Seeing forests, trees and
landscape:
professional
literacy, justice and ethical engagement
Dr Richard Howitt
Department of Human Geography,
Presentation to
session on “Forestry Education and Capacity in Indian Country”
Canadian
Institute of Forestry/Society of American Foresters
Joint Conference
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Constructing sustainable forest management systems
has often been debated in terms of competition between economic and
environmental goals.
In many places, the presence of Indigenous others
in debates about forests shifts the ground away from concern over definitions
of sustainability to broader consideration of justice, history and rights. This
shift requires participant not just to deal with the ‘how?’ of forest
management, but also the ‘why?’ and ‘so what?’. Addressing these challenges
requires other stakeholders to rethink the goals and consequences of forest
management systems. Yet many key stakeholders have been ill prepared to deal
with this shift. Education to grow the capacity of systems to meet these
challenges must involve development of frameworks within which to do this
rethinking.
This paper seeks to provoke discussion that might
contribute to better preparation of stakeholders by exploring the challenges
involved and working towards some modest suggestions for such a framework
within which stakeholders might more effectively think about and respond to
cultural domains as they influence natural resource management systems. I argue
that the professional toolkit we bring to management of forest systems must
include literacy in cultural landscapes, ethics, social process and cultural
diversity alongside science and economics. It is simply not enough to deal with
both the forests and the trees we also need to recognise the cultural
landscapes in which both are embedded.
Strange
Multiplicities
Many people who are touched by the challenge of
integrating aboriginal rights into decision-making and planning in natural
resource management systems that were once the sole province of scientific and
commercial expertise have been poorly equipped to respond constructively. The
frameworks of growth, profitability, ecology and sustainable development have
been inadequate conceptual toolkits for working through disputes about value,
meaning, rights and justice generated by the presence of aboriginal peoples’
rights in our previously orderly regulatory systems.
For the mature democracies of postcolonial settler
societies such as
This would be difficult at the best times, but
over recent decades, it has occurred in the context of multiple overlapping
changes and crises.
One the one hand, we have had the changes that are
often glossed as ‘globalisation’, a shift to a ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992, Adam,
Beck & van Loon 2000) or simply the end of Cold War geopolitics (eg
O’Tuathail & Dalby 1998). Far from heralding the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama
1992), privileging of the global scale in economic discourses has reconfigured
local, national and regional social, political, environmental and economic
relations, opening up opportunities at these other scales to remake the world
in terms other than those of the level playing field and the totalising
discourse of globalisation.
On the other hand, we have also witnessed the
emergence of new cultural politics of identity as an important element of
political processes (West 1990), and new developments in the human rights story
transforming the legal domain (eg Robertson 1999). McHugh (1996), for example,
argued that judicial recognition of the persistence of aboriginal title in
postcolonial common law jurisdictions created an increasingly significant constraint
on the capacity of national governments to dispose of and regulate natural
resources.
In seeking to deal with societal changes, social
movements aimed at securing economic redistribution, cultural recognition and
environmental protection have often constructed contradictory strategies for
change (Figure 1) (see eg Young 1990; Fraser 1995; Harvey 1996).
Figure 1: The
contradictory struggles for justice (Howitt 2001: 93)
For Aboriginal
groups in Australia, the imperative has been to integrate strategies targeting
recognition (particularly recognition of land and other indigenous rights),
redistribution (delivering economic justice to indigenous Australians) and what
is called, in Aboriginal English, 'caring for country' (eg Young et al 1991)
(Figure 2).
Figure
2: An integration of the struggles for justice based on Indigenous peoples’
experience in
This orientation alerts us to the need for an
approach that does not “predicate 'justice' in one place on entrenching
injustice to another … (and) that just outcomes at one scale (eg national
employment or revenue benefits from a resource project) are not predicated on
the creation of unjust outcomes at another (eg local environmental health,
cultural marginalisation or other negative effects) (Howitt 2001: 93-94).
