature and culture and as the geographic expression of humanitys moral commitment to biodiversity protection. Certain ways of treating animals that are widely (but not universally) accepted as moral, such as hunting and trapping, are illegal and morally unacceptable within the boundaries of national parks. The war for biodiversity has added a new dimension to the moral geography of conservation. At the height of state crackdowns on poaching, many African protected areas came to resemble the free-re zones established by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Civiliansdincluding women and juvenilesdfound within free-re zones can be treated as potential combatants. Thus certain ways of
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treating humans that are widely recognized as immoral, such as shooting them on sight and executing them without trial, become normalized and accepted within the boundaries of some national parks and justiable in the name of biodiversity protection. In exploring the moral dimensions of the war for biodiversity I will make use of the concept of moral community. One notion of moral community was brought into political ecology from the literature on the moral economy of peasantries (Watts, 1983; Neumann, 1998). The sense conveyed in the moral economy version is that the moral community is constructed of a web of responsibilities, entitlements, obligations, and reciprocities established through social ties that can extend across a range of spatial scales from the peasant household, to the nation-state, and beyond. This is not the usage that I wish to employ here. Rather, the notion with which I wish to engage in this discussion is derived from feminist and environmental ethics literature on the extension of rights (ONeil, 1997; Smith, 2000; Whatmore, 2002). For example, Whatmoredemploying the term ethical community rather than moral communitydexplores the assignment of rights among various groups of human individuals and non-human entities, including eorts to grant the status of individual rights bearer to non-human creatures, a process she calls moral extensionism (Whatmore, 2002: 156). Extending moral standing to encompass increasing numbers of categories of things and beings expands the ethical (moral) community. Thus, by moral community I mean the assemblage of individuals, things, and collectivities that are awarded moral standing within specic historical and geographical contexts. Questions concerning the moral obligation of humans to defend and protect the non-human world are fundamental to the modern conceptualization of wildlife conservation and management. In one of his earliest essays, Aldo Leopold, widely recognized as the founder of scientic wildlife management, presented a history of western civilization as a progressive extension of moral standing to greater and greater proportions of humanity (Leopold, 1933). Adopting an evolutionary stance in explaining the changing boundaries of our moral community, he reasoned that modern humans had been and would continue to accord increasingly greater ethical consideration toward the non-human world. Through the application of wildlife management principles, society may some day paint a new and possibly better picture of itself (Leopold, 1933: 642). Scientic wildlife management, he concluded, could be the basis for fullling our moral obligation to the non-human world. Roderick Nash, with his book, The Rights of Nature (Nash, 1989), continued to develop this conceptualization of the history of modernity being a story of expanding moral consideration to include greater portions of humanity and nature. He characterized the (North American) movement to promote the ethical treatment of non-human nature as an evolution of ethics from natural rights of a limited group of humans to the rights of parts or, in some theories, all of nature (Nash, 1989: 4). A drawing that represents this conceptualization is reproduced in Fig. 1. Nash acknowledges this as a simplication, but posits that it is a generally faithful representation of the evolving understanding of right and wrong behavior that is reected in law and social norms. I will return to Fig. 1 later in this section in a discussion of the idea of moral community.
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Universe Planet Ecosystems Future Rocks Life Plants Animals Humans Present Race Nation Region Ethical Past Tribe Family Self Pre-Ethical Past
Fig. 1. The evolution of ethics (redrawn from Nash, 1989: 5).
The relatively recent discovery of global biodiversity has raised new questions in the eld of environmental ethics regarding the expansion of our moral community. ONeil (1997) has argued cogently that in these debates many environmental ethicists commonly fail to distinguish between the intrinsic value and moral standing of wild species. ONeil reasoned that the obligation of human society to protect biodiversity is derived from a general obligation to protect things that possess intrinsic value, such as ancient artifacts or works of art. Wild species, as a category of things possessing intrinsic value, can and should be protected by humans. He points out, however, that environmental holists3 are in error when they conclude from this that species have moral standing, which refers to an entitys membership in the moral community and its ability to possess rights (ONeil, 1997: 47). Geographers have similarly conated standing and intrinsic value, reasoning, [b]eings with intrinsic value are said to be within our moral community (Lynn, 1998: 286). Species, like works of art, may possess intrinsic value or a gooddsuch as beauty or gracedbut it is not necessarily a moral good. Biodiversity, as composed of a collection of species, does not belong to a moral community, but it does have intrinsic value and we thus have a duty to protect it. The 1992 international
3 Environmental holism refers to philosophical position that collective entities, such as species and ecosystems, have moral standing.
