Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices) - Softcover

Choy, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822349523 ISBN 13: 9780822349525

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A rich ethnography of ecopolitics in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, as the region shifted to Chinese sovereignty, Ecologies of Comparison describes how ecological concepts of uniqueness and scale resonated among environmentalists, including those seeking to preserve a species of white dolphin, to protect an aging fishing village from redevelopment, and to legitimize air quality as an object of political and medical concern. During his research, Tim Choy became increasingly interested in the power of the notion of specificity. While documenting the expert and lay production of Hong Kong’s biological, cultural, and political specificities, he began comparing the logics and narrative forms that made different types of specificity—such as species, culture, locality, and state autonomy—possible and meaningful. He came to understand these logics and forms as “ecologies of comparison,” conceptual practices through which an event or form of life comes to matter in environmentalist and other political terms. Choy’s ethnography is about environmentalism, Hong Kong, and the ways that we think about environmentalism in Hong Kong and other places. It is also about how politics, freedom, culture, expertise, and other concepts figure in comparison-based knowledge practices.

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Tim Choy is Associate Professor in the Science and Technology Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

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ECOLOGIES OF COMPARISON

An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong KongBy TIM CHOY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4952-5

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................viiNote on Transliteration..............................xi1 Problems of a Political Nature.....................1PASSIONS.............................................192 Endangerment.......................................23SLOW.................................................513 Specific Life......................................53CHESS................................................734 Articulated Knowledges.............................76HAIR.................................................1065 Earthly Vocations..................................109HIKING...............................................1376 Air's Substantiations..............................139Notes................................................169Bibliography.........................................185Index................................................199

Chapter One

PROBLEMS OF A POLITICAL NATURE

One day in 1995, some indigenous clansmen mounted bulldozers and cleared a six-hectare tract of land in Sha Lo Tung valley, the heart of one of Hong Kong's country parks. The bulldozing captivated onlookers and reporters, who assumed the land was protected after a coalition of environmental NGOs successfully stalled a village-backed proposal to build a low-density housing complex there. Furious at the plan's blocking, with neither approval nor compensation for lost development potential in sight, the clansmen took matters into their own hands. As they flattened trees, uprooted vegetation, and tore through soil, they told observers that they were simply preparing the plot of land for agriculture. If they could not build, they would farm—as their ancestors had done. Environmentalists, meanwhile, decried the event as an attempt to destroy the ecological value of the area, a brazen plot to subvert the region's potential scientific interest and therefore its qualification for environmental protection.

I learned of this event a few years after the fact. I remember the moment vividly. I was conducting field research on the global circulations of environmental expertise in Hong Kong, interviewing Janet, a young British expatriate in Hong Kong who had worked for several years as the spokesperson for a prominent international environmental NGO. When I asked her how local people received her work, Janet nodded quickly, remarking that doing environmental politics in Hong Kong required confronting the perception of environmentalism as a foreign or "Western" political platform. It presented a real problem, she admitted, and environmental organizations, particularly international ones, needed to deal with it more effectively. For instance, had I heard of Sha Lo Tung? The most heart-wrenching thing she had witnessed in her career had taken place there.

Janet had been active in the coalition that mobilized to halt development near Sha Lo Tung. Uniting professional environmental NGOs like Friends of the Earth and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, as well as volunteer organizations like Green Power and Green Lantau Association, the coalition emerged in 1990, when the Hong Kong Lands Department approved the Sha Lo Tung development proposal.

When initially submitted to the Hong Kong government in 1979, the proposal included plans for a nine-hole golf course with a nearby country club and residential developments. Over the next ten years, however, a remarkable thing happened. As the proposal was shuffled between the Sha Lo Tung Development Company and various government departments, it grew significantly in scope. By 1990 the proposed project had evolved into a large campus encompassing an eighteen-hole golf course, a country club, sixty-six low-density houses, and two hundred apartments, all encroaching on protected lands in Pat Sin Leng Country Park, one of Hong Kong's many country parks, by 31 hectares.

Developers are usually not allowed to build in a country park, but the Sha Lo Tung Development Company found a loophole: indigenous partners. Under Hong Kong law, men descended through the male line from residents of villages that were recognized in 1898 by the colonial government hold certain land rights, including inheritable ownership and building rights. The Sha Lo Tung Development Company had sought and gained village partners, buying land from villagers in return for a promise of a cut of the profits. While the proposed housing complex would lie within the borders of the country park, technically, it would not be built on park land. In this way, the company could locate luxury housing in the middle of Pat Sin Leng.

Janet and others in the coalition responded instantly to the Hong Kong government's approval of the proposal, coordinating and publicizing a week of petitions, marches, and lobbying efforts, and their actions bore remarkable fruit. Hong Kong's Agriculture and Fisheries Department, which had initially authorized the development, now backpedaled and admitted that its approval had hinged on a technical error. Officials from the Environmental Protection Department remembered that they still had not received an independent environmental impact assessment requested years ago, and researchers began to evaluate the Sha Lo Tung Valley as a potential Site of Special Scientific Interest. Scientists determined that 65 percent of Hong Kong's dragonfly species inhabited the land around Sha Lo Tung, at least two varieties of which were unique to Hong Kong. If the valley were classified a Site of Special Scientific Interest by the Town Planning Board, it would be off-limits to development. By the mid-1990s environmentalists appeared to have won the day: the golf course and housing complex were stalled. But whatever satisfaction Janet enjoyed from this victory disappeared when Sha Lo Tung villagers mounted their bulldozers and purposely flattened some of the lands—now "habitats"—that she and her colleagues had worked so hard to protect.

I listened raptly to Janet's account, but at her mention of bulldozers, I suddenly realized that I had heard the story before. Shortly after my arrival in Hong Kong, relatives who thought I might appreciate a tale of cultural conflict in environmental controversy had told me about the incident. In fact, I would encounter it several times during my fifteen months in Hong Kong, leading me to wonder how Sha Lo Tung had come to be held so widely as an exemplary case.

Certainly, the bulldozing presented a powerful story. It featured a cast of stereotypical players: environmentalists protecting an undeveloped landscape and some obscure animals from a golf course; villagers decrying the meddling of outsiders; scientists generating new data for use in environmentalist arguments. These players met in a political drama that appeared, as it unfolded, to move toward one outcome but then turned dramatically to another. This plot twist was striking, but what most arrested me came afterward. "And they bulldozed the trees to the ground!" Then nothing.

Silence followed the punch line—an empty beat rousing me from my recollections in Janet's office, a punctuating pause in conversations with family and friends. My interlocutors' eyes would take that beat to scan my face, waiting.

At stake in the silence were two related things. The first was my location and stance: Would I view the example from within or outside environmentalism, from within...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822349523
• ISBN 13: 9780822349525
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland