Emily Wakild – Revolutionary Parks
- 1 – Rarely have tropical or postcolonial countries had the ability or the ambition to protect nature on a national scale. Why did Mexico? This book seeks to answer that question.
- In short, Mexico’s national parks were an outgrowth of revolutionary affinities for both rational science and social justice. For a brief span of time, roughly 1935-1940, Mexicans tried to blend nature protection and environmental justice in a way that rarely happened afterward or elsewhere.
- 3 – But science did not guide reforms alone: government officials developed national parks within a plan for social reform in a pattern that today might be called sustainability. Recently, scholars have argued that the resilience of Mexico’s diverse ecosystems derives from the ‘persistence of a complex mosaic of past and present traditional land uses’ that provided a more sustainable approach to conservation than simply reserving land. The values that supported this mosaic emerged in national conservation strategies of the 1930s. Rather than segregate nature to distant rural landscapes and culture to the domain of cities, parks formed a special part of the far-reaching tapestry of development designed to harness nature’s bounty and elevate humanity to its highest potential.
- 4 – And the most delicate areas with distinctive features unique to the community or to broader national history were embroidered with the name ‘national park.’ Parks formed sanctuaries complementing economic plans for increasing production while simultaneously furthering the political goals of keeping rural people rooted in the land.
- Why and how the revolutionary government was able to consider nature conservation a political priority worthy of action forms the central inquiry of this study.
- The parks represented a common cultural patrimony of nature constructed to confirm the connections between social stability, economic productivity, and landscape conservation.
- 5 – Indeed, the declaration of parks produced different results in different places, each of which had strong similarities and important distinctions. To draw out these features this study examines four parks that best illustrate the intersection of five interlocking themes — science, education, productivity, property, and tradition — that were essential to the revolution and to arguments for conservation. This selective, case-based history strives to capture both national trends and local specificity while offering broader lessons about conservation in unexpected places.
- National parks have long held a certain cachet in popular and scholarly circles. As one of dozens of nature protection areas designed to steward ecological systems and increase appreciation for nature, parks are also overtly political symbols of state power
- With over a century of formal protections, much is known about the history of conservation, but major regions and decades are missing that change the large picture. In historical literature on national parks, two interpretations explaining their origins generally hold sway: democratic traditions and the colonial roots. The Mexican case adds a sui generis model that is revolutionary in many ways.
- 7 – Unfortunately, these do little to put events in the early twentieth century into the context of global park movements. In particular, studies of conservation leave out the relationship between revolutionary social change and nature protection, a relationship foundational to creating an atmosphere in which politicians were willing and able to create parks.
- 7-8 – This narrative credits environmental awareness with the rise of environmental movements in the United States in the 1970s and makes wealthy, white, urban actors the protagonists of ‘saving the planet.’ In fact, recognizing how Mexican revolutionaries insisted that their social programs had an environmental face alters these exclusively foreign interpretations. The Mexican version of environmentalism that ascended earlier should be seen as part of a domestic genesis of ideas promoting conscientious and careful management of natural resources
- 9 – A refurbished revolutionary story highlighted unity over divisiveness and the core constituency of this new myth was the group of rural people who came t o have the political identity of campesinos. Campesinos received a contradictory focus as idyllic representations of the benevolence of the revolutionary cause and as receptacles for modernizing reforms that might turn them into productive, industrious citizens.
- An attitude that carried over into the green revolution
- 10 – Nature figured into these radical plans because Cardenas and other leaders believed that every Mexican had a stake in the environment. Cardenistas predicated their governance on the federal control of land, water, forests, and minerals, and they configured laws to both use and conserve them while increasing numbers of citizens saw natural resources as vital to national well-being.
- 13 – This study probes the intersection of environmentalism and justice, adding fresh insight into interpretations of environmentalism and moving the environmental justice framework beyond urban and industrial examples. It makes the methodological innovation of considering bodies of literature on environmental conservation and revolutionary change interdependently to understand a type of revolutionary environmentalism.
- 14 – The record of inclusion also shows that campesinos, local peoples, and indigenous communities did not defend their resources out of an innate affinity for and knowledge of the wild world. They never lived as prototypical ‘noble savages’ stuck in a pre-Columbian era. Instead, when they defended their environment they did so for modern, ration reason, among them, a socioeconomic status that mandated laboring directly with nature, prior exclusion that had once placed them outside maintstream channels of citizenship, and a lived experience of tradition and innovation that continually revised their understanding of how natural cycles and systems worked. . . . Neither static symbols representing wildness nor irreverent transgressors, rural communities shaped their nation’s relationship with the natural world. Few, if any, hoped to leave nature untouched, but thousands thought about the generations that would follow them and hoped to conserve the benefits of thick forests and helthy waters for recreation, agriculture, and daily life. This meant the nature these parks created was explicitly for people, not for nature alone.
- 15-16 – In this way, the history of how Mexicans used parks to construct a common cultural patrimony of nature contributes to the understanding of several major ideological issues. First, in park creation both federal officials and their revolutionary brethren used access to the natural world to promote their own visions of the future. . . . Second, establishing federal authority over natural resources triggered a fierce debate over the commons, that is, community-owned land. . . . Third, park creation fit into the widespread process of cultural incorporation that followed the revolutionary fighting. . . . Through community schools, public murals, radio programs, indigenous congresses, racial theories, and even national parks, intellectuals promoted the idea of an ethnically diverse, but unified, citizenry.
- 30 – By imposing regulations and monitoring mechanisms, the federal government staked its claim over all forests, even though it did not expropriate them outright. The implications of this forest policy cannot be overstated and should be compared to the nationalization of water and oil.
- 38-38 – Environmentality, a combination of environment and the Foucaultian ideas of governmentality, brings attention to the various relations of power mediated through access to the natural world. . . . The production of knowledge about natural spaces occurred in tandem with the incorporation of rural communities into tighter state control and resulted in transformed environmental identities.
- 44-45 – Various new constituent groups, from women to peasants to workers, made vocal claims on their government, and in doing so these groups helped redefine what citizenship meant and shape the consolidation of a reciprocal state. In the process of constructing citizenship, activists drew from liberal notions of participation, long-established expectations of patronage, and revolutionary processes of collective mobilization in order to gain access to the array of benefits now extended. In this way, cultural politics grafted ideas about citizenship onto plans for agrarian reform, industrial development, rural education, and, at issue here, natural resource management.// Reforms accepting more expansive interpretations of citizenship aimed to unify these constituencies. As part of this spectrum, ejidos and parks played a role in fusing collective identities into a national character.