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Convention on Biological Diversity is explicitly based on this reasoning. The preamble to the Convention begins, The contracting parties, conscious of the intrinsic value of biological diversity. (Birnie & Boyle, 1995: 590). Nowhere in the document is there a statement on the moral standing of species and the terms, moral, moral community, or moral good are not used, reecting the general anthropocentric basis for the convention. ONeils argument specically addressed the aws in the reasoning of environmental holists regarding the rights of species. From an environmental individualist perspective, there is a new movement afoot among some conservationists and animal rights activists to extend full moral standing to individual members of certain primate species. A recently formed organization called the Great Ape Project (GAP) seeks to include the non-human great apes within the community of equals by granting them the basic moral and legal protection that only human beings currently enjoy (GAP, 2001). Taking the Anti-Slavery Society as its political model, GAP seeks to include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans with human beings in a moral community where all members have equal rights to life and liberty. Great Ape Standing and Personhood (GRASP) is an even more recent spin-o of GAP. This organizations goal is to enable a non-human plainti to sue in a court of law in her own name, with the assistance of a human guardian (GRASP, 2001). In essence, this would shift the legal standing of individuals of some primate species from that of property to that of person. I have provided this brief sketch of the moral debates surrounding wildlife conservation and biodiversity protection to demonstrate that the war on poachers has largely ignored, obscured, and downplayed the ethical complexities. Likewise, mainstream environmental ethics, while advocating the extension of ethical treatment and moral obligation beyond humanity, has little to say about the moral limits of our eorts to protect biodiversity. The attempts of GAP and GRASP to alter the moral and legal standing of individuals of certain species illustrate how much we would need to expand the boundaries of our moral community in order to move beyond merely recognizing the intrinsic value of wild species. From an environmental individualist standpoint, only if individuals of a non-human species were accorded the same fundamental rights and moral standing as human individuals would they be included in our moral community. From this perspective, therefore, until non-human species are granted full moral standing, the moral justication for taking a human life in defense of the lives of individual wild animals is weak. From a biocentric holist4 standpoint, we would need to fundamentally restructure membership in the moral community and extend maximal protection to wild nature while at the same time devaluing human cultural and individual moral worth (King, 1997: 220). Even if, however, we privilege the rights of nature over individual human rights in an eort to protect biodiversity, before the taking of a human life could be morally justied, an entire species must be threatened to the
4 Biocentric holism refers to the philosophical position that combines biocentrismdthe notion that human interests are not a priori superior to non-human interestsdand environmental holism.
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point that the loss of any individual or group of individuals directly and immediately lessens the chances that the species will survive. Based on this brief exploration, the question of the moral basis for issuing shooton-sight orders as a means to defend biodiversity does not appear to be readily or easily answerable. Part of the diculty results from the existence of a multitude of incompatible philosophical stances in environmental ethics, including holist versus individualist, universalist versus relativist, and anthropocentric versus biocentric, that shape answers to moral questions. Even more fundamental than these oppositions are the questions regarding the ontological nature of the categoriesdsuch as family, race, biodiversity, and ecosystemsdthat are used in discussing membership in the moral community. Let me turn to Nashs diagram in Fig. 1 to illustrate. The diagram implies that the boundaries of social categories such as tribe, nation, race, are homogeneous, given, and xed and easily recognizable through objective observation, rather than highly contested social constructions. For example, did western (i.e. white, European) civilization evolve by progressively extending moral standing to the black race, thereby eliminating slavery, or was the very category, race, historically socially constructed so as to morally justify slavery and other forms of exploitation and domination? Similar ontological questions arise with regard to other categories in the diagram, such as nation and tribe which, often as not, have been constructed as categories of exclusion in a process of coconstituting identity and moral community. Further, are these categories as morally homogeneous as they appear, or are there nested hierarchies within categories in which we could rank moral standing? In the category humans, for example, where would we place inside stock traders, pedophiles, and poachers in a moral hierarchy? If nested hierarchies are possible, can some members of one category slip and fall outside of the bounds of the moral community? The critical points to be made here are that the categories are not homogeneous, xed, or given but are discursive constructions reecting prevailing ideologies of specic times and specic places and that the movement of the boundaries of our moral community is not a linear progression, but situational and contingent. To suggest that membership in the moral community is situational and contingent is not to argue for moral relativism as an alternative to universalism. Rather it is to recognize the spatial (and temporal) particularity (Smith, 1997: 586) in the application of moral codes and examine how discursive practices make certain kinds of violence morally defensible in particular contexts. This approach points toward an acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of categories and a focus on processes and relationships that determine the position of human and non-human individuals and groups within a uctuating and situational moral community (Harvey, 1993; King, 1997). I turn now to examine how categories, identities, relationships, and rights in the war on biodiversity are shaped through discursive practices. The discursive boundaries of the moral community Discourse theory, discourse analysis, and related poststructuralist approaches have challenged existing theorizations of human-environment relations while
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simultaneously opening new methodological and epistemological possibilities for political ecology (Blaikie, 1996; Peet & Watts, 1996; Escobar, 1996, 1999). Discourses are formed by a body of textsdscholarly, popular, journalistic, or literarydthat together produce not only an internally consistent knowledge eld, but also the very reality they appear to describe (Said, 1978: 94). Various denitions of discourses stress the way desires, imaginaries, ideologies, and metaphors work to produce textual products that both reect and shape relations of power. Discourses express human thought, fantasy, and desire. They are also institutionally based, materially constrained, experientially grounded manifestations of social and power relations (Harvey, 1996: 80). A discourse is a framework that embraces particular combinations of narratives, concepts, ideologies and signifying practices (Barnes & Duncan, 1992: 8) and emphasizes some concepts at the expense of others (Peet & Watts, 1996: 14). Peet & Watts theorize relations between geographical groups of people in terms of regional discursive formations wherein modes of thought, logics, themes, styles of expression, and typical metaphors run through the discursive history of a region, appearing in a variety of forms, disappearing occasionally, only to reappear with even greater intensity in new guises (Peet & Watts, 1996: 16). For Africa, as for many regions of the south, regional discursive formations are inseparable from the historical experience of colonialism and the interregional relations of power that produced and sustained it. With respect to relationships of power among various social groupings (e.g. race, class, and gender) and world regions and cultures, discourse plays an important roll in the mutual constitution of self and otherness. In Orientalist discourse, for example, the idea of non-Europeans as inferior Other is established through comparisons with the idea of a European identity that is constructed as superior (Said, 1978: 7). Measures of superiority are themselves not xed or given but are generated in a continuous process of discursively producing dierence. Apropos of this articles focus, one key way that dierence is constructed is by casting the Other as morally and culturally inferior to self on the basis of comparative interactions with animals. In late nineteenth century Sweden, for example, the cultural identity of a newly formed urban middle class was constructed as superior to rural agricultural classes partly on the basis of their comparative treatment of domesticated animals (Frykman & Lofgren, 1987). Immigrant groups animal practices are often used in the construction of racial dierence, casting the culture of the immigrant Other as cruel or uncivilized on the basis of their interaction with domesticated animals (Elder, Wolch, & Emel, 1998). As elaborated later in this section, during the colonial period African peoples were categorized as morally inferior to Europeans partly on the basis of what white hunter-conservationists labeled cruel and savage treatment of wild animals. In this section I analyze how discursive practices deployed in the war for biodiversity recycle and engage established notions of African otherness to structure morally appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and measures of worthiness for moral treatment. Through a discursive analysis I hope to show how a shoot-on-sight order in the war for biodiversity requires cultural processes of coding the other as demonic, savage, and the legitimate subject of violence (Peluso & Watts, 2001b: 31).
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As Smith observed, Moral assumptions are bound up with the social construction of dierent groups, who is included and excluded, and so on (Smith, 1997: 587). In the case of Africa, various forms of popular media produced in the global north have tended to reinforce the preconceived notions of a continent occupied by a black, brutal, and backward Other (Fair, 1993). In reproducing the dominant or prevailing language and discourses, media organizations position individuals, objects, and relations in a way that naturalizes the boundaries of discussion as the only ones possible or the only ones that are real (Fair, 1993: 13). I am not arguing that global biodiversity conservation constitutes a discourse (although it may) or that the threat of biodiversity loss is not real but some sort of linguistic fabrication.5 Rather, I want to explore how the war for biodiversity in Africa encounters and incorporates existing ideologies, representations, and narratives, which collectively constitute a discourse of African otherness and which establish relative positions in a situational moral community. The point that I want to make through this analysis is that the discursive construction of dierence operates to position various human groups and wild animal species in moral relation to one another and that these positions and boundaries are naturalized and taken for granted in popular media. To illustrate my arguments, I will rely on the highly original work of two anthropologists who tracked the representation of non-Europeans in National Geographic magazine in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In a fascinating study, Lutz & Collins (1993) analyze National Geographic as a cultural product withdby virtue of its mass readership and its popular status as an outlet for scientic informationda great deal of inuence in shaping the identities of Euro-American self and non-European Other. Their method, in part, was to randomly select photographs of non-European peoples and closely examine the photos structure and content as a way to analyze the representation and production of dierence. They examine the photographs not from the perspective of how successful or not they are in depicting the real world, but from the idea that identity formation draws on images of the other (Lutz & Collins, 1993: 2). Following Lutz & Collins (1993: 12 13 and 285), I focus on systematically analyzing the structure, content, and juxtaposition of photographs, observing in particular, skin color, gender, dress, surroundings, and camera gaze. The photograph captions are also critical to the process of representing dierence, rst, because the majority of the magazines readers read only captions and the sta therefore take great pains to use them to provide a x on the article, and second, because captions in general serve to rationalize our understanding of an image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination (Roland Barthes, quoted in Lutz & Collins, 1993: 76). Borrowing from the insights and methods of Lutz & Collins, I turn now to an analysis of the photographic and textual content of a National Geographic magazine article published in 1991. The article, Elephantsdout of time out of space
It is my position that biodiversity, in all its forms, has been historically diminished by human activities, is presently increasingly threatened, and that this is economically, culturally, and ecologically a negative outcome.
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(Chadwick, 1991), was published in the aftermath of the declaration of the international ban on the ivory trade and the launching of the war on poachers.6 It covers both African and Asian elephants, but features the 1980s collapse of the East African population and the Kenya governments shoot-on-sight response. Through the photographs, captions, and text, the article operates to relationally construct the identities and moral status of the poacher/Other, hunter/European, and elephants.7 Emerging from these representations is a moral positioning, with the hunter/ European secure in the center of the constructed moral community, the poacher/ Other pushed toward the edge, and elephants brought closer to the center. One of the key ways of establishing these relational positions in the moral community is to depict the savagery of the poacher/Other in comparison to the sporting hunter/European. Describing the scene of one illegal elephant kill in Kenya, Chadwick wrote of the stench of rotting esh, elephants with their faces hacked o to allow the killers to get at the root of the tusks (Chadwick, 1991: 25). The lurid details and (self-acknowledged) angry tone of the prose reinforce the idea that the product of poachers activities is shameful slaughter. Elsewhere poachers are characterized as gangs [of] tough, bushwise bandits. armed with AK-47 assault ries (24). There are two photographs of poachers accompanying the text, the rst of which captures the moment of a poachers death as he is shot by wildlife ocers in 1982. The second shows a lone African man in a loincloth standing beside a decayed elephant carcass. The caption reads: Shooting then stabbing an elephant to death, this Pygmy was just following orders. Deep in the Congo, Pygmies are hired and exploited by ivory traders, many of whom come from foreign countries. Issued a gun and a few bullets, the Pygmy must return with an elephant to receive his payment: meat rations, manioc, perhaps liquor and cigarettes (Chadwick, 1991: 32).
