Through my ongoing research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), I am engaging with broader questions about the “nature” of militarized landscapes and the production of their ecological value. In this piece, I examine how South Korean state and NGO projects configure the DMZ as a unique site of biodiversity that could provide the basis for sustainable development and also peace on the Korean peninsula. These projects, however, often depend upon a branding of the DMZ as a bounded space of pristine nature, disregarding the more complex social and political landscapes of the inter-Korean border region, of which the DMZ is just one part. This tendency to fetishize the DMZ and its “nature,” moreover, disguises the ways in which global capitalism, development, and militarization are affecting other parts of the border region, areas where the majority of what is known of the “DMZ’s biodiversity” exists.

This map shows the location and spatial extent of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and its surrounding geographies.The dotted line is the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the actual border between North Korea and South Korea. The area shaded in dark grey is the DMZ, the area shaded in medium grey is the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) and the light grey area is the border area. This image was adapted from Kim, Kwi-gon and Dong-Gil Cho. 2005. “Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea’s De-militarized Zone.” Landscape and Ecological Engineering 1: 4.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is often described as a space of superlative and jarring juxtapositions: the most heavily militarized area in the world and one of the last remnants of the Cold War; a no-man’s land for sixty years turned into an accidental haven of biodiversity. In South Korea, despite the persistence of the Cold War division and ongoing tensions with the North, the DMZ’s “return to nature” and symbolic potential have fueled state visions of converting the forbidden zone into a peace park or ecological preserve since the 1990s.[1] North Korean opposition, however, has consistently forestalled such plans. Despite this serial disappointment, and in the midst of the latest round of military provocations and propagandistic saber-rattling on both sides of the border, Park Geun-hye, the newly elected president of South Korea, during her visit to Washington D.C. in May 2013, announced her intention to build an “international peace park” in the DMZ to send “a message of peace to all of humanity.” Although she did not make an explicit connection in her speech between the DMZ’s ecological renaissance and its function as a symbol of peace, the equation between the two has been central to official state branding of the DMZ as a zone of “peace and life.”

But what is the “nature” of the DMZ that is being preserved? The DMZ proper is 4 kilometers wide and 248 kilometers long and serves as a buffer between the two Koreas, mandated by the armistice agreement signed in July 1953. It encompasses multiple ecosystems, including mountain highlands, lowland wetlands, grasslands, five rivers, and watersheds. What is referred to as “the DMZ region,” however, is a more expansive area that includes the adjacent Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), which extends south from the DMZ between four and twelve kilometers.

Korean Water Deer in the CCZ, January 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

In fact, one of the major sticking points for measuring the DMZ’s ecological value is the lack of knowledge of what constitutes the biodiversity of the DMZ proper. Surveys starting in the 1990s have documented eighty-two rare and endangered species in areas within and around the DMZ and the CCZ, out of a total of 2,900 plant and animal species, which represent the majority of the all species in the peninsula. Existing surveys inside the DMZ, however, have been spotty and unsystematic, due to difficulties of accessing the highly restricted area, which requires oversight from the UN Command. Thus, ecological knowledge of the “DMZ” is more often based on research in the CCZ and other parts of the border region, where evidence of charismatic megafuna like highly endangered migratory cranes, the rare Amur Goral, and even the apocryphal Siberian Tiger has attracted international attention. In light of these data, conservationists and others have become intrigued by the DMZ’s possibilities as a conservation area and peace park, and central and regional governments have been engaged in sustainable development projects as a solution to the economically stagnant border area to capitalize on the ecotouristic value of the DMZ.

I have worked closely with a small NGO of citizen ecologists that monitors the ecology of the western side of the DMZ region in the area of the Han River estuary and related wetlands, which are habitats for numerous species, the most celebrated of which are the highly endangered Red-crowned Crane (grus japonensis) and the White-naped Crane (grus vipio). The Red-Crowned Crane in particular is culturally valued across East Asia. Both species are declining in numbers, with a global population of 2,750 for the Red-Crowned Crane and around 5,500 for the White-naped Crane. They typically mate for life and produce one or two offspring per year.

