Abstract
Abstract
One of the important functions of the modern state is to create effective environmental policies designed to promote justice and equity in distribution of environmental resources. While some researchers argue that the economic imperatives of the neoliberal state have led to incremental changes through weak environmental policies, others offer a more positive narrative about the internal transformations of the state in the light of growing citizen activism. This article argues that the role of the state vis-à-vis the environment is not limited to legislation. Instead, the neoliberal state has emerged as an arbiter of environmental knowledge and has been actively legitimizing scientific knowledge systems over local cultural knowledge in environmental conflicts. These forms of knowledge regulation has occurred over disaster management and rebuilding initiatives, construction of dams and other large technological systems, and alternative energy projects. The cultural and environmental injustices that occur due to the non-recognition of local knowledge have important implications for environmental justice studies. I illustrate these injustices with examples from an environmental justice movement in Land Between the Rivers, KY.
Introduction
Yet, the modern state's actions are not limited to the successful implementation of environmental policies. In fact, one of the fundamental responsibilities of the state is to set the tone and the context in which environmental debates and actions occur. In other words, the modern state acts as an arbiter of environmental knowledge. In this capacity, the state wields significant influence in the creation and dissemination of scientific measurement criteria through which certain forms of environmental knowledge claims are codified and standardized. These responsibilities of the state are readily manifested in federal policies on conservation, land management, and heritage protection. For example, environmental conservation initiatives proposed by the state often depict land as pristine “wilderness” in need of protection through “scientific” tools that are aimed to standardize land and wildlife management. Similarly, debates over protection of architectural and cultural history of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina center on the scope and intent of the project among state appointed architects and historians on the one hand and local communities on the other. These state managed conservation initiatives often foster conflicts over environmental knowledge claims where the state principally acts as an arbiter of environmental knowledge and is largely responsible for the management and codification of that knowledge.
As the state creates standardized guidelines to legitimize environmental knowledge, its actions have far reaching consequences for its intended beneficiaries—local communities and interest groups. As the state enacts and codifies metrics for measuring environmental knowledge it ignores localized non-scientific knowledge claims that emerge from oral community traditions, historical contexts, and cultural discourses. This non-recognition of indigenous environmental knowledge is often viewed by affected groups as deeply disenfranchising and garners community support for mobilizing against injustice.
This article examines two specific concerns about the role of the state in the management of environmental knowledge. First, I argue that the modern state's role in environmental debates is not limited to successful implementation and dissemination of environmental policies. Instead, the state occupies a key position in constructing specific criteria for measuring and legitimizing “scientific” environmental knowledge. Second, I argue that the modern state's role as an arbiter of environmental knowledge has important consequences for local communities. Conservation discourses that largely rely on scientific environmental knowledge often appear immune to indigenous community perspectives on protection of cultural and environmental heritages. This delegitimation of local cultural and environmental claims leads to perceptions of injustice and alienates local communities.
I analyze specific state strategies and community responses to perceived injustices by examining specific strategies adopted by the state to legitimize and standardize environmental knowledge claims. More specifically, I examine the state policies on conservation and water resource management in a rural community in Kentucky known as Land Between the Rivers. Using examples from a case study I further explore how scientific environmental policies implemented in Land Between the Rivers ignored local community inputs about community heritage, land management, and environmental protection and led to perceptions of cultural and environmental injustice among the community.
Modern State and Knowledge Management: Scholarly Approaches
Scholars have documented various strategies of knowledge management to explain how environmental knowledge is measured and codified. For example, research in the field of science and technology studies illustrates the role of expert science in shaping environmental knowledge. 5 Within this field of study, academics have examined the political behavior of actors in the course of environmental policymaking whereby science takes on the mantle of nature's representative.6,7,8 Similarly, others have noted the specific tools of governance through which environmental knowledge is legitimized. These strategies and tools are used as governance mechanisms to establish priorities for research funding, determine the criteria for measuring environmental risks, set standards for safety, and to communicate expert knowledge to citizens for building alliances.9,10 Overall, researchers have examined the role of the state as an arbiter in environmental conflicts and noted the specific state strategies adopted for identifying “legitimate” and useful environmental knowledge.