6 I have chosen this article for two reasons. First, because it is published in National Geographic magazine, it allows me to build on the methods of the Lutz & Collins study. Second, this article most clearly places the rise of the war for biodiversity protection in the geographical and historical context of the ivory ban. There are other National Geographic magazine articles that also support discourses about African peoples and environments, but I have chosen to do a singe, in-depth analysis rather than a shallower, broader analysis. Likewise there are examples of texts from popular media that can be viewed as reecting and perpetuating the discourses I analyze here. Some of these are cited in this article. In the interests of space, I cannot give these the depth of treatment that I have given to the 1991 National Geographic magazine article. I wish to thank Gail Hollander for bringing this magazine issue to my attention. 7 There are multiple possibilities to examine other identities represented in popular media accounts of the war on poaching, including African politicians and bureaucrats, national park guards, conservation professionals, as well as many other wildlife species. I have chosen to focus on these three for two reasons. One is to keep the analysis within the limits of an article-length manuscript. The second has to with the centrality of these three representations in the discourse of biodiversity protection. Elephants are viewed as emblematic of the wild and the struggle to preserve it in Africa (Gup, 1989: 67). Hunters and poachers represent two contrasting images of the legitimate and illegitimate killers of this emblem.
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Several features of the photo and caption are important for establishing the social identity and moral position of the poacher/Other. First, there is the setting: the unpleasant condition of the elephant carcassdrotting, hacked into pieces, and with the ivory missingdand its proximate association with an African poacher. The poacher is photographed alone deep in the Congo and dressed only in a loincloth, signaling his distance from the West and the moral constraints of civilized society, as well as his low position on the scale of cultural evolution. His gaze is directed away from the camera, up and to the right, and his expression is unsmiling and uncomfortable, perhaps fearful. Labeled only as this Pygmy, the poacher has no individual identity (non-African portrait subjects in the article are named in accompanying captions) and the caption makes clear that the subject lacks agency. This, however, does not elicit our sympathy for his plight. Quite the contrary, as the captions explanation of his actions as just following orders, a morally vacuous defense given that his sole motivation in killing is reported to be the acquisition of a little food and self-gratication from the pleasures of alcohol and tobacco. The full power and eect of this image of the poacher/Other can only be grasped in juxtaposition with the image of the hunter/European presented a few pages further into the article. In this photo a white family hunting together in Zimbabwe stands next to the carcass of a recently killed elephant. The accompanying caption reads: I dont want the animal to suer, says Jan Duncan, who bagged this bull while on safari in Zimbabwe with her husband, Dan, and son, Scott. But Zimbabwe has too many elephants, and being shot is less painful than starving to death (Chadwick, 1991: 43). This photo and caption present a distinct contrast to the previous illustration. In this case the elephant carcass is also in proximate location to the portrait subjects, but it is bloodless, lies corporeally intact, and appears almost in repose, as if it had been put to sleep. The Duncans, smiling directly into the camera, appear to be the model of a white, close knit nuclear family, so conscientious about their appearances that even in the African bush their slacks are sharply creased. They are in Africa, but only as visitors, and we might imagine them as neighbors on the vacation of a lifetime. In distinction from the caption identifying the African poacher only as this Pygmy, Jan Duncan the hunter is allowed her individual identity as well as a voice to express her motivations in killing an elephant. She expresses no selfinterest at all and only compassion for the beast, explaining that a bullet is less painful than starving. There are endless variations on this theme of the cruel and wanton slaughter perpetrated by black Africans juxtaposed against the sporting and compassionate hunting of white Europeans throughout the popular and scientic conservation literature of the twentieth century (MacKenzie, 1988; Neumann, 1996, 1998). Early in the twentieth century, European hunters of African big game justied their privileged access to wildlife on grounds that their goals were morally superior to Africans. Your true sportsman, wrote one inuential British hunter-aristocrat, is always a real lover of nature. He kills, it is true, but only in sweet reasonableness and
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moderation. (Seton-Karr, 1908: 26). This is but one example of numerous texts produced by European hunter-conservationists during the colonial period that discursively constructed the moral superiority of Europeans (e.g. Selous, 1881 [1967]; Roosevelt, 1910; Lyell, 1923), representing European hunting as sporting and rational and African hunting as wasteful, indiscriminate slaughter (Neumann, 1996, 2002). The comparison of African poaching and European hunting presented in National Geographic magazine can thus be seen as a reworking of long-established narratives in the discursive construction of European and African cultures. A second way through which the article establishes relative positions in the moral community is through an elaboration of the perceived human qualities of elephants. For example, the author quotes a well-known elephant researcher on the impact of the illegal ivory trade on elephant populations. The