White-naped Cranes feeding on a fallow rice paddy in the CCZ, October 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

The cranes’ rarity and association with the DMZ render them even more symbolically potent, especially given the fact that they metaphorically and literally connect the two Koreas as they cross the border annually in their migrations from breeding areas in eastern Russia to the southern half of the DMZ area, where they feed on grains from rice paddies following the autumn harvest. Even as these birds are associated with the DMZ as an ecologically valuable space and branded as an integral part of this landscape (rice grown in the CCZ area is marketed as “Red-crowned Crane rice”), their survival is enmeshed in relationships with humans and agriculture that has evolved over centuries, if not longer.

On the western side of the border area, where wintering populations of Red-crowned cranes used to number in the hundreds, pressures on land use due to development have created inhospitable conditions and loss of habitat for the cranes and other migratory birds like the Bean Goose and the Greater White-fronted Goose. Landowners are increasingly converting fields and forests to high-profit greenhouse products like bell peppers and blueberries, or shade-grown ginseng. Both ginseng fields and greenhouses reduce the amount of feeding and roosting habitats for cranes, and the extension of the agricultural calendar from seasonal rice cultivation and harvesting to year-round production means more human activity and vehicular traffic during the cranes’ wintering months – between October and March. Moreover, electrified greenhouses require the erection of more power lines, which are a major hazard for migratory birds. Dozens of birds are injured or killed annually from collisions with power lines and fences, or poisoning from pesticides. In effect, the nature of the CCZ is far from pristine, and is becoming increasingly developed, threatening the very species whose presence is heralded.

Citizen ecologists monitoring aquatic insects in small irrigation ponds in the CCZ, April 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

For ecologists and crane conservationists, these developments in the CCZ are dismaying. Their monitoring work can often seem like a salvage project, as they meticulously document pockets of biodiversity while the landscape around them is transformed into plastic-covered ginseng fields created atop former forests and meadows. Urbanization and the construction of new edge cities along the western coast are destroying wetland habitats used by cranes and other birds. In response to these developments in the South, the International Crane Foundation has shifted its conservation efforts for the Red-crowned and White-naped Cranes to the North Korean side of the border in hopes that underdevelopment there will make the restoration of crane wintering habitats more viable in the long term. International designation from the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands or the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve might help to stave off the degradation of the CCZ’s landscapes, but with the expansion of ecotourism sites and facilities in the western part of the CCZ, as well as plans to create zones for inter-Korean economic cooperation within the DMZ, many committed ecologists and environmentalists are less than optimistic about the sustainability of these precious habitats.

President Park’s announcement of the peace park may have seemed merely utopian to some, especially at a moment when inter-Korean diplomacy had reached a particularly low point. The DMZ, however, invites just such projections of hope and myth-making. Many people in South Korea and internationally have become enraptured by the story of the zone and its ecological renaissance. That the most extreme example of human political strife and violence can inadvertently create a preserve for endangered species feeds romantic visions of nature’s resilience and indifference to human design. Imagining the DMZ as a site of pristine nature, however, requires one to forget its ongoing social and historical transformations, as well as the material conditions of its militarization, not the least of which includes over one million landmines within the zone and another one million in the CCZ. The space of the DMZ may be literally shaped by military conflict and political stalemate, but its ecology is also deeply enmeshed with global capitalism. It is at the nexus of militarization and neoliberalization that the DMZ’s nature now emerges as an object of fascination and instrumentalization. The idea of conserving the DMZ as a protected area may provide a glimmer of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation, yet, the romanticization of nature in the zone, whether in the name of unification politics or sustainable development, may be obscuring the ongoing endangerment of the border area’s actually existing biodiversity.

Eleana Kim is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rochester University. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press) was published in 2010. Her current project, Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, received an ACLS/SSRC/NEH fellowship in 2011-12. Articles on adoption have appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Social Text, and the Journal of Korean Studies. Articles on the DMZ have appeared or are forthcoming on SINO-NK.com and Perspectives: The Journal of the Rachel Carson Institute. She can be reached at: eleana.kim@rochester.edu.

[1] This “return to nature” narrative is not unique to the DMZ. In fact, the post-Cold War era has witnessed a number of decommissioned militarized spaces and borders that are being converted into conservation areas after having been “off limits” to civilians and thereby unintentional sanctuaries for other species for decades (despite or because of intense toxicity and militarized pollution). In addition, Transboundary Conservation Areas have been widely celebrated as a “global solution” to conservation and sustainable development (as Bram Büscher describes it in his excellent new book, Transforming the Frontier), in which landscapes of political antagonism could be transformed into zones of mutual cooperation and peace.