This article integrates and further extends the literature on the modern state's role in managing and legitimating environmental knowledge. More specifically, I build on the relevant literature stream to explore why the state's commitment to and involvement in environmental management can run counter to the environmental justice needs of the affected communities. To begin with, I argue that the role of the modern state is not limited to environmental policymaking. Instead, a key role of the state is to create environmental metrics for measuring rival forms of environmental knowledge and labeling “expert” knowledge as a legitimate tool for implementation of environmental projects. Second, using examples of knowledge management from an ethnographic study of a displaced community, I argue that legitimation of expert knowledge has significant impact on the local communities. In other words, as the modern state offers legitimacy to expert science in its attempts to protect environmental resources, it simultaneously delegitimizes alternative indigenous knowledge claims that may lead to perceptions of environmental and cultural injustice.
Using examples from the case study of Land Between the Rivers, I examine two specific forms of knowledge management that occurred in the course of the construction of two hydroelectric dams and an environmental refuge. I begin with an examination of the developmental narrative advertised by the state to justify their call for the removal of the community. This developmental narrative included a vision statement about the prospects for hydroelectric energy for nation building, job creation in an economically depressed region, and subsequently a conservation refuge to garner tourism funds to the region. This rationalized vision was juxtaposed with the community's poverty, weak infrastructure, and perceived cultural backwardness. In other words, as scientific expert knowledge about hydroelectric power generation and environmental conservation were deemed “legitimate” developmental visions, the counterclaims of the community about the value of their cultural heritage and traditional environmental knowledge were labeled as insignificant and unscientific.
The former residents of Land Between the Rivers viewed the non-recognition of their cultural and environmental heritages as an injustice and resisted through acts of community mobilization against the state. Below, I examine specific acts of knowledge management adopted by the state to protect the environmental and cultural resources in the region. I also offer specific counterclaims that emerged from the community's perception of injustice.
The Story of Land Between the Rivers
The rural community of Land Between the Rivers is spread across two states, Kentucky and Tennessee. The natural boundaries of the Tennessee River to the west and the Cumberland River to the east has created an inland peninsula whose geographic isolation has created a unique cultural identity for the descendants of Revolutionary War veterans who settled in the land in the late eighteenth century. The European settlements were preceded by Native American settlers, particularly the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and the Shawnee nations who lived and traded in the region for centuries.
Early community settlements were dotted with small homesteads where the settlers engaged with farming and raising their livestock. Over the years, the community forged a distinct cultural heritage and fostered a strong attachment to their place. Impact of industrialization efforts in the mid nineteenth century was minimal and most of the residents continued to practice their traditional occupation of farming and livestock management. Significant change however came to the region in 1938 when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created under the New Deal, proposed two hydroelectric dams in the region to stimulate the local economy, harness energy for cheaper electricity, and generate jobs in the region. Construction work began in 1938 on the Kentucky Dam built on the Tennessee River and was completed in 1944 followed by the Barkley Dam project on the Cumberland River, authorized in 1954 and completed soon after. The two dams flooded most of the low-lying peninsula, forcing community residents to seek higher grounds until, by the federal decree, the remaining land was turned into a wildlife refuge, called Land Between the Lakes, in 1965 to complete this process of displacement.
The displacement of the community occurred in five phases over two decades and created enormous hardships. The residents resisted the displacement vigorously and organized protest marches, community sit-ins, public meetings, and signature campaigns against the TVA. The protests led to a congressional hearing which offered little support or hope for the community. For the residents of this long-standing community, ripped apart from their homes and familiar landscapes, the transition was deeply traumatic, particularly in view of the federal efforts to delegitimize their cultural heritage and history of environmental stewardship.
This ethnographic study was conducted in Land Between the Rivers over a two-year period using focus groups, in depth interviews, and archival research. Participants were identified using snowball sampling and interviewed over a period of time. Interviews were conducted with forest service officials (associated with the refuge) and local residents.
Scientized Knowledge and Local Culture in Land Between the Rivers
The conflict between scientific and local knowledge claims vis-à-vis the environment has important implications for studies of environmental movements. This process occurs through the environmental state's adoption of a scientific knowledge system that allows it to manage and standardize environmental knowledge by co-opting, remaking, or delegitimizing “other” knowledge claims. The delegitimation of local environmental and cultural claims have fueled a sense of injustice and engendered community resistance against the loss of their cultural heritage, environmental history, and collective identity. Below, I discuss two examples from the case study of Land Between the Rivers to illustrate how the local community's displacement was garnered through delegitimation of their cultural heritage and the continuing non-recognition of their history of environmental stewardship that in turn contributed to the community's efforts to mobilize for environmental justice.
Managing culture and history: Cultural knowledge management in Land Between the Rivers
In 1938 TVA began the construction of the two dams in Land Between the Rivers. The project was proposed as part of larger nation-building initiative designed to bolster the economy of the southeastern states that were particularly affected by the Great Depression. The two dams were designed to harness hydroelectric power for cheaper electricity benefitting the local population and providing necessary incentives to small business owners and corporations. Further, the construction work itself, TVA argued, would generate employment in the region and boost the local economy.
