Saving the Other Amazon: Changing Understandings of Nature andWilderness among Indigenous Leaders in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article examines a new set of policies embraced by indigenous leaders in the Upper Napo region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, driven, in part, by a growing appreciation for “wilderness” —large areas where humans exercise a very light touch. In the past few years, leaders have pursued wilderness conservation initiatives while simultaneously promoting petroleum extraction in their own backyards. Both political positions run counter to those pursued in previous decades, when opposition to both oil development and strict forms of conservation within their territory was strong. To address this reversal, I trace some of the development interventions and North-South collaborations that have contributed to the emergence of “nature” as a meaningful imaginary for Amazonian indigenous leaders and for a new generation of young people, drawing connections to William Cronon’s critical analysis of how wilderness conservation became a priority in the United States. I conclude that more than two decades of conservationist interventions in the Upper Napo region have led to some largely unintended consequences, as Amazonian leaders increasingly subscribe to Northern environmentalists’ romanticization of “the Amazon” as a wild place, one that therefore must be distant from the places where they work and live

The Value of a River

The Skokomish river was once the most productive salmon river in Puget Sound, but since 1926 the North Fork Skokomish has been diverted for hydropower. The Skokomish tribe has fought unsuccessfully to restore natural flows. At issue is the “non-market value” of the river’s biological productivity. The value of the river as “natural capital” for the tribe is analyzed from an historical, ethnographic, and ecological perspective. Keywords: non-market values, natural capital, salmon, Pacific Northwest, Skokomish, riverine ecology, ecosystem management

Constructing autonomy: Indigenous organizations, governance, and land use in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 1964--2001.

Over the past two decades, indigenous groups across Latin America have been demanding and obtaining rights to cultural autonomy and self-determination from the states where they reside. However, indigenous organizations have limited resources to construct the alternative modernities they seek to build. Thus, they must form alliances with other organizations, such as state agencies, bilateral or multilateral organizations, extractive industries, and environmental organizations, most of which in turn attempt to influence land use and other issues of governance in indigenous territories. Indigenous leaders must also continuously work to build commitment to their plans, especially when their allies' visions for the development of indigenous territories have conflicted with those of their constituents. In this dissertation, I examine how indigenous people have pursued the construction of societies founded on consensus-based decision making and collective endeavor. I trace how they have done so from a position of economic marginality and alongside the shifting priorities of development organizations. I focus on one of the most comprehensive and longest-standing indigenous experiments with autonomy, the Rukullakta Agricultural Cooperative in the Napo Province of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Cooperative began as a social movement in the late 1960s in response to the rapid appropriation of indigenous lands after the 1964 agrarian reform, and has remained entirely inhabited and administered by Kichwa Indians. I place this study within the larger context of the indigenous autonomy movement in Ecuador, examining how tensions of governance existing at the local level have been replicated and complicated as indigenous leaders from around the country, with their diverse cultures and histories of exploitation and political organizing, have attempted to build a national-level social movement and pan-indigenous identity over the past two decades. Finally, I analyze the interactions between international conservationists and Kichwa organizations in the Upper Napo and argue that the development visions and governance strategies of each are becoming increasingly disparate. This study is based on long-term fieldwork as well as the interpretation of archival and spatial data, including Cooperative meeting notes, aerial photographs from 1973 and 1982, and satellite images from 1977, 1992, 1997, and 2001.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyGeographySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123831/2/3106054.pd

Beyond the square wheel: toward a more comprehensive understanding of biodiversity conservation as a social and political process. Society and Natural Resources 15

In this article we build on an accompanying critique of recent writings in international biodiversity conservation (this issu