MAPA GEOLÓGICO DE ESPAÑA
3. ASPECTOS*AMBIENTALES*
2.2. Tipos,de,tiempo,en,Galicia,
From the beginning of the 19thcentury onwards bio geographers and medical
surgeons became increasingly interested in the Indonesian archipelago. Bio geographers described tropical island environments and developed scientific evidence that the natural resources were limited.1 Medical surgeons had a
primary interest in tropical medicinal plants which led to the establishment of Botanical Gardens all around the world. This served to assess and classify the world ‘globally and in terms of the Hippocratic agenda’.2
These scientists increasingly perceived tropical nature as a ‘window to an ancient world’, something which was still in a virgin state and therefore could ‘provid[e] clues to the evolution of life itself’.3Although they were familiar
with evolutionary theory and consequently aware of the fact that nature was changing all the time, these scientists attempted to study it in a static setting. For that purpose they pleaded for preserving at least parts of nature in its ‘original’ state.
By publicly introducing the idea of nature as a source of scientific know- ledge from the end of the 19thcentury onwards they added a scientific value
to the debate on how to treat nature. They did not define nature merely as something to exploit but as something to close for the broader public, to study in its original state, and to preserve for future generations.4
The scientists established a number of scientific institutions, such as botan- ical gardens, a Herbarium, the Zoological Museum, and the Laboratory for marine research.5However, these institutions, which reflected and reproduced
the nature protection discourse, were of much less importance than the Forest Service. All that these scientific institutions got was an advisory role, which underlines the dominance of the rational forestry discourse. If the colonial administration had taken nature protection more seriously it could have strengthened the role of these scientists by making sufficient manpower and funds available for the Gardens to manage reserves in practice. Instead, in 1937, it appointed only one (!) civil servant to the Botanical Gardens for pro-
1 Grove 1996, p. 6.
2 Grove 1996, p. 13.
3 Arnold 2000, p. 11.
4 Cribb 1997a, p. 403.
5 Dammerman 1950, p. 87. The oldest botanical garden had been established in 1817 at
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tection against disaster and for nature protection. He had the job of monitoring the reserves, promoting the regulations on animal protection and, where possible, starting investigations.6
About the same time as the scientific movement for nature protection, a movement that promoted viewing nature from a romantic angle entered into the debate. In reaction to the industrialisation taking place in Western Euro- pean countries members of this movement primarily aimed at re-valuing emotion. They did so to formulate a counter-argument to rationality, punc- tuality, productivity, technology and the like. In their counter-arguments nature came to play an important role. They portrayed nature as something to be admired and enjoyed and simultaneously as a source of moral improvement and inspiration.7These functions of nature, in the romantics’ thinking, justified
reserving certain natural areas for recreation: people should be allowed to enter nature not for exploitation but to be inspired, to enjoy and admire nature’s beauty..
Some people, among them both scientists and romantics, even portrayed nature in feminist8terms: they pleaded to reserve nature in its ‘virgin’ form,
and described it as ‘fragile’9and thus in urgent need of protection.10
The romantics, who often had a scientific background too, organised themselves in non-governmental organisations (henceforthNGOs). The most prominent among these in the Dutch East Indies was the Netherlands Indies Society for the Protection of Nature (Du.Nederlandsch-Indische Vereeniging tot Natuurbescherming). It was established in July 191211and played a major role
in lobbying for the creation of nature reserves.12Its members mainly belonged
to the European elite and often worked for the Forest Service or the Botanical Gardens.13The reason for the very low percentage of Javanese members was
not so much a socio-economic one – the membership contribution was very low14– but rather political: if nationalists cared for the protection of nature
at all they perceived the proposed and enacted conservationist regulations as another way of oppressing the indigenous population.15In addition, since
conservationism was a new social movement, even under the Europeans the
6 Dammerman 1950, p. 87-88.
7 See, for instance, Rousseau et al. 1997.
8 Arnold 2000, p. 12, Sawyer & Agrawal 2000, p. 5-13.
9 Peluso & Vandergeest 2001, p. 783.
10 According to eco-feminists, the use of metaphors such as ‘virgin’ underline the parallel to the patriarchal claim to need to protect their virgin daughters against reckless, irrespons- ible (often non-white) (Sawyer & Agrawal 2000, p. 15-21) males. ‘Mother’, ‘birth’, and ‘nursery’ are other metaphors supporting the feminisation of nature (Sawyer & Agrawal 2000, p. 21). 11 Recognized in February 1913. 12 Dammerman 1929, p. 22. 13 Dammerman 1950, p. 89. 14 Dammerman 1950, p. 81. 15 Cribb 1988a, p. 343.
