Problematizing Protected Areas by Introducing Edge-Dwellers

Similar to botanic gardens, protected areas such as nature reserves or game parks often appear as quaint institutions that are useful for public education and entertainment, not to mention their centrality to environmental conservation efforts. Indeed, nature reserves, safari parks, and marine protected areas are places that people flock to for holiday adventures. Visitors revel in the notion of being “in nature” or “in the wild” because it is “simple” or “serene.” Entire economies are built around eco-tourism, a growing global trend. Public health research even touts the benefits of living near green spaces for mental health and pollution-related health issues (Maas et al. 2006; Mitchell and Popham 2008).

Protected areas are most often created through legislation that limits access and resource use and delineates boundaries (see the IUCN’s categorizations of different types of protected areas and associated levels of permissible resource use). Conservation areas are often formulated for a multiplicity of motives, of which only one is habitat and biodiversity preservation. Contemporary protected areas are largely a result of nineteenth-century class-based values that revered “pristine” “nature” (Carruthers 1995; Cocks 2006; Nash 1982; Neumann 1998). Of course, areas that are protected as sacred spaces based on local notions of importance with buy-in from local people do exist—such as in Yunnam, China, and northern Russia—but often, historically, the decision to protect an area is imposed from above with little local consultation or input. For example, the biggest nature reserve in South Africa, the Kruger National Park, was land set aside in the early twentieth century by colonialists motivated by hunting interests.

Many of these conservation areas work on a notion of fortress conservation, which imagines that if people are removed from a particular space, then the “natural” and “wild” environments of the past will re-emerge. This type of conservation relies on the notion that isolation from human impact is the best way to achieve habitat and biodiversity protection with a philosophical stance that positions nature as separate from people and relies on notions of a nature/culture divide. Further, it suggests that people are not rational users of their immediate resources and, if allowed, will degrade their natural environs. Fortress conservationists tend to rely on concepts of “the environment” as bounded, using fences to keep people out of places that they imagine are “pristine” and “wild” and conserved through processes that attempt to disallow anthropomorphic influences (see, for example, Terborgh 1999). These practitioners imagine spaces as temporal, ahistorical, and in the need of preservation but, most importantly, devoid of human impact.

Some conservation practitioners acknowledge that past concepts of bounded ecosystems do harm rather than good in that they are not realistic models of the pathways and flows of resources; for example, water flows in and out of the boundaries of imagined ecosystems, as do bacteria, regardless of whether a fence is present (Kottak 1999; Laurance et al. 2012). Environmental anthropologists have been dealing with issues at the intersection of how “nature” is known (Ingold 1996, 2000; Vivieros de Castro 1998) and the ways various people live and understand “nature” or their environment when living next to, on, or separated from protected areas, particularly in Africa (Nelson and Hossack 2003). Unlike fortress conservationists, some researchers have shown that people develop intimate awareness and knowledge of the ecological systems they live within, often referred to as local (or traditional) ecological knowledge (LEK). Such knowledge often lends itself to “wise use of resources” (incidentally, this is often how “conservation” is defined) and the development of systems to manage potential shortages of resources.

However, many contemporary conservation (protectionism) projects continue to pit indigenous peoples’ land use against an imagined pristine space (Anderson and Berglund 2003). This results from bourgeois notions of the proper place of people in society—as consumers, producers, and labor separate from nature, which, in turn, reifies concepts of a nature/culture divide (Nash 1982). In fact, the nature/culture divide works to produce and impose particular constructions of space and place that people living on the edge upset (Biersack 1999, 2006).

When humans are not afforded a place in protected spaces, “peripheral people” or “edge-dwellers” emerge (related to “edge effect”), whose needs and wants are increasingly marginalized and made invisible against goals of conservation protectionism (Brockington et al. 2008; Anderson and Berglund 2003: 6). Edge-dwelling refers to people residing on the borders of nature reserves or protected areas. The assignment of a “protected” status often imposes restrictions (“reregulation”) on customary and contemporary land use practices, including resource access, with concomitant impacts on local practices and livelihoods (Castree 2008; Hulme and Murphree 2001; West and Brockington 2006; West et al. 2006;). Changes in land use and access that result from the creation of protected areas can impact the availability, distribution, quality, and access of strategically important resources and a wide range of ecological, epidemiological, and economic processes that directly and indirectly impinge on all aspects of life (my research focuses specifically on health impacts of edge-dwelling and responses to change that impact well-being).

