This video is about a somewhat depressing thought namely the idea that even our most positive and
virtuous actions like environmental conservation or restoration can be implied in and contribute to
degradation and destruction somewhere else.
I talked about long-distance ecological relations in the previous video and this kind of ambivalence
that I like to touch on here is you might say a symptom of a world that is interconnected through a
lot of these long-distance relations
so the idea for this one is the concept of shadow ecologies and we have an article this week by
Heather Swanson in which this concept is developed but the classic shadow ecologists argument comes
from a political scientists called Peter Davern he wrote a book called shadows in the forest about
the relations between Japan and Southeast Asia through timber production he describes their arising
demand
for timber products in Japan, Japan needed a lot of stuff made of wood like paper for instance and
that demand for timber led to a massive rise in timber production in the Philippines where a lot
of the tropical forests were turned into plantations for timber production. So his argument
is about the shadows that consumption in one place can cast on landscapes somewhere else it's about
how
Consumption in one place places environmental burdens upon others and I think that we're all fairly
familiar with this kind of idea right so it's the idea that our consumption patterns are often
placing burdens on others that landscapes far away are being degraded for our clothes and food and
electronics and so on
but the Swanson article takes this argument in a sense one step further, what if it's not just
consumption that can bring harm to other people and other landscapes what if even the good things we
are doing are enabled by landscapes being degraded somewhere else in the world. Swanson goes along
with the Davern but goes one step further in the first instance as in Davern example demand and
consumption in Japan
drives degradation somewhere else but the next step is to see that the fact that Japan's needs are
now met by producers somewhere else is itself productive of Japanese landscapes Southeast Asian
forestry or a Chilean salmon production
as in Swanson's example may be part of what produces Japanese landscapes in other words it is not
just the shadows of Japan's consumption but also how those Shadow places in turn shape Japan so
Swanson takes us through the histories of salmon production in Japan and Chile and how those two are
linked so after they initially failed to establish establish salmon production in Hokkaido
Japan then sought out places abroad that could serve as their source of salmon and they found Chile to
be a promising site. Japan than openly cultivated Chile as a resource Colony as the production site
for Japan's salmon needs, Chile then became a sacrifice zone or an extraction zone for Japan and the
Salmon pens damaged the environment there in several ways.
That's like the first step right and that's the same thing as Davern did in his book and
the first step is to say that the Chilean landscapes bear the environmental burden of salmon consumption
and salmon demand in Japan and what followed then was a period when both Hokkaido and Chile
were producing salmon and this created a surplus which drove down prices and this made it difficult
to be a salmon producer in Hokkaido but it also
Opened up to new possibilities and opportunities to reimagine and reshape the production landscapes
in Japan and so this is where we get to the second step of the argument what is this this Chilean
sacrifice as Swanson puts it enabling or making possible for Hokkaido
Well it made it possible to imagine the salmon differently not just as a food product and a commodity
but as an ecological being an animal with a life and with conservation value
so for one thing the Chilean sacrifice allowed Hokkaido to situate themselves differently in the
global network of salmon producers as a more eco-friendly alternative. Chilean farmed salmon allowed
the fishermen in Hokkaido to reimagine their own salmon as wild and natural and their own practices
as green and sustainable situating themselves in contrast to the Chilean farm raised
salmon so they gradually became eco-friendly fisheries selling for a foreign market outside Japan
a market that wanted sustainable seafood and this gives us the strange situation where Chile
produces salmon for the Japanese market while Japan in turn produces salmon for the European market
but it also involves Japanese fishermen who in order to meet guidelines for sustainability
certification
comes to actually transform their local practices in meaningful ways who begin to rework Hokkaido's
rivers with a focus on restoration there's things like dam removal tree planting they're trying to
use less fertilizer and they're focusing on returning to normal and natural I should say natural
spawning salmon, they were in a sense de-industrializing their salmon practices.
But imagine yourself as the Europeans salmon consumer for a moment knowing now that your choice some
sustainable salmon leads to a healthier landscape in Hokkaido but
possible
That this is only possible because the Japanese market is saturated by cheap and far less sustainable
Chilean salmon and because of shipping and packing the infrastructures that move salmon from Chile
to Japan and Japan to Europe This locally sustainable even ethical choice seems quite a lot more
complicated when you look at those wider connections so if the first step of the argument is to point to
the shadows of consumption the second is to point to the Shadows of the
Conservation efforts that were made possible by the shadows of consumption it's not
just when you consume that your actions are implicated with an environment
elsewhere but it can also be when you do something good
the concept of shadowy ecologies gets far more interesting and far more troubling once we get to this
point where what we thought were positive and may be innocent and probably good actions in one place
can still place the burden or rely on the burden having been placed somewhere else in Swanson's case
we see that salmon landscapes in Japan are less exploited and she describes stuff like eco-friendly
Fisheries
Management Zen based conservation and an indigenous rights these are good things right you know a
great things but in a sense these things are also enabled by Landscapes being exploited in Chile
Conservation can be reliant on an enabled bio-degradation somewhere else you're restoring a forest
or a river but that restoration may have been considerably easier by a different forest or river
being exploited somewhere else so this might all
give restoration or conservation more of an ambivalence it might also you know disturb the notion
that conservation is ever completely local it also shows as I think one kind of Cosmopolitan ecology
a sort of neoliberal kind wher its ties across International lines are many and
complex where they flow not just from Europe to the new worlds as in the previous
video but from the nearly everywhere to nearly everywhere else it shows the co-constitution of
Landscapes across long distances are implicated we just need each other, a landscape in Japan can be
produced in part by something that happens in Chile.
