In the wake of the 1988 assassination of Chico Mendes, the way Northern environmentalists talk about Latin American environmental problems began to change. The problem of the Brazilian Amazon has gone from being a story about ill-conceived and destructive developmentalist policies to one about injustice. At the first conference of the Brazilian Studies Association in Atlanta last year, a U.S. politi- cal scientist gave a paper on self-described environmental movements in the Slo Paulo area to a roomful of mainly U.S. academics and representatives of environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). She talked about groups that have organized around waste, water and air pollution, noise, and other urban issues. The Brazilian organizations she described looked like the community and neighbor- hood environmental groups that have emerged in U.S. towns and cities, and in U.S. universities among stu- dent activists. The overwhelming response to her paper, however, was that she was not talking about the real environmental movement; the real environmental- ists, her critics contended, were in poor peoples’ movements-rubber tappers, indigenous peoples, river dwellers, people displaced by dams, and so forth. The authentic environmentalists in Brazil, in other words, were not people like themselves. In fact, the Northern environmental movement has not mobilized in Latin America in response to the kinds of urban issues around which most Latin Ameri- can environmentalists organize. With few exceptions, these problems are contested among predominantly domestic institutions and actors. No serious incentives exist either for foreign environmentalists to become involved, or for local activists to seek their involve- Margaret E. Keck teaches political science at Yale University. She is the author of The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil (Yale University Press, 1992). ment. Exceptions occasionally arise in cases where foreign NGOs can provide specialized information and technical expertise. Although egregious environ- mental problems like the high incidence of anen- cephalic babies born in chemical-producing Cubatio, Sdio Paulo have gotten a lot of international attention, no active international strategy has evolved around them. By contrast, international strategies have devel- oped around protection of forests, species, and indige- nous peoples. North-South collaboration around environmental issues takes diverse forms, with increasingly complex interactions among a greater number and variety of actors in recent years. Although states still play the key role in the last instance, other interactions- among and between Northern NGOs, Latin American environmental movements, Latin American states, international organizations and multilateral develop- ment banks-have proliferated.’ These interactions involve information flows, making it increasingly dif- ficult for multilateral organizations to rely exclusively on “official” accounts. In the wake of the December 1988 assassination of rubber tapper Chico Mendes, the way Northern envi- ronmentalists talk about Latin American environmen- tal problems began to change. People began to debate the root causes-the “causal story”-of tropical defor- estation, and particularly the role of poor people in determining the fate of the forest. 2 For some environ- mentalists, the problem of the Brazilian Amazon has gone from being a story about ill-conceived and destructive developmentalist policies to one about 36NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON SOLIDARITY injustice; from a belief that expertise plus resources could solve most problems to a belief that only pro- found social change can do so. Poor people have gone from being part of the problem to being potential car- riers of the solution. These changes coincided with a growing recognition on the part of conservation orga- nizations that a “parks without people” policy was at the very least unrealistic, if not undesirable, and that effective conservation required attention to the needs and concerns of local populations. profit from the area and th squatters’ movements were The new kinds of envir that came into being in Eur in the late 1960s and the 19′ decessors in being concern tion of natural areas than v of modern society. The nev harmony with nature. The, beautiful and that the indivi the big bureaucratic state. 1 The international dimension of environmental anti-growth discourse of t] politics in Latin America is nothing new, but and the hyper-developmei until the 1980s was mainly the purview of net- World leaders at the time w works of scientists. Like-minded profes- sionals in the United States and Latin America collaborated to find solutions to issues of mutual con- cern. They came to know each other at professional confer- ences and at research sites, participated in working groups of UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and developed strong commitments to par- ticular natural areas. Such networks were Environmentalists march through New York in 1990, protesting against central to the develop- logging in the Brazilian Amazon. ment of Costa Rica’s parks policy, for example. growth stance [see “A Typ( Between 1962 and 1976, Costa Rican and foreign sci- They shared with their Nor entists laid the groundwork in ecological studies for on decentralization and smr the creation of the Corcovado park on the Osa penin- Latin American conservati sula, even in the face of considerable opposition from parts elsewhere-wanted t both land speculators and squatters’ movements. 