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attention for conservation was very low. As a consequence of these two factors, the Association’s membership never reached the 1000 mark.16As a result the
organisation had even less influence on policy than the scientific institutions. Although it applied for the lease of various pieces of land in order to protect them as nature reserves, the government did not regard it as ‘strong enough’ for this task.17 Consequently, the society only got the right to manage a 6
ha reserve in Depok.18That it was still successful in promoting nature pro-
tection to some extent was mainly due to the fact that the colonial state was open to scientific arguments developed in response to problems encountered in the tropics19and, to a lesser extent, to support from
NGOs outside the area. They began to form a network and to attempt to build international support20
for the new discourse. In 1929 for instance, the Netherlands Indies Society for the Protection of Nature together with the Dutch Committee for Inter- national Protection of Nature21lobbied for the assignment of nature reserves
in Aceh, North-Sumatra, West-Sumatra, Palembang and West Borneo.22
For many of those who reproduced the nature protection discourse, the survival of humanity was the main motive behind reserving nature, whether speaking medically (as for the medical surgeons), economically (as for the bio geographers and other natural scientists) or emotionally (as for the romantics). Based on their respective ideas they strove to find medicines to cure diseases, to discover the secrets of nature which could be manipulated in the interest of economic production, and to reserve nature as a source of emotional inspira- tion.
In addition, another argument also gained importance: that the survival of certain animals was important too. This was also backed by a broad range
16 Dammerman 1950, p. 88. 17 Dammerman 1929, p. 23. 18 Dammerman 1929, p. 24. 19 Grove 1996, p. 475.
20 This was possible since conservationist NGOs began to mushroom all over the Western world. In America the Boone & Crockett Club was founded in 1887 by, among others, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901-1909 (Jepson 2002, Jepson & Whittaker 2002. In Germany, the first associations with the aim of nature protection had been established from 1875 onwards (Keiser 1949, p. 17). In England, even in 1865 the first of such associations was established (Keiser 1949, p. 19). In America it was the states that started nature conservation, for example with the establishment of state (the first in 1820) and national parks (the first being Yellowstone in 1872). Only in 1891 the first association was established (Keiser 1949, p. 19). The first Dutch association was only established in
1898. In 1905 theVereniging tot Behoud van Natuurmonumentenfollowed (Keiser 1949, p.
22, 25). This happened in reaction to a lecture in Amsterdam given by a German forester,
Hugo Conwentz, who toured Europe to promote ‘his concept and vision ofNaturdenkmal’ -
a concept which applied the protection of cultural heritage for the first time to nature and which combined it with patriotism - and which coincided with a conflict about the future of the Naarder lake (Jepson & Whittaker 2002, p. 136). See also Boomgaard 1999. 21 Established in 1925.
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of stories and related economic, cultural and emotional arguments. One rather new – and again romantic – story at the time was, for instance, that humans and some animals, especially the great apes, were possibly each other’s kin and that preserving ecosystems could help to discover the missing link between the two.23This resulted for some in an ‘obsession’ to address ‘the threat of
innate animal instincts to the dignity and uniqueness of humanity’ and to ensure ‘the maintenance of morality and civilization’.24The position at the
other extreme held that certain animals needed to be protected from over- exploitation to sustain the trade of them.
Finally, a story about increasing plant diseases caused by various insects provided an additional argument for protecting birds that were believed to be their natural enemies.25
The nature protectors had a clear picture of which activities posed a threat to achieving their goal. Among them were hunting activities,26 agriculture
and ‘other forms of cultivation’.27In this, they thus differed from the pro-
ponents of the rational forestry discourse who, as we saw above, had enduring cultivation as their aim and maintained a discourse coalition with the cult- ivators. This attitude against cultivation and in favour of nature in isolation of human activities turned all persons involved in such activities into potential enemies.
