Conference: Marine Environmental Politics in the 21st Century: MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Paper Abstracts:
Karen Barton and Emily Young
Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona
Local communities have become key players in the international environmental politics of marine resource conservation. In different geographic settings worldwide, coastal communities have been alternately cast as champions of marine conservation or culprits of marine devastation. Indigenous peoples have often been identified as allies of conservationists, where indigenous rights to sea territories and marine resources are thus viewed as critical to promote the protection of marine wildlife and habitats. But in the case of the California gray whale, it is an indigenous group -- the Makah Indians of the U.S. Pacific Northwest -- that is fighting against more rigorous global protection of gray whales and a community of immigrant fishers -- mestizo settlers along Mexico's Baja California peninsula -- that is among the cetacean's most ardent defenders.
In this paper, we analyze how and why these two coastal communities, occupying opposite ends of the migratory corridor for the California gray whale, have become polarized on opposite ends of the debate over future protection of this cetacean. Specifically, we draw theoretical insights from poststructuralism, political ecology and Peet and Watts' notion of "regional discursive formations," to comparatively examine how cultural/social identity and resource rights have historically been articulated with global markets and national/international laws governing the use of marine resources in order to understand this politically disparate intersection of local resource struggles with global contemporary disparate intersections of local resource politics. Our primary finding is that in the case of the Makah, whaling has become the symbol of cultural survival, as a result of historic policies that equated tribal identity with rights to whale. In contrast, in the case of Mexican fishers, gray whale tourism has come to be seen as an important alternative to declining area fisheries, so that whale protection is now seen as the key to their economic survival.
Next abstract:
Luis Bourillón: A Co-Management Regime for Seri Indian Exclusive Fishing Areas
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