3 slow it down. They often fr Likewise, when Paulo Nogueira Neto, a member of tect natural areas in langua the IUCN executive board, became Brazil’s first envi- itage. It was important, for ronmental secretary in 1973, he could call upon peo- of Corcovado park be seen ple like Tom Lovejoy, then of the World Wildlife Opposition of Brazilian co Fund (WWF), to help finance new protected areas. the big transnational proje4 Although they were often very politically savvy in have been as much a con pursuing their goals, the people in these networks con- multinational capital as it sidered themselves apolitical. Until recently, these sci- consequences. It is importal entists paid very little attention to the demands and opmentalist nationalism cha needs of populations in and around the areas they and authoritarian regimes sought to protect. For the scientists campaigning for period. But institutional ch; the Corcovado basin, the land speculators trying to especially regarding polluti e Communist Party-linked equally problematic. onmentalist organizations rope and the United States 70s differed from their pre- ed less with the conserva- vith the environmental ills Senvironmentalists sought y believed that small was dual should be valued over ‘he difference between the he new environmentalists italist discourse of Third ‘as quite stark. In an influ- ential formulation of the Third Worldist position in 1971, the Brazilian ambassador to the United States contrasted “the pollu- tion of affluence” with the “pollution of poverty,” accusing the industrial powers of wanting to use the environment to slow down Third World development in a new variant of impe- rialism. 4 The “new” envi- ronmental movement did not take hold in most of Latin Ameri- ca until the 1980s, and only a small pro- portion took an anti- )logy of Activism,” p. 39]. them counterparts a focus tall-scale local initiatives. onists-like their counter- o rationalize growth, not amed their appeals to pro- ge about the national her- instance, that the creation as a Costa Rican initiative. nservationists to some of cts of the 1970s seems to demnation of the role of was of the environmental nt to recognize that devel- racterized both democratic in the region during this anges in certain countries, on control, helped to open VOL XXVIII, No 5 MARCH /APRIL 199537 0 0 VOL XXVIII, NO 5 MARCH /APRIL 1995 37REPORT ON SOLIDARITY political space for domestic environmentalists active around urban issues to emerge. With a few excep- tions-like Jos6 Lutzenberger’s Gaucho Association for the Protection of the National Environment (AGA- PAN) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil-these organiza- tions had virtually no international links. Tropical deforestation first made it onto the interna- tional agenda with reference to Brazil. The military government’s colonization and development initia- tives in the early 1970s alarmed scientists, and the presidents of the IUCN and WWF protested to Presi- dent Emilio Garrastazti M6dici in 1972.5 In early 1974, the IUCN sponsored an international meeting in Caracas to discuss guidelines for econom- ic development in trop- ical-forest areas of Latin America. By August, 1974, the IUCN and WWF were calling tropical rain- forests “the most important nature con- servation program of the decade.” In 1975, WWF launched a cam- paign to raise a million dollars for rainforest- conservation pro- jects-equivalent to half of its entire 1974 project budget. Al- thou gh the Carter Greenpeace activists expose a lake Administration was meters deep with logs cut mostly f( supportive, these initia- tives foundered in the face of Reagan’s lack of inter- est and the refusal of important tropical-forest coun- tries-including Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela-to participate in the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) meetings on the subject. Reverberations of the North-South debates at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Envi- ronment in Stockholm combined with other influences to produce a new discourse on the relationship between conservation and development which by 1980 became known as “sustainable development.” The concept has been defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 6 This dis- course-which tries to strike a balance between the demands of development and environmental conserva- tion-was evident in the World Conservation Strategy, issued in 1980 by the IUCN and WWF, and in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development issued later in the decade. in or The convergence between international organizing around indigenous rights and the environment also began in the mid-1970s. In practical terms, many con- servation organizations-though not all-began to pay more attention to the people living in and around the parks they wanted to set up or preserve. Northern environmentalists began to recognize that for the parks to survive, these