This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Under what conditions do people become environmentalists? What causes translocal and transnational efforts to protect biodiversity to be adopted and connected with local interests? What are the implications of trends in global conservation practice toward both scaling-up and relying on community and non-governmental organizations? This Faculty Career Early-Development (CAREER) award will support basic research and educational activities that address these questions. The research to be pursued will advance basic understanding of the emergence of environmentalism and the encounter between transnational conservation projects and locally situated actors through a systematic examination of the recent proliferation of community environmental organizations and articulations of environmental identities on the Tibetan Plateau in the context of new transnational biodiversity conservation efforts and a growing Chinese environmental movement. More specifically, the investigator will examine the interplay of translocal and transnational efforts to save China's biodiversity through the declaration of biodiversity hotspots, community-based conservation initiatives, and mobilization of elements of Tibetan traditional culture and religion, particularly sacred lands. Using ethnographic and other qualitative methods, including textual analysis and interviews and participant observation with Chinese environmentalists, conservation staff, and grassroots Tibetan community organizations across four provinces over a period of five years, the investigator will examine the cultural and political implications of promoting culture as conservation, thereby contributing to knowledge about globalization by tracing the ways in which environmental ideas travel and are adopted and articulated with local interests in particular times and places.
As both biodiversity loss and global efforts to prevent it intensify, the theoretical implications of the study will be useful for a wide variety of settings. The research will contribute to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology by improving basic understanding of transnational biodiversity conservation efforts, environmental identities, and the relationship between sacred landscapes, indigenous identities, and environmental protection. It will be the first study of China's environmental movement that goes in depth beyond a handful of NGOs and activists based in Beijing and Yunnan and that examines the key role of Tibetan culture and nature in its formation. Furthermore, it should provide a new way of analyzing the environmental movement and globalization in China beyond standard framings of civil society and democratization on the one hand and neoliberalism on the other. In addition, the project has a significant educational component, including a new undergraduate class that will enhance students' knowledge about theories and debates in human and nature-society geography through learning about Tibet. The award also will provide learning and research opportunities for four undergraduates, including underrepresented minorities, who will participate in summer research with environmental activists in China. The project also will produce an ethnographic film about grassroots environmentalism in Tibet, which will be suitable for use in geography and anthropology classes for teaching about cultures of nature and issues of representation of the nature-society relationship. Two doctoral students will be educated and trained, and project results will be disseminated to scholarly audiences as well as to educators and conservation organizations in both the U.S. and China.
