I also included an article that I wrote not too long ago to give you some kind of idea about
new discussions in environmental anthropology as they relate to conservation, so just let me take you
quickly through that.
This is based on field work that I did over a number of years and which ended up in this
Publication in 2015 this one's built on many of the same kind of concerns that we have already
seen in discussing conservation's but here I wanted to go a step further and look more carefully at
the kind of landscapes and histories behind
a conservation area and I was also inspired by new perspectives such as science and technology
studies when I wrote this book so let me first take you through some of the story of this area and
then what the article is a reflection on so this South Africa's first UNESCO world heritage site
that stretches from the area
about two hours north of Durban all the way up to the border with Mozambique and it is hailed as one
of the most important Wetland areas in South Africa as an area under threat as you would imagine as
a pristine area that needs to be protected but it has a long history of human use and
Industrial use actually as well
this is a hunting map of the same area from the late 1880s and at that time this area was an
important supplier of wild animals and especially ivory from the British colony of natal to the
rest of the world so it was heavily used and heavily hunted, if you stop this
the
video you can have a look at this quote it describes one of the expedition's of the great white hunters
in inverted commas from the 1850s so it was quite a tough environment they traveled in but people
made a fortune doing this they traveled in North into the area shot a lot of animals often with
a collaboration of local chiefs
and helpers and brought Ivory and skins out of natal to the rest of the British Empire with the
result then that towards the end of the 1890s there was hardly any animals left at all, at that same
time the colony wanted to try to use this area for productive purposes so after South Africa was
United in
1910 this area became a center of massive forestry operations what you see here is a collector's
Plantation in the area now and today most of the area has been covered by eucalyptus so both in
terms of hunting when almost all animals were destroyed then eucalyptus and a thirdly
commercial agriculture of sugar cane where the main industries in this area so what I'm trying to
get across this that far from being a pristine nature area this is a heavily used landscape and the
landscape that has been marked by Colonial exploitation throughout, and in all these stories
in all these uses the population that used to live in this area have been displaced
and moved if you read documents from 1840s and onwards colonial
Authorities tell about how they replaced what they call squatters from the forest and likewise when
they tried to establish sugar cane plantations, black people were moved out of the area.
So this is how it is presented today as a nature conservation area and you can sort of go on these
boats up and down the history and look at look at the hippos in what appears to be in wilderness what
you don't really know when you stand on a boat like this is that only a couple of hundred meters in
the back here you have settlements like these and this is seen as highly problematic as
destroying what used to be a massive forest stretching all over the area so in order to do something
about that
the park authorities and the local conservation body has tried to clean out the
forestry operations like this they cut down all the alien trees and trying to restore the landscape
as you see here, this is from the first time I visited the park in 2010 and
today there is no
Trace at all of this use of the of the forest.
so the only places we do find some original Forest now is around some of the settlements
next to the river and it's been a huge huge outcry in the media from the 1990s onwards about
foreigners or black people squatters moving in and destroying what are the last remains of an
indigenous Forest but at this potted history I
just gave you now shows this is not the case at all, rather this is a heavily used landscape and in
fact the kind of force that you see here quite similarly to the case of the episode last week has
grown back since the 1950s when people were forcibly removed from this area much of what
is now forrest used to be grazing lands and
and when the apartheid authorities who moved people in the 1950s onwards it started to grow back, so
this Forest is really a sign of dispossession rather than an old ancient forest now being destroyed by
by squatters. In South Africa also since the end of Apartheid you have had a land reform
process so what I studied
in the book was the contestation between land reform i.e. people who had
been displaced from this area and claimed it back and the conservation Authority that wanted to re-
store the land and contrasted those two strategies what struck me after having finished that work
and that was the starting point for this
article is that time and temporality was really important to what is going on here and I hadn't
really caught on to that as I wrote so these are my article it is my reflections afterwards on
the importance of time and temporality so I begin by noticing some general aspects of climate
temporality in relation to conservation first and foremost how
conservation areas such as the wetland park perhaps best exemplified by this slide
are often portrayed as timeless they are outside time outside history this as some conservationists
used to say this is what Africa is supposed to look like that. That timelessness involves a lot of what I
called a temporal contradictions in one
quote on this Wetland Parks homepage which they later removed they actually said that
what you're trying to do when we remove the science of industrial forestry is to try to restore the
landscape to what it would be like before the first colonialists came so, i.e. nature is assumed to be a
point back in time before white settlement
that everybody realizes it's extremely problematic statement, so that was since removed. But when you
look at conservation plans and conservation aims especially in post-colonial situations like South
Africa what is what is taken as nature what you want to restore is often seen as an invisible point
in time time as it did nature as it was before Colonial relations
before white settlements, but without having black people living in it. So there's a time of temporal
contradiction I argue built into conservation itself what I try to conserve what kind of idea are
you trying to conserve where in history does that landscape exist right, and I go into much more
details about that as you can see in the article. I also then point out
that the alternative use of this land land reform i.e. people wanting to take the land back and
use it as they had until the 1940s also involves a set of contradictions which several authors have
pointed out when it sounds self-evidently right that after apartheid and people they dispossessed of
the land you need to restore land to people
but again the restoring bit here has a temporal element it's not just turning back the clock to a
predispositioned situation and giving people that land back, one problem with that solution is that in a
case like Saint Lucia the people have been moved in several stages and in several waves so that many
people could actually
claim the same piece of land another important contradiction is that land isn't what it was in the
1940s, in the 1940s you could easily or not easily but it was at least possible to live off the land
as a small-scale farmer that is completely a different situation in South Africa today and it's also
trying to undo but for conservation and for supplements the idea of restoration
which I argue has a temporal element to it, is also implicitly an argument for trying to do away with
all the temporal unfoldings all that has happened to this landscape between the point you want to
restore to and now. So the whole article is basically a reflection of the fact on the kind of work
I did when I wrote about and published about this area and it tries to show some
hidden temporal assumptions assumptions about time that often goes in conservation circles and in
conservation work as well as in social justice work such as land restitution, and the fact that we
are not aware of these contradictions I argue is a problem for what we want to actually try to
to do, so that was just an example of the new debates and newer anthropological
takes on the kind of issues that we talked about when we when we discuss anthropology and
conservation.