people had to be enlisted as allies, and not seen as enemies, as so often in the past. Recognition of links between the environmental and economic dimensions of underdevelopment was also central to the proposal by WWF’s Tom Lovejoy in 1984 to establish debt-for-nature swaps. Although this mechanism to finance park set- asides and conserva- tionist NGOs in the Third World by tak- ing advantage of the spread between dis- counted and face- value debt was never expected to do much to alleviate the Latin American debt crisis, its abili- ty to finance conser- vation activities has also proven disap- pointing. he most re- the Amazon that is stacked 20 cent phase of the U.S. plywood market. L international attention to the Amazon began in the 1980s. It has been energized by a campaign imagined in 1983 by a few Washington D.C. environmentalists to pressure multilateral devel- opment banks, especially the World Bank, to pay more attention to the environmental impact of their loans. The campaign’s logic was that since the devel- opment banks have such a major impact on Third World development policies, changing their behavior was an efficient way of influencing practices that degraded the environment in the South. Ironically, the individuals who sparked this quite radical campaign came from large mainstream environmental-advocacy organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club. Not only do these organizations’ activities and budgets seldom relate to international activities, but their representatives have been able to hook up quietly with Latin American groups that espouse a social agenda which the organizations them- selves might not endorse. 38 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON SOLIDARITY An early focus of the campaign was the impact of the World Bank’s Polonoroeste loan in the state of Rond6nia, in the western part of the Brazilian Ama- zon, where a rapid and chaotic colonization process was causing massive deforestation. The Bank loan was intended to rationalize the colonization process, provide local infrastructure, and finance the creation of protected areas and the demarcation of indigenous reserves. Unfortunately, because its first act was to pave the road to the interior, the loan simply aggravat- ed the problem. In the early phases of the development bank cam- paign, groups in the Amazon and activists in Wash- ington had little contact with one another. The North- ern environmentalists got their information about what was going on in the Amazon region mainly through networks of anthropologists based in the south of Brazil. This situation changed in 1985 when through intermediaries the Northern activists estab- lished contact with Chico Mendes and the rubber tap- pers in the state of Acre. The rubber tappers had been fighting to defend their land-use rights for a decade, with support from the Catholic Church and the National Confederation of Rural Unions. These were the years of Brazil’s transition to democracy, so the domestic context was also relatively favorable to Mendes’ cause. By the early 1980s, social movements were emerging and supporting each other in a whole range of areas. In addition to blocking the chain saws in their signature tactic of direct action, the rubber tappers union won several important court cases on land rights. And with the help of anthropologists and other allies, they developed a project for extractive reserves that would guarantee their long-term access to land and livelihood. When the U.S. activists brought the project to the international community and it was endorsed by the multilateral development banks, the rubber tappers’ hand was strengthened locally. This relationship gave the rubber tappers a voice in political arenas they could never have reached alone, and finally provided the Washington D.C. activists with an answer to the accusation that they were just a bunch of rich Northerners who cared more for trees than for people. International interest in the Amazon exploded in the late 1980s for a variety of reasons. The release of satellite photos showing unprecedented burning of for- est coincided with the July 1988 heat wave and drought in the United States that made the concept of global warming suddenly seem real to millions of peo- ple. In December, 1988, Chico Mendes was assassi- nated by gunmen hired by ranchers in the Xapuri region. To the astonishment of most Brazilians, his murder made the front page of the New York Times. Pressure on Brazil to stop burning forest, and inflam- matory statements by U.S. and European politicians about what the Brazilian government ought or ought not to be doing in the region produced a nationalist backlash in Brazil. The uproar also, however, led to institutional changes such as the consolidation of scat- tered agencies into IBAMA, the Brazilian equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although the Brazilian government’s rhetoric was similar to what it had been at the time of Stockholm, the context in which it was issued and received was quite different. In 1972, the first leg of the Transama- zon Highway had just been inaugurated; in 1988, the highway was virtually impassable and lined with abandoned colonization projects. In 1972, Brazil was in the midst of an economic