Search

People change the climate. Ethnography, however, tends to look past these perpetrators and see only victims. In such accounts, parties vulnerable to climate change suffer, adapt, or do both. To varying degrees, their societies are resilient and may soon make themselves more so. These comparatively cheerful keywords overlook an entire moral field of responsibility, complicity, and culpability. High emitters of carbon dioxide bear the bulk of responsibility for the unfolding catastrophe. How do such people interpret and justify their actions? What ethics and mentalities with respect to the environment are high emitters, their firms, and their governments fabricating? In this article, I address these questions in the context of a society both complicit and vulnerable: the petrostate of Trinidad and Tobago. There, an overlapping set of environmental policymakers and environmentally minded industrialists consider Trinidad—including its oil industry—to be only vulnerable. Their “victim slot” relies on cultural constructions of insular geography, performances in diplomatic fora, and planning rubrics for hazards. In each instance, the slot allows Trinidadian institutions and corporations—including oil firms—to skirt accountability for carbon emissions. Nevertheless, some Trinidadian public figures are beginning to reconsider hydrocarbons in ways both painful and humane.

In Zimbabwe, many whites have affiliated themselves with the land rather than with surrounding societies. Theories of settler culture—which emphasize ethnic conflict—often overlook this environmentalist form of identity. As conservationists, white, large-scale farmers sought to belong to the landscape, and they modified it in ways that facilitated that sense of belonging. On the semiarid highlands, they manipulated the most manipulable of environmental variables: water. In the 1990s, their new landscape of dams and reservoirs provided habitat for wildlife and irrigation for tobacco. Whites justified their land ownership on grounds of both conservation and development—a considerable rhetorical feat. Engineering, then, fostered an unstable, ephemeral feeling of entitlement and belonging.

A symposium paper on how eco-tourism ventures are impacting negatively on the black small-holder farmers in Zimbabwe's rural areas.

Projects promoting community-based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics — struggles over the bounding and control of land — overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco-tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community-based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter-day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community-based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough-and-tumble of cadastral politics.