whole society began to collapse. Now you see leaderless bands of sub-adults and orphans. The gathering of these last groups into big terried herds of refugees. (Ian Douglas-Hamilton quoted in Chadwick, 1991: 24). Invoking a vision of a collapsed society of refugees and orphans represents the decline in elephant population numbers as a situation that morally demands international intervention. Observing the behavior of elephants around carcasses of herd members, some researchers have become convinced that these giants can die outright of grief (Chadwick, 1991: 26). The author was himself aware of the temptations of anthropomorphizing in his own writing. After observing an elephant that he imagined could be laughing to himself, he wrote: It would be slightly less anthropomorphic to say they have an immense capacity for amusement (43). Without questioning whether non-human species may experience joy, it is hard to see this elaboration on elephants emotional tendencies as less anthropomorphic and not part of the construction of a cultural identity for elephants that is human-like. There is an emphasis throughout the article on the sociability of elephants and the importance of family relations within the herds, as in the observation that [r]elated families often spend time together, forming what are called bond groups (43). The article closes with a silhouette photograph of two elephants with their trunks entwined in a gesture the caption describes as Earnest as a handshake and gentle as a caress and a display of ponderous aection (48). To summarize from this analysis, the essential identity of the poacher/Other is male, black African, travels alone or in all-male gangs, and possesses cunning and superior arms.8 He stands in sharp contrast to the compassionate, sporting, and conservation-minded hunter/European. The photographs and captions selected for the National Geographic magazine article reect and sustain this dierence, operating in relation to one another to construct contrasting identities of the European/hunter and poacher/Other. Together the photos associate, poor, uncivilized, male Africans with wasteful destruction of a scarce resource (biodiversity, as embodied in the decaying carcass) and auent, white families with conservation-minded sustainable hunting. Wild animals, as victims of the poacher/Other, are portrayed in the popular
8 In this representation the African poacher is heir to a longstanding and durable symbolic representation of the black male as a threat to white civilization and a challenge to white male dominance.
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and scientic conservation literature as highly intelligent, possessing the best human qualities of loyalty, dedication to family, and compassion and capable of experiencing a full range of human emotions from grief to joy. The analysis shows how ideologies of race, gender, and family are active in the discursive construction of the identities of the poacher/Other, the hunter/European, and wild animals. The language and imagery deployed in these discursive constructions elevate the moral standing of wild animals that move in bond groups and care for their sick and aging, while diminishing that of the poacher/Other who travels in gangs and kills for liquor and cigarettes. This discursive analysis is not meant to challenge the idea that animals, wild, captive, or domesticated, should be subject to more ethical treatment. Nor is it meant to engage in debate over the intelligence and emotional capacity of animals. Rather, one purpose is to suggest that the discursive construction of elephants as human-like has important material consequences. One of the consequences is that sentimental appeals to save elephants that play to and reinforce northerners anthropomorphic visions are mobilized by international conservation organization to raise donations. Africa-based critics within the conservation community suggest, Anthropomorphic interpretations of wildlife behavior and environmental impacts are emphasized [by northern-based conservation organizations] to promote public interest.to get money (Crowe & Shryer, 1995: 27). The 1989 ivory ban was a major fundraiser for conservation organizations like AWF, which urged Americans to end the slaughter of African elephants by donating (Bonner, 1992). A second material consequence is the violence done to African populations, a subject that the conservation community is divided on, as indicated in the epigraphs to this article. As two Botswana conservation biologists point out, in fundraising and media messages about wildlife conservation northern patrons are not told about the cost to Africans for protecting animals that donors love to love (Crowe & Shryer, 1995: 27). A second purpose of the analysis returns us to the question of ethics in the war for biodiversity in Africa. It illustrates that as we discursively construct certain wild animals as near-human cousins, we draw them closer to and even inside the boundaries of our moral community. The National Geographic magazine article oers a somewhat restrained version of anthropomorphic construction of elephants compared to other mass media outlets. Commenting on the portrayal of the poaching war in British tabloids Bonner observed that they ran tear-jerking stories about baby elephants orphaned when their mothers were killed by poachers (Bonner, 1992: 141). These sorts of representations in popular media make it easier not only to declare war in their defense, but also to declare a just war. By framing the militarization of biodiversity protection as the prosecution of a just war, wartime violence, such as the abrogation of basic human rights and extra-judicial executions, becomes normalized and even morally tolerable. As Elder et al. point out, depicting a particular treatment of animals as savagery can be used to dehumanize those who engage in it (Elder et al., 1998: 83). I turn now to examine some cases that demonstrate how the war for biodiversity protection has normalized deadly violence in African protected areas.