miracle; in 1988, during the “lost decade,” xenophobia rang false. In 1972, the notion that Brazil was speaking with one voice at Stock- holm was-despite the military repres- sion-credible; in 1988, Brazil no longer spoke with one voice. In 1972, Brazil enjoyed a widespread consen- sus on developmen- talism with only a very small sector of the scientific com- munity apparently worried about the colonization of A taxonomist collects samples in a Cos colonization 1of sity-prospecting project financed by th Amazonia; in 1988, within and outside the country, consensus on the developmentalist model had disappeared, and democ- ratization had allowed debate to flourish. Within Brazil as well as outside, the Chico Mendes case made transparent both the structure of repressive social relations in Acre and the fragility of the rule of law. Finally, unlike in 1972, by 1988 environmental- movement organizations had sprung up in Brazil around a wide range of primarily urban issues. These groups, and those influenced by them, were able to channel some of the increased interest in the Amazon into an effort to strengthen domestic environmental- ism more generally. While the Brazilian government has been a pariah to environmentalists, the Costa Rican government has been one of the movement’s darlings. Costa Rica has over 20% of its eta e land in some kind of conservation. Ecotourism is the third-highest income earner in the country, after cof- fee and bananas. In 1990, U.S. environmental NGOs helped to broker a deal that many have hailed as a new and more equitable approach to biodiversity con- servation. The September 1991 agreement between the U.S.-based pharmaceutical company Merck and the Costa Rican environmental NGO INBio (Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad) to finance collection of biological specimens for a period of two years (later renewed) was touted as a model arrangement by which Third World countries would receive the com- pensation they deserve for First World exploitation of their resources. Merck paid INBio $1.1 million upfront, with a promise of royalties if commercial products were developed as a result of the specimens collected. Half the roy- alties would go to the Costa Rican govern- ment for conservation programs; of the origi- nal $1.1 million, INBio gave $100,000 to the government for park conservation. At the same time, the govern- ment gave INBio’s specimen collectors the right to prospect for species in national parks. Although INBio was to train local peo- Rican national park for a biodiver- Merck pharmaceutical company. ple in taxonomy so they could do this work, as of mid-1993 only 15 people had been trained. The project has been enormously successful in increasing the number of known species in Costa Rica. Its commercial prospects, however, remain uncertain. Product development to the point of pro- ducing royalties will take an estimated 15 years. 7 The Merck-INBio accord is just one facet of the broader trend in Costa Rica towards privatizing the management of environmental resources. As the Costa Rican state has downsized in recent years, it has also handed over more and more park mainte- nance functions to NGOs. The results have been rela- tively effective park management, but a lack of a broader “public” policy context. 8 However much NGOs have contributed to the conservation of the country’s natural areas, the INBio agreement goes quite far in privatizing what are best thought of as public goods. NAC4NA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON SOLIDARITY The Brazilian and Costa Rican examples show two different dynamics present in international environmental relations. These dynamics are competing for hegemony within the broader frame- work of a sustainable-development dialogue. Collabo- ration among environmentalists regarding Costa Rica began and remains strongest in scientific and technical networks. Although these networks have begun to take seriously the need to involve local people in park pro- tection, they are not committed to allowing local peo- ple to establish priorities. Local participation can be considered if unexpected or unintended difficulties in park maintenance arise down the road. Collaboration between Costa Rican and U.S. environmentalists, for the time being however, is between people who are like each other, and who share worldviews and goals. This type of collaboration takes place in Brazil as well, and in terms The Me of funding, represents the lion’s biodi share of financial transfers from the United States to Brazilian NGOs. prospectir The developments set in motion by Chico Mendes’ murder, however, just one f reinforced an alternative interpreta- broader tion of social relations to the one prevalent in the Costa Rican case. Costa Ri During the late 1980s, a number of new stories changed the image of privati. the poor from victim of, or unwit- manag ting contributor to environmental degradation, to bearer of potential envirol solutions. The Chico Mendes story was one of the most important of reso these new stories. Others included the Chipko movement in Uttar Pradesh, India that, starting in 1973, mounted non-vio- lent resistance to the felling of community forests, the Penan people in Sarawak, Malaysia who have