For the community of Land Between the Rivers, TVA's decision to uphold the developmental logic over the local cultural loss was traumatic. The long and undisturbed settlement history and the geographical isolation of the region fostered a deep sense of place and collective identity among the residents. Community residents cared for their land, managed communal properties for grazing their livestock, and allowed communal ownership of the land by multiple residents. The arrival of the Resettlement Administration in 1935 began the process of delegitimation. The earliest interventions occurred with the introduction of managed grazing practices to regulate community access to the land. By 1936, vast tracts of communal land were transferred to the federal government resulting in severe limitations on communal farming and grazing activities. Accounts of these transfers offer interesting insights about the early regulatory interventions by the federal state. Former residents shared stories about official frustrations with open grazing and hunting in the commons land and favored the elimination of these traditional practices in order to “protect it for regulated use.” 11
The dam building activities that were announced in 1941 further intensified efforts to delegitimize local cultural history and place attachment. Envisioned as a developmental initiative, the dam construction was conceived by policymakers whose “expert” knowledge about the advantageous economic impact of the dams on the region was granted precedence over local residents' cultural claim to their place. To promote the desirability of this economic vision, the local community and their economic and cultural pursuits were advertised as illegal commercialization and exploitation of the land.
This image of the community was projected through unjust cultural stereotyping of residents as poor families living in dismal living conditions with little access to basic human necessities like appropriate shelter. Residents were also frequently castigated in local newspaper advertisements about their illegal use of land and forest resources and commercialization of livestock and farms. Short informative documentaries on the Land Between the Rivers community offered visuals that negatively stereotyped the community's living conditions and cultural practices including pictures of residents husking corn, illegal moonshine production and sale, unlivable homes, and poor infrastructures.
These early initiatives to normalize the displacement were resisted by the community as attempts to delegitimize their unique culture and collective contribution to the region's cultural and environmental history. These protests were labeled by the TVA as local efforts to hinder socioeconomic development of the entire region thereby fostering resentment from other communities in the region. Protesters were offered lower prices on their homes, publicly condemned, and harassed by TVA officials. The non-recognition of the cultural history of the community continued as the wildlife refuge was constructed in the 1960s when the entire community was uprooted from the peninsula and forced to resettle elsewhere. TVA's accounts of its dams and refuge do not provide any acknowledgement to the displaced community and official accounts gloss over the violence witnessed by the community during its displacement. In fact, the dams were never put to use for power generation, refuting TVA's original mission plans.
Delegitmization of local cultural knowledge has continued in recent years under the U.S. Forest Service. While the ownership of Land Between the Rivers was transferred to the federal government, the community retained its burial and management rights to the two hundred surviving cemeteries located inside the refuge. Under the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. state issued a directive in 2001 to streamline refuge management and proposed to transfer the control of the cemetery to its own authority. As part of this proposal, the Forest Service issued a directive called the “cemetery handbook” to outline a set of directives and guidelines to access local cemeteries. While the cemetery handbook acknowledged the access rights of the former residents, it sought to regulate those rights.
For the former residents of Land Between the Rivers, the cemeteries are their last surviving link to their cultural history in the refuge and the federal attempt to regulate this link was widely perceived as a direct violation of the community's agreement with the state and an effort to entirely derecognize their cultural heritage. Concerted campaigns by the community forced the Forest Service to agree that the community's use of the cemetery was in full compliance with the federal cultural heritage laws and the community regained its rights to manage the burial grounds.
Managing environment through science: Environmental knowledge management in Land Between the Rivers
The community of Land Between the Rivers has also resisted the U.S. Forest Service's efforts to delegitimize the community's history of land management and environmental stewardship. Early stewardship efforts are documented in accounts of the Coalins, a local term referring to large tracts of rugged land managed by the community as commons property for communal grazing of their livestock. The success of this informal arrangement led to its formalization in the early twentieth century when local residents received training as gamekeepers from the state. These environmental stewardship efforts were largely ignored by the Resettlement Administration in 1933, and subsequently the TVA, who portrayed these efforts as unscientific grazing practices and illegal poaching on land. Most of the Coalins land was transferred to the federal state and little documentation of these environmental efforts remain available in the history of the refuge.