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Collateral damage in the war for biodiversity Military metaphors and organizational styles are not particularly new in African wildlife conservation. The historical roots of wildlife conservation are very closely associated with European, especially British, military campaigns in the nineteenth century conquest of sub-Saharan Africadmany of the rst game wardens in East and southern Africa were veterans of those campaigns (MacKenzie, 1988; Neumann, 1998). In countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya that suered through armed insurrections against European colonial control and guerilla wars of liberation, park and wildlife personnel became involved in government suppression eorts. For example, following Kenyas 1952 Mau Mau emergency, national park ocials utilized the training they received in bush warfare several years later in anti-poaching campaigns (Steinhart, 1994). Moreover, the main recruiting grounds for park guards and game scouts have been the army, police, and prisons where military-style discipline and tactics are common. Today, most of the national park and wildlife agencies in the region reect a paramilitary style of organization, particularly in their resource law enforcement sectors (Neumann, 2001). What is new in the contemporary situation in Africa are the notions that biodiversity protection is a war, that Africans found inside protected areas should be shot on sight, and that advanced military equipment and training are key to the conduct of wildlife conservation. These notions are, to varying degrees, supported and encouraged by northern media, governments, animal rights groups, and international conservation NGOs. Mainstream news media have suggested to their northern audiences, Only a military solution may now save Africas endangered species (Ransdell, 1989: 61) and saving the African rhino from extinction has in fact become a war (Baker, 1988: 2). Virtually all of the funds for military equipment in anti-poaching came from the north. In 1989, the Kenyan Vice President asked Britain for an aid package that for the rst time included requests for helicopter gunships, automatic weapons, and other equipment to supply an anti-poaching unit (Ransdell, 1989). At the height of the anti-poaching campaign of the 1980s and 1990s, the British Parliament debated sending British troops to Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique to help those countries protect their elephant populations (The Daily Telegraph Sta, 1989: 6). In 1991 and 1993, the U.S. Congress included in the Department of Defense budget millions of dollars through the African Biodiversity Program for military equipment, support and training for several countries (Byers, 1994). In sum, just about every aected country, asked fordand receiveddmore ries, bullets, helicopters, vehicles and equipment to conduct their war [on poaching] (Bonner, 1992: 19). Although ocial WWF policy around the time of the ivory ban was that it would not provide funds toward the purchase of guns and ammunition, it did so in at least one case in Tanzania in 1987. It also funded the purchase of helicopters for anti-poaching in Zambezi valley in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, with the knowledge that the governments shoot-on-sight policy would probably mean that it would be used as a gunship (Bonner, 1992). The recent war on poachers and increased militarization of biodiversity protection has, at dierent times and places, transformed expansive tracts of national park
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lands in sub-Saharan Africa into spaces of deadly violence. In one of the more astounding cases, American Bruce Hayse, a co-founder of EarthFirst!, hired mercenaries to shoot poachers in the Central African Republic (CAR). Hayse, who after river rafting for 4 weeks in the CAR and seeing little wildlife, concluded, If we were going to save this place, people would have to be killed (Clynes, 2002: 4), started the African Rainforest and River Conservation (ARRC) program. He located a South African mercenary who was training park rangers in Malawidwho themselves have subsequently been accused of murdering and torturing local villagers (discussed in this section)dand hired him to take over anti-poaching operations for ARRC. President Ange-Felix Patasse gave ARRC and its mercenaries shoot-on-sight authority in a 60 000 square kilometer area of the CAR (Clynes, 2002). In the wake of shoot-on-sight orders in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, national park guards and other state enforcement agents have likely killed hundreds of people that they encountered inside park boundaries (see Table 1). African park and wildlife agencies have identied those killed as dangerous, wellarmed poachers while African domestic and international legal and human rights organizations have countered that many of those killed were poorly armed, impoverished rural residents in pursuit of subsistence (see the following discussion). According to their reports, violence against the rural poor, women, and ethnic minorities appears to be escalating and spreading throughout east and southern Africa in the name of biodiversity protection. These reports indicate the occurrence of collateral damage in an anti-poaching war purportedly aimed at a few well-armed bandits. While an expanding body of literature by geographers, anthropologists, and historians has documented the violence of displacement in the creation of national parks and the coercive qualities of wildlife conservation in colonial and postcolonial Africa (e.g. Marks, 1984; Anderson & Grove, 1987; Peluso, 1993; Neumann, 1998; Ranger, 1999; Giles-Vernick, 2002; Brockington, 2002), the cases presented here point to a systemic, qualitative shift in violence. While this shift is dicult to conrm conclusively, biodiversity protection strategies arguably have created a new context for violence that is unlike anything that historically preceded it. I have not
Table 1 Estimates of people killed inside protected areas in the war for biodiversity in Africa Country Zimbabwe Zimbabwe Kenya Malawi Tanzania Botswana No. of people reported killed 57 100C 100C 300C 2050 (Differing estimates for the same incidents) 2096 (Diering estimates for the same incidents) Sources Bonner, 1992 Kelso, 1993 Chadwick, 1991 Jamali, 2000 LHRC, 2000; The Guardian (Tanzania), 1998 Hitchcock, 1995
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encountered any suggestion of a shoot-on-sight directive for wildlife conservation in any primary archival material or secondary literature for British colonial Africa.9 Shoot-on-sight protocols, documented in ve countries over the past 17 years, have now become relatively commonplace and taken for granted. During the colonial and the early postcolonial periods, incidents in which park and wildlife agents did kill people were relatively rare and justied as self-defense when poachers turned their weapons. The reports reviewed in this section suggest that violence in recent years includes extra-judicial executions, not just self-defense shootings, and not as rare occurrences, but in many incidents in dierent countries and national parks. To illustrate the ethical issues raised by the spread of violence in the war for biodiversity in Africa, I turn now to examine recent human rights reports from Malawi, Tanzania, and Botswana that document incidents of murder, rape, torture, and maiming that conservation agents allegedly perpetrated against people caught in the parks and reserves there. The rst example, from Malawi, is based on a February 2000 human rights report produced by a local NGO, the National Initiative for Civic Education (NICE). According to the report, Scout Justice, park and wildlife agentsdreportedly trained by South African mercenariesdhave been killing, torturing, and raping local villagers caught inside the countrys national parks, particularly Liwonde National Park (Jamali, 2000). The reports author claimed that his investigation team witnessed or received testimony of torture administered to poachers, who included unarmed women (Tenthani, 2000). NICE ocials claimed that park guards, following a government shoot-on-sight protocol, routinely kill people caught inside the park boundaries and leave the corpses for scavengers to consume. The report stated that national park rangers had killed over 300 people between 1998 and 2000 and that another 325 people had disappeared (Jamali, 2000). Park ocials have dismissed the report as one-sided, stating that rangers only re in self-defense against better armed poachers and that women were not raped but oered sex in order to be released from prosecution. Contra the claims of the government, investigation team members maintained that most of those killed were not well-armed bandits, but were typically unarmed peasants, including women, from nearby villages. Some were allegedly shot while merely illegally shing. The report presented evidence that local village women caught in the park have been handcued and gang-raped by park guards and estimated a total of 250 rape cases. One man was allegedly beaten until he bled to death and another was thrown into an electric fence where he died from electrocution. In Tanzania, a front-page headline in the independent English language newspaper, The Guardian, brought to public attention an alleged incident in which national park rangers murdered 50 people from a nearby village. The paper reported
9 I base this observation on 14 years of research in numerous colonial archival collections in Africa and England, covering all of the countries referred to here (excepting the CAR), and on the examination of numerous rst-hand accounts by persons actively involved in wildlife and park conservation and secondary historical scholarship.
