Sylvain Guyot

The Eco-Frontier Paradigm: Rethinking the Links between Space, Nature and Politics

There is a gap in the geographical/geopolitical literature about the process that motivates humans to conquer a boundless, timeless and invaluable wilderness in the name of plural ecologies to serve their own political interests in control and territory building by means of ‘green gerrymandering’. The ecological frontier (or eco-frontier), a neologism produced by a contemporary greened civil society, can be considered a new paradigm that embraces the mental representations and spatial constructions of eco-conquest without restricting its temporal dimension to the present time. Indeed, the eco-frontier is a genealogical paradigm where new dynamics always revisit old processes. The creation and use of the eco-frontier can illuminate the history of the global territorialisation of nature in the last three centuries. From a spatial point of view, two main understandings of the eco-frontier exist. The first characterises virtual and mental imageries of natural spaces of eco-conquest that are strongly associated with Westernised representations of nature. The second considers eco-frontiers as geographical processes to understand the green dynamics of territorial appropriation and re-conquest. As a genealogical paradigm, the eco-frontier has a specific temporal dynamic that integrates the different historical contexts and political ideologies of nature. Three generations of eco-frontiers (Empire, Geopolitical and Global generations) began at different times and co-exist today, with superposition and percolation. This empirical study shows how contemporary environmentalists and green stakeholders produce specific discourses and representations on global eco-frontiers. The paper focuses on the current territorial domination carried out by contemporary eco-conquerors creating possible new geopolitics.

The Instrumentalization of Participatory Management in Protected Areas: The ethnicization of participation in the Kolla-Atacameña Region of the Central Andes of Argentina and Chile

This paper focuses on participation regarding protected areas management with respect to the supposed benefits to local communities in two regions: the Los Flamencos national reserve located in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, and the World Cultural Landscape of the Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina. The priority is to explain the links of legitimization created between participatory management and local people. How do conservation organisations define and instrumentalize local people in their participatory strategies? Conversely, what tools do local people use to legitimate themselves to gain power and credibility in participatory management? Both sides consider the current ethnicization of local indigenous people as a relevant process of empowerment causing success or failure of the participation process depending on local and national political contexts and strategies, as analysed in the two case studies.

Escaping the Border, Debordering the Nature: Protected Areas, Participatory Management, and Environmental Security in Northern Patagonia (i.e. Chile and Argentina)

Abstract This paper focuses on the management of protected areas in transboundary contexts and centres on the contemporary evolution of the border between Chile and Argentina in Northern Patagonia, which is a region that has witnessed the creation of numerous protected areas that are currently claimed by Mapuche organisations and communities as part of their customary territory. In response to these claims, both states have progressively integrated Mapuche communities into the management of protected areas through specific agreements. Many of these protected areas have also been included in a Transboundary Biosphere Reserve proposal for UNESCO. A new environmental governance model that includes the protection of indigenous peoples’ rights is under construction not only along but also across the border between Chile and Argentina. Therefore, we discuss how participatory management could be viewed as a tool for redefining borders by linking environmental security in protected areas to human security in Mapuche communities. The article seeks to understand the role of environmental governance in shaping and/or overcoming political boundaries, and analyse how strategic mobilisations of the environment can advance the achievement of competing territorial projects led by different actors in different periods.

Urban National Parks and the Rich: Friends with Benefits

This chapter poses the question of the inter-relation between the rich, nature and the national parks. It wants to illuminate the role of the (upper) middle classes in the conservation of the urban environment. What is the influence of protected nature on the territorial strategies of the well-to-do population? Conversely, what is the influence of the rich on the national parks in terms of their creation, management and sustainability? To illustrate the answers to this question, the chapter ends by asking what the situation of the national parks would be without the urban rich, and what would become of the urban rich without the national parks. Urban national parks are for the rich both a tool that allows them to consolidate their privileged situation in the city, and a glass ceiling, given that the governing of a park with relevance to the national scale tends to reduce their range of influence. It must be concluded that the rich can be as much of a nuisance as an asset for these parks.

When Cities Host Parks: When Will Urban Frontiers Become Eco-Frontiers?

The issue of spatial, social or political encounters between cities and parks is central to the UNPEC project and more broadly to the future of biodiversity and the wellbeing of city dwellers in an increasingly urban world. Urbanisation and nature conservation are not set processes fixing borders within the metropolitan structure; they are dynamic processes, underlain by ecological, political, social, economic and territorial logics. In order to account for the mobility and intentionality linked to these processes, we use the concepts of eco- and urban frontiers. Eco-frontier refers to the appropriation of real or imagined spaces by ecological discourses or practices, where such spaces benefit from environmental and aesthetic amenities usually perceived as being highly significant. Urban frontier refers to the spatial extension of urbanisation, whether as urban sprawl or satellite cities, or in the form of recovery and renovation of already urbanised areas. In this chapter, we suggest the possibility that, in an emergent metropolitan context, eco-frontiers intertwine with urban frontiers. Hybridisation becomes essential—as an explanatory notion—in trying to decipher the reality of the cooperation, reconstitution, domination or exploitation links between the two processes.

Mobilization of imaginaries to build Nordic Indigenous natures

ABSTRACT This paper is about two Northern territories and peoples, the Sami in the Swedish Lapland and the Cree of James Bay (Quebec, Canada). This comparison aims to show how the North is commonly seen as a human desert – completely wild – and how this imaginative space is full of political and poetic constructions. The colonial vision of the North omits the Indigenous dimension of such territories or includes it as the Ecological Indian of Shepard Krech III. This study shows how what was a patronizing colonial perspective became a tool for the Sami and the Cree to legitimate their involvement in the management of local resources and the protection of nature. Simultaneously, the empowerment of the Indigenous inhabitants of the two Nordic lands – via protected areas such as Laponia or Assinica – is a means of development in the communities. In particular, it supports the emergence of tourism and thus reduces the mental gap between the South and the North and their peoples. Moreover, even when Indigenous tourism is criticized for the promotion of folklore and exoticism, it also enables young generations to reconnect with a culture in oblivion.

The Politics of Eco-frontiers: When Environmentality Meets Borderities

A frontier is a space of material colonization drawing a mobile border between remaining ‘untouched nature’ and civilization (Guyot, 2011; Redclift, 2006). Following the same rhetoric, an ecological frontier — or eco-frontier — is a dynamic space where natural ecosystems are afforded the utmost consideration, marking thus a mobile and changing border between protected and unprotected nature (Arnauld de Sartre, et al. 2012; S. Guyot & Richard, 2009; Guyot, 2011; Heritier, et al., 2009). Eco-frontiers, a term first created by a greened civil society (Guyot, 2009) contains a geographical process that motivates humans to conquer a boundless, timeless and invaluable wilderness, in the name of plural ecologies, to serve their own interests of control and territory building (Guyot, 2011). Eco-frontiers are about diverse and evolving political strategies of protecting nature in time and space. This political dimension of this geographical appropriation of nature seems to be included in the very post-Foucauldian notions of ‘eco-governmentality’ and ‘environmentality’ (Hebden, 2006).