Place-Based Conservation: Social Science takes a View from Somewhere

Thankfulness for Google Alerts! Every day I get a new list of "sense of place" links from both Google and Google Scholar. Most of the time I don't have time to sift through them all but, recently, one book caught my eye and held my attention: Place-Based Conservation: Perspectives from the Social Sciences.

Of the many themes in this collection, more than one approaches the philosophical. An overarching theme in Daniel Williams' (an editor and author in this volume) and others' work is the notion that an Enlightenment approach to science - one of dispassionate observation and objectivity - is essentially impossible in the social sciences and creates quite a narrow view of the world. The so-called "view from nowhere" needs to be countered by an emplaced, embodied "view from somewhere."

As Williams et al. write in the introductory chapter (p. 11), "Entrikin (1991) suggested recognizing intermediary forms of knowledge between somewhere and nowhere...." This position is one that Entrikin described as "betweenness," one informed by "scientific discourse while also being historically and spatially specific."

The whole of this book focuses on the value of place-based conservation - a scientific approach to natural resources management taking into account local knowledge, emergent and multi-scaled goverance, the many dynamic levels of social-ecological interaction, and the growing importance of place-specific meanings.

Place-based conservation then "involves a fundamental repositioning between the scientific/technical view from nowhere and a more appreciated and enriched view from somewhere." Here, place is recognized as a fundamental organizing framework where knowledge is given context and nuance relative to the flows of a changing world and our evolving role within it.

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See also:

Entrikin, J.N. (1991). The betweenness of place: Towards a geography of modernity. Baltimore: The
 Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sack, R.D. (1992). Place, modernity, and the consumer's world: A relational framework for geographical analysis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.