Acknowledging that conservation is a construct—framed through Western discourse as morally virtuous habitat and biodiversity protection—allows for the perspective that others, namely edge-dwellers, might view conservation as a semantic guise used as a means to take control of resources (Brockington et al. 2008). These constructed protected areas (Escobar 1998; Nazarea 2006) contribute to economic and social limitations and impositions on edge-dwellers. Potential impacts arise from increased attention to and flows of people through an area, including increased levels of traffic, which can affect air and water pollution levels, not to mention the demands on an already limited public health system (clinic and hospital capacity, supplies, and staff). The potential to attract grant funds for protected areas also increases as notoriety increases, which could have knock-on implications for local landscapes; increased tourism may create the demand for increased service delivery and will certainly increase demands on limited resources like water or firewood.

With the expanding eco-tourism market (Sullivan 2011) comes the creation of expectations for “pristine” environments (Brockington et al. 2008). Pressure is thus exerted on edge-dwellers, limiting resource access (for example, wood-cutting regulations) and use, through expectations and imaginings of places devoid of human impact (Anderson and Berglund 2003)—as much constructed as reserve boundaries themselves. Further, since the marketing of eco-tourism creates expectations of “pristine” environments, it may shape the modes of “development” that people on the ground enter into or find imposed. Tensions can emerge in trying to navigate the difference between the lived local reality of a place and the imagined “pristine” space based on protectionist notions, bringing into focus the global pushes and pulls that shape places and lives (Biersack 2006; National Geographic Society 2013). For some, these places are home, and thus the “wild” and “beautiful nature” may not be seen as an escape but rather an everyday reality. As such, it is increasingly important to focus on the ramifications of expanding protected areas on the people most closely affected by the reregulation of land and resources.

Although the term “edge-dwellers” is a relatively new method (Andersson et al. 2012) to describe people living on the boundaries of protected areas, extensive anthropological research explores the experiences of people involved in land claim conflicts and the impacts of protected areas on livelihoods (see, for instance, Chennels 2003; Sullivan 2002). At the same time, while research on the topic of human health and the environment abounds in fields like conservation medicine (Aguirre et al. 2002; 2012), ecology (Laurance et al. 2012), and public health (Bell 2013), there is very little anthropological research that explores the lived experience of navigating health while “living on the edge” of protected areas (Andersson 2012: 6; Osofsky et al. 2005).

There is an established interwoven relationship between protected areas and human displacement that entails contestation over land perceived to be “disease-free” (Carruthers 1995). Considering the history of a strong academic acknowledgement of the roles epidemics and disease have in shaping outcomes of colonial contact (for example, see Deneven 1976), it is striking that so little attention has been paid to how the people who live closest to the spaces of conservation experience health ramifications at the hands of colonial protectionist notions. Thus, my research intends to explore the following questions:

1. How do edge-dwellers understand, discuss, and enact well-being, and how, if at all, do their understandings of “nature” pertain to health?
2. How and when, if at all, are natural (surroundings, biota, water) and local (biomedical and other healers, clinics, religious leaders) resources used toward achieving health?
3. How and when does land access shape land use in terms of well-being and in what ways? That is, have health and healing changes occurred in relation to changes in land status? Have shifts in practices occurred as a result of the formation of protected areas?
4. How, when, and in what ways, if at all, are health-seeking skills and strategies developed and operationalized by people living at the borders of a protected area in the context of conservation-driven limitations on land and resource use and access? That is, how do people understand and relate to the adjacent protected area?

Environmental and medical anthropology acknowledge the ongoing dynamics between local landscapes and ways of living (Sahlins 1977). By exploring existing and changing health-seeking activities and beliefs alongside conservation activities and the various and intersecting ways nature is known and health is achieved, my research aims to question positivism’s singular reality and the oversimplified dualisms of nature/culture and biomedicine/“traditional medicine” (Latour 2004) to link and bring into dialogue the complexities of multiple ways of being healthy while “living on the edge” (Andersson et al. 2012).

Amber Abrams is a PhD candidate at the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent in Canterbury, with partial support through a research scholarship at the University of Kent. She works as a Senior Scientist at the South African Cochrane Centre at the South African Medical Research Council, and has been involved as co-author on two Wellcome Trust International Engagement grants.

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