For many of the Aboriginal groups I work with in
The discourse of rights constitutes what Ignatieff
(2000) referred to as a ‘rights revolution’, and produces decision-making,
planning and management systems that are characterised by a ‘strange
multiplicity’ (Tully 1995) and ‘uncanniness’ (Gelder & Jacobs 1998) that
arises from cultural difference and ontological diversity. Where once we could
point to a decisive authority as the final arbiter in disputed decisions a
powerful government regulator, a black letter legal system, market forces,
corporate sovereigns we now find decentered systems where alternative sources
of authority assert overlapping and contradictory claims.
All stakeholders have experienced the
vulnerabilities that arise when we find that still-familiar places have become
unfamiliar because new elements have made themselves at home:
- aboriginal
people are an unavoidable presence in places previously characterised by
their absence as they were excluded by way of curfews, police harassment
and fear;
- agricultural
and forestry landscapes forged in the heroic conquest of nature by
pioneers have been transformed by a re-reading of history into horrible
landscapes of genocide and theft (eg Reynolds 2001);
- Indigenous
homelands have become the industrial landscapes of natural resource
industries (and vice versa);
- forests
have been transformed by new management technologies into monocultures;
- communities
based on forest industries transformed into tourism hosts
- …
and the list goes on.
Such difficult circumstances have become
commonplace in the landscapes of natural resource management. Forging
manageable outcomes in such situations is neither simple nor guaranteed. Old
privileges die hard, as do old prejudices and nostalgia for circumstances where
the few certainties granted to us were dependent on dispossession,
marginalisation and erasure of even older systems of order.
The ‘rights revolution’ has transformed our
societies from imagined communities with a single dominant culture into complex
and often troubled multicultural collages. Palimpsests of divergent even
contradictory histories compete for attention when we seek to understand how
our nations came to be as they are. And yet, as both Ignatieff (2000) and Tully
(1995) both remind us, these divergent stories cannot simply produce a set of
singular ‘us-es’ and ‘thems’. They also constitute the ‘we’ of common humanity
that is characterised by diversity; the ‘we’ of complexly constituted nations.
Situated
engagements
For natural resource management professionals, the
challenge of responding to these complexly changing circumstances is
considerable. Questions of human rights, community welfare and even broader
environmental questions have long been treated as external to the operations of
resource production systems in forests and mines and elsewhere (Howitt 2001: Ch
2). Where they were considered at all these were concerns of governments to be
addressed using the wealth generated by resource industries.
New discourses of ‘corporate social responsibility’
(eg Schaffer 1992; Warhurst 1998; Davis 2001) have provided one set of
mechanisms for responding to changing circumstances in resource management
systems. Adaptive management has been championed as a way of building adaptive
institutions that respond to increased recognition of traditional ecological
knowledge, or developing processes of first nations’ self-government (see eg
Jacobs & Mulvihill 1995). Social impact assessment methodologies have been
harnessed to bring diverse views into planning and decision-making (eg
O’Faircheallaigh 1999). And yet the dominant imperatives remain firmly rooted
in the domains of economy, efficiency and political efficacy. We continue to
see fragmentary (and fragmenting) strategies as the basis for addressing parts
of the challenge in isolation from other elements.
Suchet (1999) argues that an approach she refers
to as ‘situated engagement’ offers a way forward. Drawing on experience in
wildlife and conservation area management in
Rose (1999) argues for ‘ethical availability’ as a
first step in this process decentring our views of our professional roles to allow
both discursive and material space for non-professional expertise in the form
of local and non-technical stakeholder participation in decision-making and
goal setting, and recognising that the dominant (and dominating) values of
western systems often constitute their own knowledge as an objective and
universal ‘truth’, which marginalizes the values and truths of other knowledge
systems.
