Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 15

Statement one: “Elephants are a keystone species whose density is crucial to keep the Kenyan ecosystems in balance. The right concentration of elephants sustains biodiversity in the savannah, where their grazing removes shrubs and keeps the plains open for other species, and in the forest, where it creates clearings and favors revegetation. However, an excessive concentration of elephants, such as the one observed in Amboseli, can lead to the disappearance of woodland and eventually to a decline in biodiversity.”

Statement two: “The African elephant is a species of exceptional conservation value. Not only are the animals majestic and unique, they are also highly intelligent and capable of sophisticated matriarchal social systems. Furthermore, the Amboseli elephants have been studied for over 20 years, which has allowed scientists to accumulate the necessary knowledge to sustain a research program on these animals and their collective organization.”

Considered in isolation, neither of the statements above are controversial. Both are empirically sound, logically coherent and generally accepted by Amboseli stakeholders. The controversy, however, becomes immediately visible when the statements are read together as two opposing arguments in an ongoing conversation about wildlife management. The first suggests that, in order to enhance the biodiversity of the region, some elephants should be pushed out of the park (where their concentration is too high) to the neighboring areas (where their concentration is too low). The second maintains that elephants, because of their unique social lives, should have priority over other ecological considerations and should be allowed to remain in the park where they could be more safely protected from poaching and other threats. The first movement of controversy mapping, therefore, is to make visible how expert knowledge is never valid in itself, but always in relation to a series of claims which support or oppose each other.

The tree of disagreements shown in figure 1 allows us to visualize the battle lines of the controversy, which are sometimes unique and relatively clear (as in the Amboseli controversy) and other times multiple and fractured. It also allows us to appreciate the way in which knowledge claims are never simple statements of fact, but attempts to prescribe how a situation should be handled. The first statement above is not only an observation on how elephants interact with their environment, it is also a “speech act” (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) meant to curb the numbers of Amboseli elephants, by encouraging them to migrate from the park. Likewise, the second statement is not a generic praise of elephants; it is a specific plea for protecting Amboseli’s elephant population within the established structures of the national park. In sociotechnical controversies, statements are always connected in arguments and arguments are always set forth as proposals for action. In controversies, knowledge is always enmeshed with politics.

Figure 1 Tree of disagreements around the conservation of Amboseli elephants. Western’s position and its associated knowledge claims and prescribed actions on the left, Moss’s position on the right. Main battle line in the middle (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).