This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

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Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas

Further evidence of continent-wide impacts of agricultural intensification on European farmland birds, 1990–2000

This article presents a critical review of recent writings that argue that people-oriented approaches to conservation have largely failed to achieve their main goal--the protection of biological diversity. Based on an analysis of this problem, authors of these works conclude that biodiversity conservation initiatives should place renewed emphasis on authoritarian protection of national parks and other protected areas to safeguard critically threatened habitats worldwide. We examine five core themes in these writings. We conclude that, while many of their findings regarding shortcomings of current people-oriented approaches are well grounded, the overall arguments are incomplete because they largely ignore key aspects of social and political processes that shape how conservation interventions happen in specific contexts. As a result, recommendations linked to the renewed protectionist argument most likely will not provide long-term protection of biodiversity.

Reinventing a Square Wheel: Critique of a Resurgent "Protection Paradigm" in International Biodiversity Conservation

Agricultural activities and their complex effects on nature conservation, and the services that ecosystems deliver to humans are controversial. We present an overview of land abandonment, its driving forces and its consequences for landscape, biodiversity and humans. A descriptive metaanalysis of independently published studies highlighted the fact that the abandonment of agricultural land is a phenomenon mostly driven by socio-economic factors such as immigration into areas where new economic opportunities are offered to rural people. Ecological drivers such as elevation and land mismanagement leading to soil erosion are of secondary importance. We identified the major problems related to abandonment of agricultural land and quantified their relative importance. In order of decreasing importance, they were biodiversity loss, increase of fire frequency and intensity, soil erosion and desertification, loss of cultural and/or aesthetic values, reduction of landscape diversity and reduction of water provision. The impacts of these problems were not equally relevant in all regions of the world. The abandonment of agricultural land may also benefit humans. The benefits include passive revegetation and active reforestation, water regulation, soil recovery, nutrient cycling and increased biodiversity and wilderness. In a world that is becoming less natural and more intensively exploited by humans, we suggest that (1) farmland must be viewed in a context of multi-functionality to take advantage of ecosystem goods and services, (2) at the global scale, the abandonment of agricultural land is mostly positive for humans and (3) there is a need for the implementation of policies based on the payments for environmental services that encourage human societies to reconcile agricultural use, nature conservation and ecological restoration.

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Abandonment of agricultural land: an overview of drivers and consequences

It is almost certainly the case that many populations have always existed as metapopulations, leading to the conclusion that local extinctions are common and normally balanced by migrations. This conclusion has major consequences for biodiversity conservation in fragmented tropical forests and the agricultural matrices in which they are embedded. Here we make the argument that the conservation paradigm that focuses on setting aside pristine forests while ignoring the agricultural landscape is a failed strategy in light of what is now conventional wisdom in ecology. Given the fragmented nature of most tropical ecosystems, agricultural landscapes should be an essential component of any conservation strategy. We review the literature on biodiversity in tropical agricultural landscapes and present evidence that many tropical agricultural systems have high levels of biodiversity (planned and associated). These systems represent, not only habitat for biodiversity, but also a high-quality matrix that permits the movement of forest organisms among patches of natural vegetation. We review a variety of agroecosystem types and conclude that diverse, low-input systems using agroecological principles are probably the best option for a high-quality matrix. Such systems are most likely to be constructed by small farmers with land titles, who, in turn, are normally the consequence of grassroots social movements. Therefore, the new conservation paradigm should incorporate a landscape approach in which small farmers, through their social organizations, work with conservationists to create a landscape matrix dominated by productive agroecological systems that facilitate interpatch migration while promoting a sustainable and dignified livelihood for rural communities.

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Biodiversity Conservation in Tropical Agroecosystems

Patterns and ecological implications of agricultural land-use changes: a case study from central Himalaya, India.