Taking other knowledges seriously is, of course,
easier said than done. In many cases, NRM professionals have few means of
understanding the different views that aboriginal peoples bring to bear on
resource management decisions and what they mean when they talk about ‘caring
for country’. Historically, their education has been more centred on scientific
and technical expertise than inter-cultural sensitivity. Indeed, it is often
the case that even when they seek expert advice on such issues, they fail to
heed it because it is too hard perhaps impossible to make business sense of
such advice. The challenge is, of course, to understand that business is not
the only lens through which to view the cultural landscapes of natural resource
management systems, although for many natural resource management
professionals, it is the only lens available to them to make sense of the
places that their work creates.
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, it was only
in the 1980s, when “reports of the (Waitangi) Tribunal articulated to a wider
non-Maori audience the principled basis for Maori grievances’ (Williams 2004),
that the Maori view of the significance of longstanding grievances regarding
breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi could begin to be addressed
systemically. In the subsequent two decades, the process of taking those
grievances
Treaty negotiations in British Columbia similarly
bring to light the profound differences around the idea of ‘negotiation’ (de
Costa 2004) and the difficulty of using litigation to secure sustainable social
outcomes (Tehan 2004). Again, the experience provides another lens through
which to understand past, present and future of affected landscapes.
And in Australia, the expectation that resource
industries could secure a quick-fix of certainty through native title
negotiations has not been met as negotiations have moved towards mutual understanding
and grappling with the burdens of historic injustices whose present legacies
are the ever-present realities of Aboriginal people’s daily lives (eg Agius et
al 2004, Jackson 1996).
In adapting NRM systems to the changing context of
the ‘rights revolution’ and the rhetorical and practical recognition of
aboriginal others, the foundations for transformational politics is to be found
in linking new practices to new ways of seeing things, and new frameworks for
thinking about and responding to them (Howitt 2001).
It is not enough, for example, to enter into the
change process with good intentions and a knowledge of history. We all need to
understand the foundations of the other parties’ responses and aspirations.
Let me illustrate my point with reference to
native title issues in
Conservative political parties and many farming
and resource industry groups proposed to re-establish certainty by
legislatively extinguishing native title and the prospects of native title and
other western property titles co-existing. At one meeting to discuss settlement
negotiations in
Clearly, economic, environmental, political and
legal circumstances have changed. We cannot go back to old certainties based on
gross injustices or unsustainable environmental and social practices. But
negotiating new relationships to match these new realities is no easy task.
Equipping participants with the capacities to meet these challenges is a
crucial responsibility for professional education and development.
Negotiating new
relationships process and ethics
If the challenge is to negotiate new relationships
with aboriginal peoples involved in and affected by NRM systems such as
forestry management regimes, then what does it take to succeed?
Clearly, there are many opportunities for failure
and we need to consider just what the implications of failure might be.
But what might ‘success’ actually look like? How is success to be defined? Whose criteria
for judging success and failure are we to use?
Natural resource professionals and their public
and private sector employers have grown used to a privileged position in many
NRM systems. Increasing understanding of markets, technological choices,
ecological constraints and so on have all produced shifts in the definition of
‘good management’ that has further entrenched and empowered professionals eg
the shift from private profit to sustainability as the singular goal of
production.
Recognition of persistent aboriginal rights,
however, shifts the reference point in quite different ways. If first nations
bring other values to a place previously managed for ‘good management’ goals,
then commercial forestry (or particular forestry methods) might no longer be an
adequate measure of systemic goals.
Let me illustrate, again with an anecdote from my
own experience in comprehensive negotiations about native title issues in
Resolving such
issues will not be achieved by unilateral imposition of expert solutions that
lack understanding and credibility amongst affected stakeholders. Nor will it
come from resolutions that take the form of a short-term ‘deal’ a set of trade-offs;
a quid for a pro; a project site for an attractive set of
payments; land for beads and so on. It requires building, and re-building,
relationships on the basis of some mutual recognition, respect and acceptance.
This, in turn,
requires acknowledgement of critically important issues involved in the
negotiation relationship other than the substantive issues under consideration,
specifically the emotional and procedural concerns people carry with them into
negotiations (Figure).