Whenever such persons tried to make an argument against nature pro- tection or in favour of exceptions, nature protectors would turn to scientific arguments to help defend themselves. If such persons then tried to base their own arguments on scientific knowledge, nature protectors would try to posi- tion them as untrustworthy. An example is the debate between those in favour of hunting and trading birds-of-paradise and those opposed to it. Cribb notes that hunters produced technical arguments that claimed ‘even if all the males in their prime were removed from a local population by hunting […] the species could still reproduce itself.’ To this they added ‘that males began to breed at one year of age, but did not attain their full splendour until at least four. If this were so, then, the future of the species was not at risk.’28Nature
protectors argued on their turn that ‘not enough was known of the distribution or population biology of the birds to assert that hunting did not damage the species’. The observations made by hunters they labelled as ‘uncommon’ and as not applicable in this very case.29
23 Cribb 2005, p. 15.
24 Jepson & Whittaker 2002 citing Thomas 1984, Lowe 1983, Burrow 1966, Persall 1969 and Turner 1980.
25 Cribb 2005, p. 4 citing Leefmans; Dammerman 1919, p. 296.
26 See, for instance, the debate on the hunt of the birds-of-paradise as described in Cribb 1997a. 27 McCarthy 2000, p. 113 citing Dammerman 1929.
28 Cribb 1997a, p. 401. 29 Cribb 1997a, p. 401.
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Likewise, cultural and developmentalist arguments that hunting, or forms of cultivation, would bring civilisation and development to hitherto uncivilised regions and their primitive inhabitants, were countered by disqualifying those making such arguments as an inappropriate civilisation force. Cribb cites an assistant resident as follows: ‘The fact that there are any people left in New Guinea is certainly no thanks to the bird trade.’30
The colonial administration opted to search for a balanced policy, one that acknowledged scientific evidence about threats to nature but that tried to accommodate economic interests as well. Officials therefore tended to portray the various values of nature as not opposing each other but as rather comple- mentary. In 1931 the chief inspector of the Forest Service, Ten Oever, stated for instance that the forests had been redefined from a ‘winstbedrijf’ (En. enterprise aimed at economic profit) to a ‘bedrijfsobject’ (En. economic object), which included the hydrological, climatological and romantic functions of forests.31
What helped to integrate various objectives and to find allies was referring to the notion of ‘progress’.32This notion was an essential part of all discourses
in the colonial period. It was thus a story in which all people from the West had a place and which was therefore conducive to coalition formation. After all, no one could be opposed to progress, and progress could be interpreted in various ways. For those striving for fast economic profit progress would mean an increase in productivity; for those in favour of rational forestry arguments progress would mean, among other things, to introduce manage- ment techniques to the field of teak exploitation; for proponents of the pro- tection against disaster discourse the concept of progress would bring pro- tection forests to mind (they argued that only when the forests in the mountains were protected nature would they not remain an obstacle to the region’s progress and civilisation but become one of their main catalysts;33
and finally, for people favouring nature protection progress would mean showing that one was not only interested in economic profit but also in moral
30 Cribb 1997a, p. 401 citing Westermann; see for more details on the debate about whether or not to preserve primitive peoples in their original state and protect them from the outside world (Cribb 2005). In this paper, Cribb argues that the motivation for the Dutch to preserve the Papuans in their original state was to ‘justify their indefinite presence in the Indonesian archipelago and [to] refute the nationalist claims that there was a single national identity’ (Cribb 2005, p. 16).
31 Ten Oever 1931, p. 742-743.
32 This general concept also formed part of the discourse of the Ethical Policy, orethische
politiek. This policy was based on the feeling of a moral obligation to bring modernity to the people in the colony and economic interests to raise their welfare to create a better working force and a new market. It consisted of three main pillars: the protection of, mainly pitoresque, elements of the culture of traditional communities against modernization and capitalism, the expansion of education for Indonesians and welfare services for the ‘strong’ parts of the Javanese society (Cribb 1993, p. 226-234).
