Chapter 1: Postgraduate Environmental Education Research from
3.3 Theoretical Frameworks 73
3.3.1 Resource Capture and Ecological Marginalisation 74
When powerful social groups identify the transformation of the functional integrity of ecosystems, they decide on forms of interventions which may also produce and lead to socio-economic and health impacts on the non-powerful (Kousis, 1998). Kousis indicates that when these interventions take place, people get deprived of access to resources and get exposed to environmental risks while the powerful have full use and control over natural resources.
Those who directly or indirectly have the economic and institutional power to affect various types of rural natural resources or activities induce, through their
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actions, specific forms of ecosystem offences. Sequentially these environment- related offences lead not only to negative ecosystem impacts but to negative socio-economic, political or psychological effects as well, normally but not exclusively in terms of damages to a local population (Kousis, 1998, p 88).
This discussion indicates the concepts of Resource Capture and Ecological Marginalisation which are seen by Homer-Dixon (1994) as the cause of environmental problems in areas such as South Africa, and which in this study I argue can be addressed through knowledge produced from Environmental Education research. Resource Capture is when the powerful social groups identify decreased quality and quantity of renewable resources and limit access of other social groups to those resources. This unequal access to resources, unfortunately, does not solve the problem, but leads to further decrease in resource quantity and quality and more environmental scarcity, referred to as Ecological Marginalisation (Homer-Dixon, 1994). It gets aggravated by population growth, which in the case of South Africa was caused by more people being sent to rural homelands from the cities in the name of influx control.
Unequal access to resources such as land, fuel, food, water and even education in South Africa led to decrease in the quality and quantity of these resources in the rural homeland of South Africa where people were placed by the apartheid government. Over-cultivation;
overgrazing; deforestation; mud brick making, to mention but a few, all led to adverse soil erosion, poor water quality and quantity, pollution as well as food insecurity and poverty in the rural areas of South Africa. Due to these poor environmental resources, people over the years, especially after the attainment of democracy, have opted to move
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to urban areas with the hope of better living conditions. This movement, made worse by immigration from other poor African countries, has increased pressure on urban resources, resulting in scarcity of resources in those areas as well, including also the high rate of unemployment and poverty. Figure 1 below illustrates resource Capture and Ecological Marginalisation as understood by Homer-Dixon (1994).
77 Source: Homer-Dixon (1994)
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Describing Ecological Marginalization, Homer-Dixon (1994, p. 5) states:
Unequal resource access can combine with population growth to cause migrations to regions that are ecologically fragile, such as steep upland slopes, areas at risk of desertification, and tropical rain forests. High population densities in these areas, combined with a lack of knowledge and capital to protect local resources, causes severe environmental damage and chronic poverty. This process is often called
―ecological marginalization‖.
Homer-Dixon (1994) gives an example of the Philippines where inequalities in access to rich agricultural lowlands combine with population growth to cause migration to easily degraded upland areas, erosion and deforestation. These actions in turn led to economic and social problems for those communities. The colonial policies in the Philippines left a grossly unfair distribution of good cropland in lowland regions. This imbalance has not been rectified by the powerful landowners even after independence. As a result the
―economically desperate, millions of poor agricultural labourers and landless peasants have migrated to shantytowns in already overburdened cities….‖ (Homer-Dixon, 1994, p.
7), which does not therefore, resolve the problem.
Researchers have used this theory to research political and ethnic conflicts and disputes in different parts of the world due to unequal resource access and its effects (El Zain, 2008; Ravinborg, 2003; Mwaura, 2005). El Zain (2008), for example, used to argue the impact of displacement of rural populations in environmental degradation and civil wars in Sudan, while Mwaura (2005) used it to study pastoral conflicts in Uganda and Kenya.
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Social conflicts and violence are some environmental issues that have been associated with resource scarcity in these studies using Homer-Dixon‘s (1994) theory. In this study, however, I have used this theory not to narrowly look at particular environmental problems but with an open mind of reviewing (getting into) all postgraduate Environmental Education studies that were done in the selected institutions. In this study I argue that biophysical, socio-economic and political environmental problems stem from unequal resource access and unless these are addressed through knowledge produced by researchers they will continue even when apartheid has stopped in South Africa. I believe that knowledge that has been produced during the transformation period through research must have been meant for the transformation of people‘s lives by addressing these environmental problems.
Various Environmental Education policies have been developed during the transformation period which are meant to address the inequities of the past (section 2.5.2) as stated in these theories. For example when the Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution (Section 24, 1996, p. 1251) stipulates the right to safe and healthy environment for all one would refer back to Resource Capture and see the policy as addressing the situation where the politically powerful people grab large tracts of land and other resources only to put the marginalized in unsafe and unhealthy spaces such as flood prone areas of the Western Cape. This study is based on the assumption that the causes of environmental problems as identified by Homer-Dixon (1994) have informed the development of new policies during the transformation period and that the researchers have also been informed by such transformation in one way or another in the choice of their research topics and methodologies. If this is the case, then the question goes to the
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kind of knowledge they have produced, whether it has been meant to transform the living conditions of the former ecologically marginalized or it has been just meant to theorize about these. This brings us to the next section on the different modes of knowledge production.