rallied against the logging of the rainforest that they inhabit, the struggles of tribal peoples in the Narmada River Valley in India (the states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat) to stop construction of a vast dam complex that would flood their lands, and the Green Belt move- ment in Kenya that combines ecological action with a struggle for women’s empowerment. These stories offered a new angle on environment and equity issues that moved them from the terrain of North-South inter-governmental relations to that of struggles for social justice within nations. This shift-which is still emerging-has had impli- cations for international relations among NGOs in par- ticular. Northern NGOs that want to work on environ- ment and equity issues now interact much more with social-development NGOs in the South than they do r V( n( a rl zi Z n U with environmental NGOs. They work together with a whole variety of social movements that are not explic- itly environmental-and even go so far as to deny the authenticity of the environmental organizations that are most like themselves. Although this provides poor peoples’ movements in Latin America with potentially important allies, it also tends to reproduce structural inequities within North- South environmental relations since all the money comes from the North, and all the legitimation from the South. The same struggles are defined in quite dif- ferent ways by different organizations, which may not necessarily want to enter into the same alliances’. This also tends to produce a stereotypical view of poor peo- ple-as saviors rather than destroyers of the forest, for example-which is often hard to reconcile with the messier reality of real communities. The Kayapo ck-INBio indigenous people in the Brazilian ersity- Amazon, for example, have won international attention for struggles g accord is against dams, but at the same time sell timber and mining rights. cet of the Despite these drawbacks, environ- trend in mental-social alliances constitute a framework within which new a toward understandings can be negotiated. Those accustomed to the clear ing the pictures of good and bad that tended ment of to characterize solidarity politics will be uncomfortable with the mental kinds of issue networks that have arisen around environmental issues. rces. However much their campaigns may provide “road maps” through complicated terrain, the environ- mental movement remains full of organizations and individuals with different goals, and of strange bedfel- lows who unite for one purpose but ferociously oppose each other on other issues. Among environmentalists in Latin America and in the United States, strikingly different interpretations of reality intermingle and compete within the more general compromise framework of sustainable devel- opment. There is neither a single Northern nor a single Southern position. In its essence, the notion of sustain- able development begs the question of blame and responsibility for environmental degradation, and allows North-South inequities to stand proxy for inequities within countries. Clearly these inequities are not the same thing. But the very fuzziness of “sus- tainable development” may offer a space in which new relationships can be negotiated over time, and may prevent premature closure and polarization around these issues. Parks, People and Power The research on which this essay is based was made possible by financial assistance from the following institutions: the Howard Heinz Endowment/Center for Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Research Grant on Current Latin American Issues; the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the Social Sci- ence Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 1. Since NGO is a negative definition that reflects a state-centric view of international relations, its burgeoning use as a sort of catch-all for organizations blurs the complexity of relationships among them. I use the term to refer to professionalized organi- zations, with budgets, regular (normally paid) staff, and fundrais- ing capacity. 2. On causal stories, see Deborah A. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 104, No. 2 (1989), pp. 281-300. 3. Catherine A. Christen, “The Creation of Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica: Negotiating Land Use Interests in a Small Latin American Country,” paper presented at the conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Los Angeles, California, September, 1992. 4. Joao Augusto de Araujo Castro, “Environment and Develop- ment: The Case of the Developing Countries,” International Organization, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 1972). 5. “The Opening Up of Brazil,” IUCN Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 5 (May, 1972), p. 18. 6. The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4 3 . 7. The Merck-INBio agreement has been widely discussed in the press. See Roberto Herrscher, “Latin America: Third World Biodi- versity is North’s ‘Green Gold,”‘ InterPress Service, April 22, 1993 (from Nexis). 8. Lisa Fernandez, “Non-government Environmental Organizations and the State in Costa Rica,” Yale University, May, 1993, unpublished.
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