“… In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.”   – Andrew Mathews, as quoted in his January 2013 interview with ENGAGEMENT

I would counter by positing that good bureaucracies do not bleach out local context. Instead, they create big, simplified umbrellas that cloak the complex, dynamic range of local circumstances and thereby give the staff of government bureaucracies the space to address local circumstances despite changes in political direction.   I base this assertion on twenty-five years’ experience working with USAID, and on the literature on good governance.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Kyrgyzstan

I came to Washington DC in 1988 to serve as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow at the USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development).  AAAS Fellowships offer scientists an opportunity to apply their knowledge to policy development.  And, in my case, the Fellowship served as a passport to get inside the State Department building, where USAID was then housed.  Once I had my ID pass and was inside the agency, I was often asked by USAID staff why the AAA had Fellows working in USAID.  (They were confusing AAAS with the American Automobile Association, not the American Anthropological Association.)   The AAA is an all-American organization, trusted by everyone, so AAA unknowingly gave me legitimacy to listen in on the internal workings of part of this federal bureaucracy.  And thus I became a “participant observer” inside USAID for two years, learning the language (acronyms) and customs during the first six months, and then becoming an active member of this society.

At the outset, AAAS sent us new Fellows to an intensive three weeks of in-depth orientations and briefings on the institutions that comprise Washington—from Congress to NASA, from the White House to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Smithsonian.  One briefing stands out in my mind.   The presenter showed us a graph. On one axis was the level of knowledge about a topic, and on the other axis was the level of political attention given to the topic.   These variables were inversely related. The more that is known about a topic, the less political attention it gets.

I was given a position as Advisor to the Bureau for Asia and the Near East, in the office of Energy and Natural Resources.   My first assignment was managing an infamous reforestation project in Nepal—created by a Congressional earmark to ship poplar saplings from a constituent’s nursery in Oregon. Nepal has high levels of poverty, not to mention its own native poplars, so saplings weren’t high on the Nepali list for foreign aid.    My immediate supervisor, a social forester, advised me not to talk too much about this project.  Nepal simply was not a priority country.  He also pointed out that 80% of US foreign aid was in the form of “economic support funds”—checks written to Egypt and Israel—so Nepal was actually near the bottom of the remaining 20% of the budget described as “development assistance.”

Nevertheless, as an actor within this bureaucracy, my supervisor did his best to leverage the reforestation project into something that did more than airlift poplars from Oregon. He worked around the edges to provide assistance that was appreciated in Nepal—and then he threw away all the records of the project when he was transferred to another assignment.  When I saw him dumping out the files, I asked him whether we didn’t need to keep records of what had been done.  He said no, that it was better for the agency not to keep such records.   And thus I learned how dedicated people inside a bureaucracy can use those big, simplified umbrellas to fulfill a professional mission and address local concerns, even when the paperwork and politics push in a different direction.

I entered USAID during the transition from President Reagan to President George H.W. Bush.  There was a flurry of activity creating documents for “transition teams.” In effect, those documents served as ideologically-aligned, simplified umbrellas that shielded the professional, non-ideological work of the agency.   Again, these big simplifications did not bleach out local complexities, but rather covered for them.  During the transition, I discovered that agencies like USAID are run by political appointees, and I watched as President Bush inserted his people from the top down to the level of office director.   Our new office director met individually with each of his sixty-two person staff.  When he met me, the “AAA representative,” he said he was pleased that American business had a representative interested in “environment” inside USAID. Then he said that I needed to understand one thing: USAID was to do nothing to stop pollution. In fact, he continued, we should encourage it because US companies have the “predominant capability” in technologies for cleaning up pollution.