One of the questions we should ask then when we study conservation sites and especially restoration
sites so places that used to be production and have been restored or turned into consideration sites
one of the questions we should ask is according to Swanson where has the degradation gone and
I'm quoting Swanson here "where is the degradation that has made possible these restoration and
conservation projects?"
because production rarely goes away right more often as Swanson writes the sacrifice zone is simply
moving somewhere else so if you look at an individual local place what you might see is a shift a
transitioning from a production site to a conservation landscape from a sacrifice sites to a
restoration side but if we zoom out and look at the world as sort of an interconnected system it
might look more like a shifting around of extraction or
Degradation like some sort of zero-sum game where degradation or extraction is the only constant or like
a game of whack a mole you know the older arcade game where he punched down moles that stick their head
up from little holes and when you punch down one there's always another one popping up
somewhere else so you'd punch down one sacrifice zone turning into turning it into a conservation
side only to have another pop up and when you get rid of that one another one pops up right over
here
and the efforts start to seem more futile, but it doesn't have to be such a
one-to-one relation either as in Swanson's case where there's something like a direct companionship
between the Chilean landscape and the Japanese one, for instance when when all old coal and
Timber town like this Australian town named Kali where I spent some time doing field work when it
shifts gradually from being a place of extraction to a place of conservation
and tourism there isn't necessarily one other place that pops up sort of to take over Kali's coal
mining and timber production but we should still ask where is the degradation site that enables the
shift for this town and the answer might be that the degradation has been sort of dispersed
and widely between several Industries in many different places some of the burden might have been
shifted onto Southeast Asian forests when
Kali's Forest became national parks but some might also have been shifted on the other kinds of
building materials such as concrete and steel and the burden of coal is shifted on to other sources of
power such as wind power or maybe maybe oil somewhere else and none of which are
completely benign and innocent and so the burden of production enables
the coal mining
Town to become a site of consideration would be widely shared dispersed through a large
International network of power production and yet you know this is not to say that we should should
keep mining coal of course it is instead to say that this place like all places are shaped by
long-distance ties and sometimes those ties are easy to locate like in Swanson's case between
Chile and Japan and other times these
are extremely widely dispersed and difficult to pin down
and so this all sort of evokes a sense of interchangeability and we should be wary of moving too far
in that direction I think so places can become less like specific localities and more like just
side so either extraction or consideration there's a tendency to regard places as production
sites a tendency to see the world as composed not of unique local places but as a series of
potential production sites we might think of
This as an assumption that makes shifts like the shifting salmon production from Japan to Chile
possible and even more stark examples of this way of thinking about places and how the world is
interchangeable can be found in environmental accounting and so this is the extreme expression of a
logical place you might say and you all know the notion of the carbon footprint idea that
all of our actions constitute a burden we
place on the world and the atmosphere so with carbon accounting we get them the idea that this
burden can be made up for somewhere else and so that when you build a city you can make up for that
by planting some trees somewhere else and this creates an equivalence between places everywhere is
part of the same whack-a-mole game being either emitters or holders of carbon either sources or
carbon sinks so nowhere is locality
Nowhere is just a specific place distinct and unique and different from everywhere else instead
everywhere is carbon either as a sink or source so these carbon accounting imaginaries are sort of
like an abstractions that can render place and locality irrelevant with abstractions like carbon the
forest is simply a carbon sink and you can swap one carbon sink for one in a different place without
anything being lost and in that imaginary
so what do we take from all this you know is there's nothing that's innocent anymore is
there nothing that's unambiguously good and I think the tricky thing is that the world is set up in
such a way that even when you move towards conservation this is something that is going to open up for
degradation somewhere else or that move itself may only be an option because of degradations somewhere
Else the move towards conservation in Japan is only an option in this situation because you have
degraded landscapes in Chile or you have production sites that cause degradation in Chile. Things
are set up in such a way that when you become a carbon sink this can open up for others to be a
Emitters and but again what the concept shows us the concept of shadowy ecologies what it suggests is
not just that conservation isn't a good thing or that we shouldn't do conservation that's not
that's not right instead the point is that we live in a world whose pattern and connections
cause some deep and sort of unsettling ambivalences and we should recognize those tensions we
have to sit with the fact that our conservation projects rests on the foundation of some other
places being degraded we should make those connections visible and also another thing is
that we live in a world that has a drive towards abstraction and placeslessness we should we should
realize that and try to counter it
some ways I think Swanson would say and to add to that those two things together create a tension so
on the one hand if you were to insist on Hokkaido being a completely local place a
singular local landscape that we should value for its own sake then we would be blind to its
implication to its complicity with the exploited landscape so Chile as a Swanson points out many
conservation projects are our myopic or nearsighted
in exactly that way and undercut them their desire for a more sustainable world but on
the other hand if we were to see Hokkaido as simply the shadow of Chilean exploitation as simply a
conservation site made possible by degradation somewhere else then
if you were to see only its global interconnections and none of its local specificity you would be
playing right along with the neoliberal tendency towards abstraction the same tendency that
drives this whack-a-mole game shifting around of exploitation right,
it's that we have to be able to see places as local and singular while also seeing their implication
with places somewhere else and how they're tied into the world system.