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issues of preserving certain elements of nature for future generations for aesthetic or scientific reasons.34
This emphasis on progress, however, contained – from our present per- spective – a patronising or even racist element. In pressing to make ‘the tropics truly productive, to meet the world’s (i.e. the north’s) expanding needs for raw materials’35the Europeans judged that the productivity was far below
what was possible. In their eyes ‘there [was] a very big disproportion between the number of the indigenous people and the size of the areas [used by them]’, leading to the claim that ‘the West with its culture and techniques could [and was obliged to] teach the indigenous people how to live a better and easier life on less land’ and that ‘a part of the land [needed to be] allocated to a rational land exploitation under Western direction’.36 In other words, the
Europeans were convinced that what the land needed wasthem and their progress, order, and civilisation, all based on higher productivity, Western technology and scientific rationality. After all, ‘no progress […] need[ed] to be expected from the present [indigenous] inhabitants’.37Whatever the word
‘progress’ meant to people, it left those who used it in the position to define their ideas as the best available at that time.38This legitimised all kinds of
claims about defining objectives and the instruments to achieve them.
11.1 POLICY
Nature protection policy aimed for protecting certain territories for scientific and recreational purposes and certain species to prevent them from becoming extinct.
11.2 LAW
The rules that reflected the emergence of the nature protection discourse concerned the protection of animals and the establishment of reserves.
Regulating animal protection in the beginning was closely linked to the regulation of hunting activities. Regulations of this kind had their roots in,
34 Cf. Cribb 1997a, p. 395. 35 Arnold 2000, p. 15.
36 ’s Jacob 1945, p. xiii. This was a general perspective among colonizing nations (Agrawal,
1997). Cf. the expression of the ‘white man’s burden’ (Van Nederpelt 1993, p. 31) and the
later ‘Ethical Policy’ (Du.Ethische Politiek). See, for instance, Cribb 1993 and Fasseur 2000.
37 Arnold 2000, p. 14 citing Belt 1888. The general opinion was that the tropical nature created conditions for an ‘easy, year-round subsistence in return for minimal labour’ which caused ‘indolence’ and ‘torpor’ and a lack of any stimulus for technical innovation (Arnold 2000, p. 6-7).
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among other things, a warning given in 1890 by the former resident of Ternate, F.S.A. de Clercq and in 1895 by an official of the colonial department of Justice and ‘amateur entomologist’, M.C. Piepers, that birds-of-paradise were close to extinction.39 Considering that, for instance, feathers of these birds were
popular all over the world and that they were thus valuable, the colonial administration decided that something should be done to prevent such animals from extinction. However, the debate about what this ‘something’ should be took about a decade! Cribb described in his analysis of relevant materials in the colonial archives that scientific uncertainty about the degree of urgency and administrative considerations40 formed the major obstacles for taking
quick measures. Likewise, arguments in favour of protecting insect-eating birds and killing those that were harmful to farming efforts,41and in favour of the
economic development of New Guinea42 contributed to the slow pace of
policymaking. Due to the long debate the first real measures had a very local character: in 1905 the resident of Ternate was advised to raise a bird tax and use his authority to limit the hunt by requiring a license for carrying fire- arms.43Cribb notes that in practice these measures intensified rather than
reduced the hunting of the protected birds since the actual hunters had to hire equipment from license holders and to pay them back in pelts.
In 1909, at the initiative of the director of the zoological museum,44a much
farther-reaching regulation was issued that much more clearly reflected that the nature protection discourse was – at least in terms of institutionalisation in regulations – gaining ground: the Ordinance for the Protection of Certain Wild Mammals and Birds.45 This ordinance aimed at protecting all wild
animals and birds in the colonial area.
Due to the opposition of hunters, farmers and plantation owners,46and
probably also the realism of nature lovers themselves, the romantic perception of nature was, however, limited to its attractive aspects. Consequently, animals considered as dangerous or harmful were excluded from protection.47Two
major exceptions were made: dangerous animals, including those that damaged crops, such as monkeys, and predators, such as tigers, and those that were considered not in need of protection were first. Traditional game and certain animals that required the permission of regional heads for hunting (such as
39 Cribb 1997a, p. 388-389.
40 The colonial administration was not yet present in the western part of New Guinea which would make enforcement of any regulations unfeasible (Cribb 1997a, p. 389-390). 41 As promoted by the Botanic Garden’s agricultural zoologist Koningsberger (Cribb 1997a,