In recent years, environmental knowledge management efforts are evident in conflicts between the community and the Forest Service over the grassland and wildlife management plans proposed by the latter. The Forest Service developed two recreation and education facilities in the refuge known as the Elk and Bison Prairie and the South Bison Range. These environmental protection initiatives are designed to rebuild “a native habitat lost more than a century ago is being carefully restored.” 12
The two wildlife management initiatives have led the former residents to challenge the purported vision of the conservation projects and its implementation plans. First, while the community acknowledges the success of the project in restoring the pastureland which was turned into a commercialized golf course under the TVA, they remain critical of the specific forms of conservation efforts adopted in the refuge. The community is particularly critical of the plan to introduce managed herds of elk and bison and instead suggested the introduction of free-range herds to promote greater sustainability. Further, the community argues that the Forest Service's usage of conventional pasture management practices in the area are unsustainable and may hamper the shift towards the projected goal of regrowth of native species of grass and forests in the region. Finally, the community encourages the Forest Service to place greater emphasis on environmental education, an “original mission” of the program. They argue that the commercialization of the pastureland through visitor fees severely impedes the mission to develop respect among visitors for their land and all its inhabitants. Overall, the non-recognition of the early environmental stewardship efforts as well as the commercialization of current environmental education programs are viewed by the residents as designed to promote scientific “value-based” conservation practices that renders place-based histories of conservation meaningless and “unscientific” and hence non-legitimized forms of knowledge. 13
The former residents of Land Between the Rivers have resisted the cultural and environmental injustice that occurred as a result of the legitimization of an expert knowledge system that normalized cultural violence and displacement and imposed a “scientized” value-based conservation system. This form of knowledge management by the U.S. state has led to the non-recognition of their local cultural heritage and environmental stewardship thereby disempowering the community's collective identity. The ongoing environmental justice movement is a response to this sense of powerlessness and injustice and is an effort to reclaim their own cultural and environmental space.
Conclusion
As concerns about global environmental risks enter the public imagination, the modern state is increasingly called upon to propose regulations on industrial emissions, support conservation projects to prevent land loss and deforestation, and adopt effective measures to ensure climate justice. The response of the state to its environmental responsibilities remains complex. While the state has offered to act as a regulatory agency engaged in the management and protection of our environmental resources, it has also adopted the role of an arbiter of environmental knowledge. In this capacity, the state creates the metrics for measuring rival knowledge claims and is responsible for legitimizing and standardizing environmental knowledge. These processes of knowledge legitimation occur through scientific conservation policies aimed to protect land and wildlife, tools for heritage management in reserved land, and guidelines for the identification, sorting, and labeling of environmental problems and population. This environmental knowledge management has important implications for local communities who are the stakeholders in these projects but whose knowledge claims are deemed non-scientific and delegitimized.
There are several implications of this study for scholars of environmental justice. To begin with, environmental justice must be broadly conceived to include not only policies for more distributional equity for collective sharing of environmental resources. Instead, injustice can also occur through regulation of environmental knowledge that delegitimizes local communities and their knowledge claims. Second, it allows us to explore the impact of knowledge management on local communities. While conservation projects are aimed to address and resolve community concerns about environmental resources, state projects that prioritize one form of knowledge and do not acknowledge rival environmental claims often contribute to perceptions of injustice among affected communities. More research is necessary to examine the possibilities of new forms of injustices that emerge from the production, labeling, and legitimization of environmental knowledge.
Footnotes
1
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2
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3
United Church of Christ. 1987. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. New York, NY: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.
4
Bullard, R.D. (ed.) 1993. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston, MA: South End.
5
McCormick, S. 2006. “The Brazilian Anti-Dam Movement: Knowledge Contestation as Communicative Action.” Organization & Environment. 19(3): 321–346.
6
Sabatier, P.A. and H.C. Jenkins-Smith (eds.) 1993. Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
7
Hannigan, J.A. 1995. Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective. London, UK: Routledge Press.
8
Yearley, S. 1992. “Green Ambivalence about Science: Legal-Rational Authority and the Scientific Legitimation of a Social Movement.” British Journal of Sociology. 43(4): 511–532.
9
Jasanoff, S.G., Markle, J. Petersen, and T. Pinch (eds.). 1995. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
10
Hess, David H. 1997. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction. New York, NY: New York University Press.
11
Nickell, D.L. 2007. “Between the Rivers: A Socio-Historical Account of Hegemony and Heritage.” Humanity & Society. 31: 164–209.
12
“Elk and Bison Prairie.” Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. <
13
Banerjee, D. 2012. “Narrating Place, Negotiating History: The Politics of Place in Land Between the Rivers.” Local Environment: International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. 17(10): 1074–1088.