Analyze

Our project has been conducted in so-called ‘Kelowna’ , located in ‘British Columbia’ , ‘Canada’. This land on which we live and work is the unceded, ancestral territory of the syilx Okanagan nation. Prior to European colonisation in the 19th century, the syilx people stewarded the land for thousands of years, guided by an ethos that sees the nonhuman world as an inheritance to be protected rather than owned and exploited. In spite of the violence of settler colonialism, syilx culture endures. A compelling example of the mobilisation of syilx knowledge systems and philosophies against environmental injustice is the restoration of kokanee and coho salmon to the Okanagan. Since the 1990s, the Okanagan Nation Alliance has led efforts to restore habitats, build fish passages over dams, and release fry. The salmon populations have rebounded from near extinction through a process guided by syilx environmental principles. While designing a class in place-based environmental humanities methods we have collaborated with syilx colleagues to integrate their philosophies and approaches to land-based learning. 

Image source 'Mission Creek in Kelowna', Daisy Pullman

Pullman, Daisy, Astrida Niemanis, Natalie Forssman and Haida Gaede. 2023.  "Place-based Learning on syilx Land." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Adrian Martin is a professor of Environment and Development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, UK. His prior publication, Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability, calls for reassessing conservation from the viewpoint of social justice. He describes the goals of his research as being centered on informing “the management of natural resources in developing countries, particularly in relation to governance of protected areas, integrated conservation and development, participatory forestry and agricultural intensification.”

“The ‘new conservation’ camp has the advantage of rejecting segregationist and elitist approaches, but it fails to challenge the inequalities or unsustainability of current economic systems and priorities. The ‘protectionist’ camp does challenge current economic systems, but it is essentially an upscaling of a segregationist model of protected-area conservation that is unlikely to be effective and would fail to recognise other ways of knowing and living with nature. “ (Martin 142)

“First, we need to break free from some of the mental dispositions that we are currently conditioned to think with. First and foremost, this means ceasing to think with the dominant economic ideology that makes a goal of economic growth, consumerism and individualism. It is this way of thinking that now threatens the destruction of humans and the rest of nature. Second, we need to understand and embrace the many past and current cultures ‘that promote harmonious forms of co-inhabitation among communities of diverse human and other-than-human beings’”. (Martin 143)

• “Rozzi looks at the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia, including the phrase ‘Suma Qamaña’. This translates as ‘living well together’. In the Aymara language, it means to inhabit, in the sense of both living in and living with, and it emphasizes the relational value of co-habitation” (Martin 143)

• “An example of a protectionist position is the ‘Half-Earth’ call for a massive expansion of protected areas (Wilson, 2016)” (Martin 142)

• “In the last twenty years, there has been a major scientific effort to quantify the benefits that humans derive from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the influential report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010).” (Martin 142) 

• “The need for transformative societal change that addresses such root causes is now making it into globally agreed reports such as the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.” (Martin 135)

• A key point of the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report emphasizes the necessity for “sustainable and just economies” and the safeguard of food systems as a whole. Recovery of Vietnam’s Central Provinces will require joint commitments between Vietnam and Taiwan to prioritize the preservation of environmental resources over GDP growth. Such commitments will need to incorporate more stringent regulations for manufacturing infrastructure, greater funding for supporting recovery efforts both on the part of affected ecosystems as well as fisherman communities whose operations have been suspended, and stipulations for community consultation processes in all future related manufacturing processes. 

• “A collaborative process led by the International Institute for Environment and Development has employed the environmental justice typology of distribution, procedure and recognition to develop an equity framework for assessment in protected and conserved areas (Schreckenberg et al., 2016; Franks et al., 2018). Use of this framework has now been adopted as voluntary guidance by the Convention on Biological Diversity and is being promoted by IUCN.” (Martin 142) 

Martin’s main argument centers on the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of  anthropogenic and ecocentric framings to conceptualize methods of addressing biodiversity loss. The future of conservation, as noted by Martin, will need to embrace alternative framings of natural diversity which “deliberately integrates human and biological values into a holistic expression” (Martin 143). The importance of emphasizing “biocultural diversity”, argues Martin, serves to “decolonize” conservation via centering indigenous valuations of  “living in nature or as nature” (Martin 144) and rejecting dominant emphasis on upholding current economic systems and extreme segregationist views. While Martin does not provide an example of what a conservation scheme based on biocultural diversity could look like, he does use ideas presented in the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia to show that such ideas have in fact been gaining traction as an alternative means to framing conservation. 

The authors all work at University of California San Francisco. Their names are Vicanne Adams, Taslim Van Hattum, and Diana English. Adams works at USCF and was the former director and vice-chair in the department of anthropology, history, and social medicine. She focuses her research in Global Health, Asian Medical Systems, Social Theory, Critical Medical Anthropology, Sexuality and Gender, Safe Motherhood, Disaster Recovery, Tibet, Nepal, China and the US. She has been involved in various publications and has received numerous grants from the NIH. Van Hattum and English are also within the department for Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine. 

The main argument made in this article is that the term "chronic disaster syndrome" can be used as a diagnosis of Katrina survivors as opposed to PTSD. They use this term on the basis of factors including: individual suffering (trauma), the workings of disaster capitalism tied to the undermining of public infrastructures of social welfare and their replacement with private-sector service provision through contracts with for-profit corporations, and the ways that displacement functions within disaster capitalism. They make the point that this term can be used in link with disasters. In this case, Katrina caused "chronic disaster syndrome" to most survivors in that they were affected (and still are) socially, politically, and individually. The trauma experienced and the lack of leadership and governmental response created stressful situations for all residents of New Orleans pre-Katrina. 

The argument is supported through various anecdotes and testimonials. The authors use quotes from various victims in order to highlight the ways in which they were affected by Katrina. Notably, Sally, a 56-year-old woman from St. Bernard Parish who was still living in a FEMA trailer 50 miles from her original residence 2 1/2 years after the storm was interviewed. She talks about the living conditions post-Katrina. She describes families being torn apart, the National Guard using unnecessary force, and dead bodies floating in the water. The authors also use statistics and facts in order to back up their point about the horrendous conditions the survivors were in post-Katrina. A psychological and anthropological analysis also helps strengthen their argument regarding chronic disaster syndrome.

1. "Despite the overwhelming need for mental health services, few residents were able to access mental health support for their symptoms, simply because health care facilities and health care personnel were so scarce. Most health personnel were themselves experiencing the trauma of displacement, and few clinical facilities survived the disaster."
2. "...in the months following Katrina, that the suicide rate had tripled..."
3. "Lakeview, a predominantly Caucasian upper-middle class community, had perhaps made the most progress in rebuilding."
4. "However, for most urban poor residents, it became clear fairly soon after the disaster that they would not be welcomed back to the city."

Through extensive data analysis and interviews, the authors were able to produce claims and formulate their argument. They used information from the NIH and other research and data already obtained to explore displacement in relation to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age.