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that a Member of Parliament from the Mara Region, which includes part of Serengeti National Park, was raising the allegations for Parliamentary discussion. According to the MP, a group of villagers, suering from a famine that had aicted the area, entered the park on September 24, 1997 armed with bows and arrows in search of small game. They were allegedly discovered by park rangers and disarmed. Rather than turning the suspects over to the local magistrate, however, game rangers who arrested them lined up the suspects and shot them the MP claimed (The Guardian (Tanzania), 1998: 1). According to the report, park guards allegedly covered up the execution by disposing the bodies in a nearby river and park ocials were accused of transferring the guards involved to other duty stations to make an investigation more dicult. The MP placed responsibility for the murders with a former Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism, Juma Ngasonga, who had issued a shoot-on-sight directive to rangers in 1996 for bandits found within the park boundaries. After appointing a commission of inquiry, the government determined that the charges were not supported, though the commissions report has never been made public. Consequently, the Tarime Development Association, an NGO based in Tarime, Mara region, asked the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) to investigate the allegations. LHRC initiated an independent investigation from October 1999 to May 2000, conducting interviews with survivors, relatives of victims, village leaders, and a single conservation ocial who agreed to be identied. The investigation team produced a 19-page report with photos and accompanying videotape (LHRC, 2000). In broad outline but not the specic detail, the LHCR team conrmed the MPs allegations. One park sta member, who declined to be identied, conrmed that killings had occurred while the local project director for the Frankfurt Zoological Society stated that the shoot-on-sight order had long been in place and was followed as park policy. The team was able to document 20, not 50 killings, which occurred in not one, but several incidents over a period of more than 2 years. They reported general allegations by villagers living on the Serengeti boundary that park guards killed people in the park on a regular basis. Among the most compelling evidence gathered were eyewitness statements from survivors of the incidents. In the September 1997 incident, the single survivor claimed to have witnessed park rangers systematically execute eight of his unarmed companions with a close range gunshot to the head. In another incident in 1998, a survivordwho at the time of the incident was 14 years old and claimed to be hunting to earn money for schools fees from the sale of bushmeatdcharged that park rangers chased and shot at them as they ran into a river unarmed. Upon surrendering, his companion was shot and wounded. Rangers took these two with four other villagers who had been apprehended to a ranger post where they were handcued and shot. Two survived to identify the rangers to the authorities, though at the time the report was issued they remained at large. Other evidence gathered from relatives of victims of numerous incidents suggested that extra-judicial executions were normal in Serengeti National Park. The nal case comes from Botswana. The context for the war for biodiversity here is not a blanket shoot-on-sight order but a pattern of longstanding ethnic
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discrimination against various groups of hunter-gatherers, or so-called Bushmen (see Gordon, 1992). In the northeastern Kalahari Desert region, Bushmen have experienced decades of displacement and violence conducted in the name of wildlife conservation, including allegations of routine killings of rural people by government ocials (Hitchcock, 1995). According to Hitchcock (1995), coercive conservation practices increased in the area in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the torture and killing of suspected poachers, some of who were reportedly only gathering plants or obtaining water. Botswana Defense Forces (BDF) and game scouts may have killed as many as 96 people in anti-poaching operations during this period including women and children (Hitchcock, 1995: 192193). The nearby Central Kalahari Game Reserve, originally established as a reserve to protect Bushmen and their hunting and gathering practices, is now claimed by conservationists who want the area evacuated (Colchester, 1994). In most cases in which Bushmen have been displaced in the name of conservation, there has been little if any compensation and resettlement plans have been vastly inadequate. The most recent and internationally visible incident stems from the Botswana governments 3-year campaign to remove nearly 3000 resident Basarwa San Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. As reported by the human rights organization, Survival International (2001), when San residents refused to move, game reserve ocials threatened to call in the BDF to forcibly remove them. Eventually about 1500 peoples homes were destroyed and they were relocated to poorly developed resettlement villages. Village leaders accused the BDF and wildlife ocials of torturing residents and of conscating their bows and arrows, which they legally possessed and depended on for subsistence hunting. About 500 residents steadfastly refused to leave the reserve and were increasingly harassed by wildlife ocials and the BDF for overhunting. In one case, about a dozen men were held captive by wildlife ocials for 6 days and subjected to repeated interrogations, beatings, and torture. Some were tied to trees and threatened with re; most had their feet tied to vehicles, forcing them into a press-up position, whilst being kicked and beaten (Survival International, 2001). Women also complained of being assaulted by wildlife ocials. Amidst domestic and international human rights organizations growing accusations of racism and human rights violations, the government reversed itself on the eve of the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa and allowed residents to return to the reserve. Despite the policy reversal, Survival International went forward with a public condemnation of the Botswana government wildlife conservation practices at the WCAR.