People
in any negotiation process have … three interdependent needs... Procedurally,
people need to believe that a process is fair that it gives them an
opportunity to have their say and that it is not biased or prejudiced in any
way. Emotionally, people need to feel OK about themselves and their
participation in the negotiation they need to feel listened to, acknowledged,
respected and validated. Substantive issues are the issues and things that are
the subject of negotiation. Dealing with just one or two sides of this “satisfaction
triangle” does not produce sustainable, just and equitable outcomes (Agius,
Howitt, Jarvis and Williams 2004: 2)
Substantive
Figure 3: The Satisfaction Triangle (Based on the work of Chris Moore, CDR Associates, Boulder Colorado USA
But supporting entire constituencies to acceptance
of addressing these needs for all parties is profoundly difficult. And holding
all the parties in to the slow processes of negotiated change is critically
important.
And the critical
issue is process good process is both a key outcome, and a critical
means to achieving just and sustainable outcomes on substantive, emotional and
procedural dimensions.
In many
negotiations involving Indigenous peoples, however, old structures of privilege
and power intervene to pre-empt decisions about process. Government agencies
and industry bodies try to proscribe the terms of indigenous participation and
insist on adoption of non-indigenous institutional forms and procedures. Only indigenous
participants who are duly authorized by the dominant culture can participate.
Rules of evidence, timeframes, and critically important political decisions
about how to represent indigenous culture in negotiations are often made not by
indigenous people in their own governance structures in accord with customary
law and culture, but by legal representatives and expert negotiators in
accordance with what they judge is likely to succeed in their terms!
Clearly, this is the antithesis of self-determination
and recognition which for many Indigenous groups is the driver for
participation in such negotiations in the first place. We need to understand
just how differently other people see what seems like ‘common sense’ to people
outside the productionist logic of existing natural resource management
systems.
Consider, for example, the difficulty that many
non-aboriginal Canadians have in accepting the need for the negotiation of
modern treaties in order to achieve the federal government objective ‘to preserve
and encourage economic development possibilities for all Canadians’ (quoted in
Alfred 1999: 122). For many Canadians this seems like a reasonable policy
position, yet it constructs processes that entrench a denial of respect and
recognition for aboriginal rights:
Achieving
true, respectful certainty would go a long way towards rectifying the
injustices done to indigenous people; but the actual process of negotiation is
taking place within a different intellectual framework and is aimed at a very
different goal … Preserving ‘economic development possibilities for all
Canadians’ has nothing to do with rectifying the injustice of colonization. It
is a concession to industries that have illegally established themselves on
Native land. It is a cynical manipulation that effectively makes the
achievement of Native objectives impossible … (Alfred 1999: 122-123).
How might the thinking of NRM professionals be
reframed to better understand, and respond more respectfully and constructively
to the thinking behind Alfred’s criticism, rather than simply dismissing it as
somehow unrealistic, unreasonable or uninformed? How might such reframing
change industry, public and government views of processes of engagement with
Indigenous peoples?
One thing is clear such reframing requires a
different approach to the ethics of cross-cultural engagement.
For Levinas(1989 [1947]), it is the terms
of an embodied, face-to-face encounters that establish the ethical imperatives
that define a relationship such as those involved in cross-cultural
negotiations. It is precisely this that Suchet refers to as ‘situated
engagement’ (1999). From this perspective it is not simply ethically imperative
to acknowledge other ontologies, rather :
The ontologies of other peoples need to be understood
and engaged with in active partnerships in the construction of knowledge (and
power). New interactions and relationships open new possibilities (Howitt &
Suchet-Pearson 2003: 565).