Conservation policy–people conflicts: a case study from Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (a World Heritage Site), India

Conflicts between local people and protected area managers are a common problem in developing countries, but in many cases there has been little attempt to comprehensively characterize the underlying problems. Resource uses, management practices, economy and people's perceptions of problems and likely solutions were analysed in two villages near and two villages away from the core zone of Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in the Indian Himalaya. Agriculture, although practised on less than 1% of the area, was the primary occupation of local people. Six annual crops of a total of 22 and all four horticultural crops on private farms were damaged by wildlife, but Reserve management provided compensation only for livestock killing by wildlife and compensation amounted to only 4–10% of the total assessed monetary value of killed livestock. A variety of wild plant products were used locally but 27 were marketed by more than 50% of surveyed families; income from wild products was substantially lower than that from crops and livestock. A sociocultural change from a subsistence to a market economy, together with changes in traditional land/resource rights and institutions, has led to a number of changes in land-use and management practices. The livestock population has declined, agricultural area has remained the same and people have started cultivating medicinal species in the last 20 years. These changes seem complementary to the goal of conservation. However, changes such as abandonment of some traditional food crops and stress on cash crops lacking fodder value, requiring substantial manure inputs derived from forest litter and livestock excreta, and causing severe soil erosion, seem to counter the goal of environmental conservation. Some government-managed Reserve Forest sites were similar to the Community Forests in terms of species richness, basal area and soil physico-chemical properties. Two Reserve Forest sites showed basal areas of 160.5–191.5 m2/ha, exceeding the highest values reported so far from the region. The formal institutional framework of resource management seems to be not as effective as the traditional informal system. The Reserve Management Plan lays more emphasis on legal protection than on the sustainable livelihood of local communities and has led to conflicts between local people and reserve managers. Plantation of fodder and medicinal species in degraded forest lands, suppression of economic exploitation of local people in the market, enhancement of local knowledge of the economic potential of biodiversity, incentives for cultivation of crops with comparative advantages and lesser risks of damage by wildlife, and rejuvenation of the traditional involvement of the whole village community in decison-making, could be the options for resolving conflicts between people and protected areas in this case.

Analysis and resolution of protected area-people conflicts in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, India.

A study of the medicinal plants and knowledge of diseases was conducted in Bhotiya tribal communities in the Niti valley of Alaknanda catchment in Central Himalaya Indigenous knowledge of local traditional healers about plants used for medicinal purposes was collected through questionnaire and interviews Eighty-six plant species were identified as being used for treatment of 37 common ailments The methods and application of uses of these plants varies and was based on the nature of disease

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Ethnobotanical Uses of Plants among the Bhotiya Tribal Communities of Niti Valley in Central Himalaya, India

Losses of forest cover, biodiversity, agricultural productivity, and ecosystem services in the Himalayan mountain region are interlinked problems and threats to the sustainable livelihoods of 115 x 106 mountain people as well as the inhabitants of the adjoining Indogangetic plains. Until the 1970s, environmental conservation, food security, and rural economic development were treated as independent sectors. The poor outcomes of sectororiented approaches catalyzed efforts to address environmental and socioeconomic problems concurrently. The identification of "key" natural resource management interventions is an important dimension of integrated management. Projects to rehabilitate the degraded lands that cover 40% of the Indian Himalaya could be key interventions provided that they address both socioeconomic and environmental concerns across spatial and temporal scales. However, projects of this type, e.g., investments in conifer plantations on degraded forest lands, have failed because their designs did not take into account the needs of local residents. This study illustrates a case of land rehabilitation in a small isolated village close to the alpine zone. Vital elements of this project strategy included identifying local perceptions and knowledge and involving the local people in the selection and implementation of the interventions needed to restore the land. Communities were found to be more concerned with the immediate economic benefits from bamboo and medicinal species than the long-term benefits of tree planting. The villagers eventually reached a consensus to plant broadleaved multipurpose trees in association with bamboo and medicinal species. Despite assurances that all the economic benefits from rehabilitation would go to the community, the people would not agree to voluntary labor, although they did absorb significant costs by providing social fencing, farmyard manure, and propagules from community forests. Households shared costs and benefits according to traditional norms. The economic benefits to the local people exceeded the rehabilitation cost over the 7-yr life of the project. There were significant on-site environmental benefits in terms of improvements in soil fertility, biodiversity, protective cover, and carbon sequestration, and off-site benefits from more productive use of labor, reduced pressure on protected areas, and the introduction of rare and threatened medicinal species onto private farmland.

K. G. Saxena

Papers

Patterns and ecological implications of agricultural land-use changes: a case study from central Himalaya, India.

Conservation policy–people conflicts: a case study from Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (a World Heritage Site), India

Analysis and resolution of protected area-people conflicts in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, India.

Ethnobotanical Uses of Plants among the Bhotiya Tribal Communities of Niti Valley in Central Himalaya, India

Integrated natural resource management: Approaches and lessons from the Himalaya conservation