Factoring Humans into the Environmental Picture
Instead of Seeing Local People as Poachers or Polluters,
Social Scientist Lisa Campbell Views Them as Part of the Landscape
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It is not entirely surprising that Campbell
came to environmental work not though the natural sciences,
but through her early career in international development.
Her undergraduate honor’s thesis was about “The Future of
the Peace Movement in the Gorbachev Era,” and one of her early
jobs was with the Canadian Agency for International Development.
There, she analyzed the environmental assessment policies
of funding agencies like the World Bank, and turned this work
into a Master’s research paper. At the time, the development
community was responding to the 1987 report of the World Commission
on Environment and Development, also known as the Brundtland
Commission. The landmark report, entitled “Our Common Future,”
called for a deeper environmental commitment from the world’s
development agencies.
“I started thinking about the other half of
that equation,” Campbell says. “I got interested in how things
like parks and protected areas impact on rural and impoverished
communities.”
So Campbell realigned her career path and went
back to graduate school. While scores of environmentalists
study how humans threaten sea turtles, she began looking at
how sea turtle conservation efforts impact humans. Turtle
protection efforts, she says, make the perfect subject for
her research. Turtles are charismatic— people have strong
feelings about them. They attract both an academic and an
amateur following, so there is a strong lobby for their protection.
Often those efforts straddle what Campbell has called “the
sometimes fuzzy line between conservation science and environmental
advocacy.” Turtles live and breed all over the world, in both
developed and developing countries. Traditionally, humans
have used their meat, eggs and shells. And most sea turtles
are considered endangered.
“Turtles allow you to look at how economics,
politics, values and science interact when you are trying
to design conservation programs,” she says. “I wanted to look
at case studies where people thought the balance between conservation
and development were being met.
”Which is how she ended up in Ostional, Costa
Rica, surveying and interviewing people who make their living
by gathering turtle eggs. Ostional is an example of participatory
development that allows limited harvesting of turtle’s eggs—
consumptive use—as the main method of conserving turtles while
benefiting the community. Local residents run an organization
that monitors the harvesting of the eggs from the first turtles
to hit the beach each month. Since those eggs are destroyed
by subsequent waves of nesting turtles, there is no loss with
the controlled harvest. And the legal eggs flood the market,
which theoretically takes business away from illegal collectors.
All that sounds good, but Campbell wanted to find out if the
claims held up under scrutiny.
“People were happy to say the project had achieved
these objectives, but it had never been evaluated from a socio-economic
perspective,” she says.
Campbell spent a year collecting data about the
jobs, income and other benefits that came with the egg harvest,
and compared that to non-consumptive use through ecotourism.
In Ostional, economic benefits from ecotourism existed, but
were concentrated in the hands of a few families and were
attracting the interest of foreign developers. On the other
hand, the legalized egg harvest was economically and socially
beneficial to the community as a whole, and encouraged support
for the regulation of wildlife use and for additional conservation
activities.
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