In such hybrid time-spaces, conventional adversarial negotiating processes
are revealed as an extremely limited sort of partnership. The ideal of
collaborative and mutual recognition, which engages with ontological pluralism
as constitutive rather than a problem for negotiators, opens prospects for
previously unthinkable sorts of outcomes. It takes seriously the links between
‘people, country and protection of culture and cultural properties’ (Tarran
1997); it accepts ‘mutual interrogation’ (Nader 1996); ‘it engages rather than
erases; and in the process it simultaneously reaches out, in and across the
dominant knowledge-power nexus to create the possibility of new processes,
experiences, discourses, systems, structures, outcomes and ideas’ (Howitt &
Suchet-Pearson, in press).
Reframing the ethical imperatives of the situated
engagements generated by resource negotiations about aboriginal rights is a
process that requires both institution building, or perhaps more accurately
what Cornell and Katz (2002) refer to as ‘nation building’, within aboriginal
domains, and relationship building between aboriginal and non-aboriginal
domains.
As I suggested earlier, it is not enough in
negotiations about forested country to see both the forest and the trees and
insist on negotiating parties ‘fighting over the scraps of what was once a
wholistic indigenous landscape’ (Bauman 2001: 202). What is needed is nothing
less than processes that reweave the integrity of cultural landscapes into the
contemporary social fabric of complex multi-cultural geographies. Well-meaning
government, public or industry groups must work hard to question what is at
stake for aboriginal peoples with whom they seek to negotiate, and take the
Aboriginal stake seriously. It is just as appropriate for the to hold processes
adopted accountable to the ancient jurisdictions as well as conformity to the
legal demands of national and provincial legal systems. And, perhaps most
significantly, it is completely appropriate:
that
the law should not be mistaken for a straightjacket that disadvantages
Aboriginal people negotiating about their rights and identities, but as a
starting point for deliberate and conscious negotiation of new relationships
which can then be codified as appropriate (Agius, Howitt, Jarvis & Williams
2004: 8).
Lessons and
Conclusions
As a passionate geographer, I want to assert the
significance of geography in these matters. In this paper I have argued for the
need to produce new capacities, particularly new professional literacies, as a
basis for reframing the cross-cultural challenges of renegotiating relationships
between resource industries and aboriginal peoples. I started with a metaphor
that depends for its meaning on the significance of geographical scale as an
element in the constitution of these relationships, arguing that it’s not just
that we need to see both the trees and the forests simultaneously, but we also
need to contextualise these elements at wider scales as well in terms of
complex, overlapping and conflicting cultural landscapes.
For many people, implementation of formal equality
is the criterion against which fairness is to be measured. But achievement of
substantive equality may require differential treatment to redress historical
inequalities and injustices. This is certainly the case in negotiated
settlements in natural resource landscapes. As Ignatieff points out, using an
eminently geographical turn of phrase:
[The]
idea of equality, and the notions of fairness that go with it, gives us a
particular vision of national belonging. The belonging consists in knowing that
everyone shares more or less the same entitlement and the same
responsibilities. When we map this ideal of equality onto the countries we
actually live in, we get a of a nation as a single, homogenous, and unified
political space made up of equal individual units. No region has more power
than any other nor does any group (Ignatieff 2000: 56).
Natural resource industries, however, exist
precisely because of the uneven geographical distribution of natural resources
over the face of the earth. Participants in these industries, perhaps more than
many, therefore, should recognise the need for real geographies rather than
imaginary level playing fields to provide the foundations for our thinking
about just and sustainable outcomes on the ground at various scales.
In forestry, the discursive shifts from forest
products and forest ecologies to a discourse of rights, values and meaning, has
destabilised many certainties that demonstrated the capacities that the
industry and its regulators brought to bear on the challenges it faced. In
responding to questions of aboriginal rights, we need professionals whose literacy includes
facility in cultural landscapes, ethics, social process and cultural diversity
alongside science and economics. Similarly, we need to support aboriginal
peoples in coming to negotiations with capacities to argue not just in terms
defined by the dominant society, but also in terms that are defined within
their own societies.
It is this that will contribute to decolonisation
of these landscapes and the construction of just and sustainable communities of
difference that achieve substantive equality through mutual recognition and
respect and participation in transformed forest management processes.
Thank you.
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