Over the first year, this appointee made it his personal agenda to remove biodiversity conservation from USAID’s mission by adding a “screen” that would stop all biodiversity-related activities and projects.  He believed that biodiversity was a fad whose time had passed, and he wanted to test the political power behind it.  Instead, he ended up being removed from his post because a memo promoting his anti-biodiversity plan was leaked. His memo shamed the administration and strengthened the political power of biodiversity conservation.  At his going-away party, we gave him a piece of window screen with paper cutouts of birds and rabbits taped to it along with a card that read, “We wanted you to have this screen, through which birds and bunnies cannot get.”  He laughed.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Bolivia

After my Fellowship ended in 1990, I had learned the language and culture well enough to be recommended for a new position in a USAID project.   During the 11 years I worked on that project, I again came to appreciate how those big simplified umbrellas can provide cover for dedicated agency staff and local context.   One case stands out.  Our project was able to work with black-listed NGOs in Indonesia because Jakarta had signed an agreement with Washington exempting USAID-funded projects from review against the Suharto government’s black list.  Nonetheless, the project needed its $12 million budget authorized by Congress, and USAID staff knew there were powers who would not want our project authorized.  In the mid-1990s, the paperwork for our project was placed in a stack under a simple cover sheet, which listed a different project instead of the Indonesia project.  No one in Congress looked under the cover sheet to see the details, and Congressional authorization was given on the basis of the umbrella cover memo.  After authorization, Congressional anger was impotent.

Several years later, that multi-million dollar project gave a $15,000 grant to a small NGO. This small NGO was inviting organizations from across Indonesia to a workshop in a village whose river was being heavily polluted by an American mining operation. Women in the village claimed that the pollution was damaging their vaginas because they had to stand in the polluted river to wash clothes and bathe.   Just before the workshop was to occur, the US Ambassador made a phone call directly to the NGO’s staff and instructed them to cancel it. It was inappropriate for an Ambassador to intervene in this way, and we took action to prevent it from becoming a precedent that could limit all future work.  Armed with staff knowledge of Congressional schedules, our allies were able to meet with concerned Members of Congress in both parties and build support for the workshop. But even this was not enough.  Higher levels of power were mobilized by the mining interests.  Only after an ally convinced Vice President Al Gore to step in did the mining interests back down and the workshop proceed.

None of this would have been possible without the big, simplified umbrellas of bureaucracy.  Without the opportunities I have had to be a participant observer within bureaucracies that use these umbrellas, I would not have understood how to play on the insiders’ team.  When our Indonesia project ended, a senior USAID official said to me, “this was the best project USAID ever did in my entire career … and it will never do another one like it.”  The project’s legacy continues more than a decade after it ended in 2001, in the good relations and capacity built among over 150 NGOs and the birth of the indigenous peoples’ federation of Indonesia. The project illustrates, with apologies to James Scott, how career staff in this bureaucracy made judicious and effective use of the “umbrellas of the weak” to achieve positive outcomes despite political obstacles.

March at the founding of the indigenous federation in Indonesia.

Please see the related references below, including Judith Tendler’s classic book on how giving bureaucrats the freedom to make decisions contributes to good governance and good government.

Janis Bristol Alcorn holds a doctorate in botany and anthropology from the University of Texas and has served as President of the Anthropology & Environment Society.  She currently works as the Deputy Director for Social and Environmental Soundness in a USAID-funded project based in Washington, DC.  From 1988-1990, she was an AAAS Fellow in USAID.  From 1991-2001, she was the Asia Director for the Biodiversity Support Program at WWF.  Since 2002, Dr. Alcorn has worked as a consultant for private foundations, NGOs, and USAID projects.  Her current engagements also include serving as Chair of the Theme on Governance, Equity, and Rights with the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy and as Adjunct Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute. 

Related references:

Alcorn, J.B., John Bamba, Stefanus Masiun, Ita Natalia, and Antoinette Royo (2003)  Keeping ecological resilience afloat in cross-scale turbulence:  An Indigenous social movement navigates change in Indonesia. Pages 299-327 in C.Folkes, F.Berkes & J.Colding, eds, Navigating Nature’s Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK.

Tendler, Judith (1997) Good Government in the Tropics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tendler identifies five central themes connecting the successes she identifies:

(1) Government workers demonstrated an unusual dedication to their jobs. (2) The government made efforts to instill a sense of mission in the workers. (3) Workers were more flexible and responded to the perceived demands of the clients. (4) Both workmanship pride and increased community pressures limited corruption and malfeasance. (5) A three way dynamic between the state government (central government), local government and civil society did not fit the stereotypical roles in terms of building civil society.

RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what is the theme of your new book? 

GMS: My book examines obstacles to the forest conservation effort in Madagascar through the lens of labor. It centers on the role and perspective of low-wage workers in conservation projects, and on the significance of manual labor in producing protected areas and biodiversity hot spots.

The book historicizes the conservation-and-development model, and it does so from a “subaltern” vantage point. By this, I mean that I try to tell a history of land degradation and conservation through the eyes of Malagasy worker-peasants, who have consistently been targeted by conservation officials because they practice “slash-and-burn” agriculture in the rain forest. My book begins by taking the reader back in time about 100 years, when France conquered Madagascar. The first half of my book is weighted in the past – an ethnography of the colonial archive – tracing how Malagasy “underlings” confronted (and carried) French colonialists as they organized space and life in such a way as to make Malagasy wildlife and Malagasy people’s “nature” valuable according to specific criteria.  Although I compare the moral economies of capitalism and subsistence agriculture, my focus is really on the middle ground, on the people who straddle both worlds and who are caught between them. The second half of my book is weighted in the contemporary period and focuses on low-wage workers of an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP). I believe that looking at the ways Malagasy workers have negotiated the structure, and shifts in the ideological content, of conservation institutions over time reveals a lot about why peasants still burn forest and why quick fixes through the usual institutional models are elusive.

RG: How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

GMS: Environmental anthropologists have been taking stock of conservation and development interventions into poor countries since the late 1980s, when the sustainable development model took hold.  Following the lead of a number of ethnographers, I explore the social life of an ICDP, a kind of “key symbol” of neoliberal foreign aid. Those of us adopting a political ecological approach investigate: 1) how people in postcolonial contexts receive and interpret interventions such as ecotourism development, the creation of national parks, environmental education, community conservation efforts, agroforestry training, “green” commodification, and so on, and 2) what have been the social, economic, and ecological effects of conservation interventions on postcolonial peoples and landscapes.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

GMS: When I went to Madagascar to do fieldwork for my dissertation, I relied on my close friendship with a Merina family who I had gotten to know through prior fieldwork. Merina is the politically dominant ethnic population of Madagascar; however, the island’s coastal populations, including the Betsimisaraka (the group I focus on in my ethnography) generally do not trust Merina.  Despite these social tensions, I ended up living with members of the Merina family I knew. They had a home in the town of Mananara-Nord, also the location of the headquarters for the UNESCO biosphere reserve and its ICDP that I studied. I stayed in Mananara-Nord with my Merina friends between my forays into Betsimisaraka villages in the biosphere reserve.  My alternating residence in villages and in town was illuminating in many ways. What I feared might be a liability (living with a Merina family) in getting to know the Betsimisaraka workers of the ICDP became, after a while, an asset, offering me a deeper glimpse into the politics of ethnicity there.

While in the field, I was in contact with Malagasy academics, villagers, expatriate conservation representatives and Peace Corps volunteers, as well as tourists and scientists passing through the biosphere reserve.  At the time, my field site did not have telecommunications. However, times have quickly changed–cell phones, internet, and social media networks are now more widely available, at least in larger Malagasy towns.  I am gearing up to go to Madagascar briefly this summer after a long hiatus, and I very much look forward to my fieldwork, and to connecting with people virtually too.

I stay in touch with Malagasy contacts, read posts on the Madagascar Environmental Justice Network – a listserv run by Barry Ferguson – and communicate with conservation scientists and practitioners affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, which manages a protected area in Madagascar. I also treasure any opportunity to talk with doctoral students and recent PhDs who have worked in Madagascar.

RG: What is the key message or key point you hope people take away from reading your book? 

GMS: I hope to convey two key messages. First, that history matters deeply. And, second, given the acceleration of species extinctions, climate change, and habitat loss, it is high time for a redistribution of aid to further the global conservation effort.

Money needs to reach the people most affected by the degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as subsistence farmers. I think the “direct payment” approach to conservation (payment for well-defined and measurable inputs or outcomes) is probably the most persuasive way to get a lot of people to support conservation very quickly. Direct payment for conservation services has been done to some extent by organizations who deliver community development projects in exchange for conservation practices—even the mining company, Rio Tinto, has endorsed this approach, ironically. When I discuss a “direct payment” approach, I mean making direct cash payment to individuals in regions where biodiversity is rich and vulnerable, and where erosion is severely depleting people’s livelihoods.