Discussion Through the analysis presented here I have sought to advance political ecologys understanding of justice through an engagement with environmental ethics. Notions of justice in biodiversity conservation tend to focus narrowly on distributive questions at the expense of other considerations such as livelihood rights, respect for
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cultural dierence, and abuses of state power (Schroeder, 2000). An engagement with environmental ethics helps clarify and articulate some of the moral considerations in biodiversity conservation and highlights why environmental interventions must move beyond distributive justice (Schroeder, 2000: 52). By combining a discursive analysis with environmental ethics, I sought to demonstrate the critical role that imagery and representations play in shaping the moral standing and worthiness for moral treatment of individuals and collectivities. The discursive analysis shows how the imagery of place, people, and nature operates to make the militarization of biodiversity conservation a taken-for-granted practice in Africa. As Zerner observed, the politics of environmental imagery and its social justice implications are just beginning to be explored in political ecology (Zerner, 2000b: 16). This study is intended to further the exploration. The resort to war metaphors and the militarization of conservation in Africa, and in these cases in particular, bring questions regarding the moral calculus of biodiversity protection into stark relief. Specically, what is the moral status of human individuals in the war for biodiversity vis-a-vis wild animal species, individually and as a collective entity? The abrogation of basic rights and the extra-judicial killings in national parks appear to pose a dicult moral dilemma, forcing us to choose between two moral goodsdthe protection of biodiversity or human lives and livelihoods (see West, 1991: xix). The dilemma is solved, I would argue, through discursive practices that construct dierence in a way that establishes relative positions in the moral community. Three powerful sets of images and representations are at work here; the amoral and brutal poacher/Other, the compassionate and conservation-minded hunter/European, and the intelligent and social wild animal. These images and representations are conveyed through cultural products, such as National Geographic magazine, which collectively exert a potent impact on the formation of ideologies of human-animal relations (Emel & Wolch, 1998: 18). Cultural products constitute and are constituted within a regional discursive formation of Africa that recirculates narratives and images of the savagery, amorality, and danger of the dark continent in new forms (Jaroz, 1992; Fair, 1993). It is not only that African poachers are represented as immoral or less civilized in their treatment of wild animals, but also that this dierence makes them less worthy of full moral consideration. Thus discursive constructions have important material consequences, making shoot on sight appear to be a rational and ethical tool in biodiversity conservation in Africa. That such imagery and regional discourses have real world consequences is demonstrated by the words of a philanthropist who was approached to fund mercenaries in poaching wars. I was a little shook up because of the possibility of violence. But people say thats the way its done in Africa; theres no law; there are no jails (Kathe Henry of the Scott Opler Foundation, quoted in Clynes, 2002: 5). I present this not to disparage a well-meaning philanthropist, but to illustrate how regional discursive constructions make violence in African conservation practice seem normal. The discursive construction of the African poacher/Other and the normalization of shoot-on-sight directives create a potent moral geography centered on African national parks as ground zero in the war to protect global biodiversity.
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The focus on parks highlights the importance of the spatial and temporal contextuality of morality and ethics (Smith, 2000: 25). National parks are, by denition, bounded spaces where the rights of wild nature have priority over human interests. In creating free-re zones in the parks, rural Africans from neighboring villages are transformed into potential enemy combatants, thus loosening the moral restraints on agents of the state involved in wildlife conservation. The practice of biodiversity protection as war has indeed shifted boundaries of our moral community, but not as a straightforward linear extension of moral standing to non-humans. There is no philosophical position in environmental ethics that justies the taking of human life in defense of non-human species. Only a radical reordering of moral standing could justify shoot on sight. This is accomplished not through philosophical developments in environmental ethics, but through the discursive construction of key identities. The analysis of discursive construction of identities shows how ideologies of gender, race, and family are strategically and selectively deployed to simultaneously humanize wild animals and denigrate poachers, including impoverished peasants searching for small game or sh. Thus, through these discursive constructions in combination with the designation of parks as war zones, deadly violence against humans, not in the self-defense of human life, but in the defense of biodiversity, is normalized.
Acknowledgements Several people oered encouragement and advice on the earlier drafts of this paper. I am especially grateful to Rick Schroeder, Gail Hollander, Matt Turner, Lucy Jarosz, Raymond Bryant, and the participants in the Fall 2002 Graduate Studies Colloquium in the Department of International Relations at FIU. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers for Political Geography whose critical readings were immensely helpful for revising the manuscript. The research for a portion of this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Geography and Regional Science Program, award number SBR-9617798.
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Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837 www.elsevier.

Moral and discursive geographies in the war for biodiversity in Africa

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

Fig. 1. The evolution of ethics (redrawn from Nash, 1989: 5).

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813837

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