The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981

The latest  issue of the English Historical Review has an article by Matthew Kelly, "Habitat Protection, Ideology and the British Nature State: The Politics of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981". The abstract:

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was the most important piece of environmental legislation passed by a British government since the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. It sought to enhance the protection of listed flora and fauna, prevent further damage to existing habitat and resolve issues that had arisen with respect to rights of public access to the countryside. Although the bill was long and complex, many of its provisions sought to rationalise existing statutes or extend existing provision rather than create new powers. Provisions seeking to protect habitat proved highly contentious. The proprietary interest resented what it saw as an unjustified interference in private property rights; statutory bodies were alarmed that the centralising aspects of the Act would empower ministers at the expense of their ‘scientific’ independence; and the emergent environmental lobby, increasingly frustrated by the cautious approach of the statutory bodies, was determined that the bill’s habitat protection provisions be strengthened. This article examines the lengthy and disputatious consultation and parliamentary process in terms of longer-term frustration with the apparent weakness of statutory protections and how it brought the environmental effect of agricultural intensification into mainstream political debate. This article contextualises the growing insistence that there was a public interest in the health of the natural environment and situates the argument with respect to what environmental historians have started to analyse as the history of the ‘nature state’, a distinct realm of state activity comparable to the welfare state, warfare state or security state.

Farming, antislavery politics, and nature parks

The latest Environmental History has a book review by Timothy Johnson of Adam Wesley Dean's An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2015). Johnson writes:

In a new study that traces the relationship between land use and politics not in the South, but in the North, Adam Wesley Dean sets out to challenge the common notion that the war was a conflict between an urban, industrial North and an agrarian South. To do so, Dean looks to the ideology of the Republican Party. The author argues that Republican ideology was “fundamentally agrarian” and shaped by “an environmental understanding of social development” (pp. 2–3). Dean convincingly demonstrates how beliefs about the tenuous relationship between soil and civilization were at the heart of the Grand Old Party’s ideology.....

The first three chapters follow the strand of agrarian thought in American politics from the Northwest Ordinance through the landmark wartime legislation of the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act. Dean argues that Republicans defined themselves in opposition to the extensive agriculture of the South, where observers like Frederick Law Olmstead cited soil erosion as physical evidence of the moral decay inflicted by slavery. But Dean goes beyond the North-South dichotomy and also moves along the East-West axis to triangulate the centrality of land use to Republican discourse....

The final two chapters take an abrupt turn to postwar debates about park creation in Yosemite and Yellowstone, and then to settlement policies in the South and among Native Americans out West. While these subjects might seem like a detour from earlier chapters, they lead to the book’s most original contributions. One of the more surprising findings relates to the creation of national parks. The conservation question drove a wedge within the party between those who believed that natural beauty could nourish republican virtues and old Free-Soilers who believed that all land—even Yosemite and Yellowstone—should be divided into small farms. The final chapter examines how agrarian thought shaped policy intended to bring freed people and Natives Americans into the national fold after the war. Some readers might take issue with the provocative claim that Republicans “had an environmental view of citizenship,” but Dean makes a strong case that the ideology of soil and civilization hewn in the congressional turmoil in the 1850s helped structure postwar Republican policies in distant regions, long after war’s end (p. 136). 

More on Cecil the lion

In last week's post on Cecil I didn't have time to do much more than copy an extract from the NY Times piece, but I think it's also worth trying to unpack the argument made or echoed in the story that "hunting... is part of a complex economy that has so far proven to be the most effective method of conservation".

One argument seems to be that demand for hunting gives government preserves a lucrative source of income, which they can use for conservation:

While hunting is banned in government parks here in South Africa, animals inside their boundaries are routinely sold to game ranches when their populations are considered excessive, generating money to maintain habitats and fight poachers.

But that's not really an argument for hunting, that's an argument for letting parks sell "excess" animals to those willing to pay for them; not only hunters, but ivory collectors, medicine preparers, zoos, or whomever.

Another argument seems to be that private, for-profit management is better at conserving land and species than government conservation:

In southern Africa, the emergence of a regulated trophy hunting industry on private game ranches in the 1960s helped restore vast stretches of degraded habitats and revive certain species, like the southern white rhinoceros, which had been hunted almost to extinction, conservationists say.

It's not clear what the connection between hunting and restoration is here, other than providing an incentive to private ranch owners to restore land and species so they can make money from hunting. Surely government could do the same, without the financial incentive.

In a strange twist, the article then says:

Representative Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia

A similar shift occurred in the United States decades earlier when the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 allocated the proceeds from hunting to bring back lands and animals, [conservationists] argue.

The "proceeds of hunting" allocated by the Pittman-Robertson Act (the Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937) to habitat restoration are actually the proceeds of an excise tax on firearms and ammunition. Now, while it may be true that hunting makes such a tax more palatable from a political point of view, there is no inherent connection between government spending tax money on conservation and hunting.

There are, of course, other conservation arguments for allowing hunting, including keeping populations in check to prevent habitat degradation and giving local populations a financial incentive to preserve wildlife and their habitat. But I find the arguments cited in the newspaper article wanting.

Cecil the lion and legal history

The furor that has arisen around the killing of "Cecil" the black-maned lion has some asking whether restrictions on trophy hunting would do more harm than good. According to a New York Times piece by Norimitsu Onishi, there's a historical angle to this:

Despite intensifying calls to ban or restrict trophy hunting in Africa after the killing of a lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe, most conservation groups, wildlife management experts and African governments support the practice as a way to maintain wildlife. Hunting, they contend, is part of a complex economy that has so far proven to be the most effective method of conservation, not only in Africa but around the world as well.

While hunting is banned in government parks here in South Africa, animals inside their boundaries are routinely sold to game ranches when their populations are considered excessive, generating money to maintain habitats and fight poachers.

And because trophy hunting is legal in private game reserves, the animals end up fetching higher prices than they would in being killed for food or other reasons, conservationists contend. Lion hunts, one of the most lucrative forms of trophy hunting, bring in between $24,000 and $71,000 per outing on average across Africa, according to a 2012 study. In southern Africa, the emergence of a regulated trophy hunting industry on private game ranches in the 1960s helped restore vast stretches of degraded habitats and revive certain species, like the southern white rhinoceros, which had been hunted almost to extinction, conservationists say.

A similar shift occurred in the United States decades earlier when the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 allocated the proceeds from hunting to bring back lands and animals, they argue.

“There’s only two places on the earth where wildlife at a large scale has actually increased in the 20th century, and those are North America and southern Africa,” said Rosie Cooney, a zoologist who is the chairwoman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group. “Both of those models of conservation were built around hunting.”

More on Cecil the lion here.

International Conservation and the “Naturalization” of Indigenous People

The Journal of the History of Ideas recently published Raf de Bont's “'Primitives' and Protected Areas: International Conservation and the 'Naturalization' of Indigenous People, ca. 1910–1975". The abstract:

This article explores a long-standing discursive tradition within international nature conservation. In this tradition the argument is made that “primitive” people should be allowed to live in the areas the conservationists deem as “pristine” or “natural.” The article explores the (changing) relative importance of this tradition in the conservation discourse as a whole, and analyzes the shifting composition of its argumentative arsenal from the 1910s to the 1970s. Particular attention goes to the uneasy combination of two types of argument: one in which indigenous people are presented as part of nature, another in which their customary rights are stressed.

Tagbanua in Culion, Phillipines (Bulakbol)

The history of the IUCN

My friend Richard Laster recently brought to my attention Barbara Lausche's Weaving a Web of International Law (IUCN/ICEL, 2008, fully available online), a history of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Environmental Law Programme.

The book traces the program's origins back to pre-war Switzerland and the Netherlands, but things really picked up just after World War II, including efforts in the 1950s to advance a World Charter for Nature inspired by the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Man. The organization was influential in the creation of several environmental treaties, as well as in advancing domestic legislation around the world.

Though it aims only to tell the story of one organization, it seems to me the larger significance of the book in the historiographical landscape is that it shifts attention from both internal-doctrinal factors and (domestic) external-social/political/cultural ones that are usually marshaled to explain the evolution of environmental law, (back) to the realm of institutions and especially international experts, and their role in shaping environmental law across jurisdictions and on a global scale.

Soviet environmental law

Soviet environmental law is not a subject that we often come across, but last year's Soviet and Post-Soviet Review published two articles on the topic. One is Laurent Coumel's "A Failed Environmental Turn? Khrushchev’s Thaw and Nature Protection in Soviet Russia". The abstract:

Detaining poachers, from Douglas R. Weiner,

A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection
from Stalin to Gorbachëv 320 (U Cal Press, 1999)

This article aims to identify a “Thaw” in Soviet environmental history. Focusing on the attempts from some actors, above all writers and scholars of the Academy of Sciences to promote an ambitious law at the all-Union level in the second half of the 1950s, it uses new evidences from the central Russian archives to show the existence of an offensive by activists and experts in this field, but also their failure to obtain the creation of a unified state committee of ministerial rank. If the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP) was sidelined in this battle, the 1960 Law on Nature Protection was significant for its members. It cited the VOOP as the main organ of control in the environmental field, and created an opportunity for new “social organizations” to emerge in the country: the Brigades for Nature Protection (DOP), the first of which was created at Moscow State University.