People, plants and justice: the politics of nature conservation, edited by C. Zerner. Columbia University Press, New York, 2000. ISBN 0 231 10811 7, US$49.50 (hardback), 0 231 10810 9, US$30.00 (paperback), 416 pp

✍ Scribed by C. Gibson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 38 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1085-3278
• DOI: 10.1002/ldr.468

✦ Synopsis

The study of conservation by social scientists has matured over the last three decades. This is as it should be: conservation is a complex subject, and its practice can change radically with time, location, scale, and ideology. But the growth of conservation's analysis means that texts devoted to it will confront the increasingly dif®cult task of touching its ever-multiplying number of branches. If such books try to do so, they will increasingly sacri®ce precision for coverage. This edited book People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation may be one of the last of these more general volumes: its 15 chapters of interesting ideas can barely be woven together into one text.

The common denominator of this book's chapters is resource extraction by humans. After that, the authors' work varies by topic, emphasis, discipline, natural resource, and lessons to be learned. There truly is something for everyone here: after an introduction and two of the more theoretical chapters come 13 case studies. Some of these case studies are especially noteworthy for their attention to the complexity and subtlety of resource extraction and conservation, especially at the local level. Jill Belsky, for example, deftly weaves the many cultural, economic, and political threads that comprise the local' in her chapter work on the Gales Point Manatee Community Conservation project in central Belize. Belsky takes stock of a particular effort in ecotourism ± that illusory promise held out to many poor, rural communities by outsiders. While the Gales Point project can claim to be different from other projects striving for community-based conservation,' Belsky shows it also must confess to embarrassing similarities: misunderstandings (and clear differences) between expatriate project designers and community members, manipulation of opportunities by locals, political rivalries, and market vagaries. And these un¯attering outcomes resulted from a project supported with signi®cant funds, committed supporters, and a years-long, generally cordial history between biologist±conservationists and locals. Belsky's work admirably captures the distributive side of conservation politics at the local level: there is rarely a solution in which all affected parties win.

Laird, Cunningham, and Lisinge also avoid the trap of forcing environmental issues into the dubious local vs. outsider dichotomy in their fascinating analysis of bioprospecting for Ancistrocladus korupensis (a woody climber with compounds possibly useful for the treatment of the HIV virus). Rather than explore a case with easily identi®able protagonists and antagonists and clear outcomes, the authors examine a situation in which many well-intentioned actors made crucial decisions about natural resources that touched on issues of sovereignty and the distribution of bene®ts, while producing ambiguous outcomes (the project eventually ended since the plant's compounds were found to