In my book, I have a chapter that discusses how rural Betsimisaraka people in the early 20^th century preferred doing “piecework” to regular wage work. One colonial French entrepreneur had great success in finding Malagasy workers, compared to his competitors because he would pay per log felled, rather than the normal fixed, miserly wage to men working in the timber concessions. As a result, this entrepreneur was never short of labor, while the others complained incessantly of the labor shortage. I think the piecework payment approach for reforestation, though administratively complicated, would be popular and would achieve positive ecological and ideological outcomes very quickly.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

GMS: Despite the complaints one often hears by conservation practitioners that academics criticize their projects but do not offer concrete recommendations for changing their practices, I see critical scholarship as a driving force behind policy changes in conservation programs. In particular, critical scholarship has prompted the conservation community’s re-orientation toward poverty alleviation, as compared to the colonial era. I am hopeful that my attempt to resurrect the concept of “labor” in conservation policy discourse will someday lead to positive change. Interestingly, by the 1990s, the term “labor” had been entirely suppressed in political discourse, including, not surprisingly, discussions about environmental conservation.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

GMS: My book aims to expose the deep contradictions of implementing “participatory” and community conservation via entrenched hierarchies that operate nationally and globally.  The contradictions are not just moral problems but also practical ones: they exacerbate species endangerment, human poverty, and conflict.  I focus on low-wage, locally-hired workers of an ICDP because to me their position epitomizes the contradictions of the bureaucratic hierarchy of conservation and development. These men felt that their ICDP salaries, given the difficulty of their tasks and all the moral and social tensions inherent in the work of cracking down on their friends and neighbors for breaking rules of the national park, were not adequate compensation.  To make ends meet, and to maintain their social bonds, they either practiced or relied on the fruits of slash and burn agriculture and hunting in the reserve, the very things they were supposed to police and transform.  They constantly had to make compromises (if they did one thing, they jeopardized their ICDP jobs; if they did another, they were scorned by their fellow villagers).

A biologist named Joe Peters suggested a while back that a voluntary civilian conservation corps like that of the Roosevelt administration be tried in Madagascar.  Instead of organizations hiring a small contingent of under-paid guards to police reserves and villagers, a conservation corps, perhaps paid according to measurable units of reforestation or agroforestry work, would open up opportunity for a much larger population of able-bodied individuals seeking additional income.  This would offset the precariousness of subsistence agriculture in the current environment.  In my view, this approach is a much better way to spread the conservation message. I would love to see it tried in Madagascar and elsewhere.

RG: How is your book being used beyond the academy?

GMS: In December 2012, I was invited to talk at a conference sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Duke Lemur Center at Duke University. The conference was invigorating because it brought together a mix of conservation experts, activists, and social scientists to discuss the illegal plunder of rosewood and other precious timber out of Madagascar’s national parks (including my former field site) since the 2009 coup, as well as more enduring obstacles to forest conservation. The looting of endangered hardwoods by what the press has called a “rosewood mafia” has shifted global attention from slash-and-burn agriculture to illegal timbering in Madagascar. In addition, the recent expansion of mining by transnational corporations along the Malagasy rain forest belt has ushered in what I see as a post-conservation era. It’s not that conservation has been abandoned, but increasingly it is mediated and managed by the mining corporations. Meanwhile the de facto state has been collaborating with the mining corporations and the timber merchants.  The expansion of mining deepens the problems of soil erosion, pollution, species loss, and social disruption.  The consequences of the mining boom remain to be seen given the time lag of extinction debt and the eventual depletion of profitable minerals.  A number of Madagascar scholars have been investigating the ways in which mining is transforming the management of nature and Malagasy societies. It seems as though the new scramble for African resources, at deeper geological strata and in smaller fragments of forest, has brought together scholars and conservation practitioners in common purpose like never before. Yet, I believe that the insights of my study for long-term conservation, and how they might be applied, will stay on the backburner until a new presidential election happens (the coup regime is still in power). We’ll see.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Genese Marie Sodikoff, for your time and insight.

Genese Marie Sodikoff is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Professionally and academically, Dr. Sodikoff has focused on rain forest conservation and international development in Africa, specifically the Comoros (1989-1991) and Madagascar (1994-2002). In addition to her current book, Dr. Sodikoff has edited a volume entitled The Anthropology of Extinction:  Essays on Culture and Species Death (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her teaching and research interests include political ecology, conservation and international development, extinction (both biological and cultural), human-animal relations, historical anthropology, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands. She is beginning a project on mining and future perception in Madagascar.