Canada's position as to the legal status of the Northwest Passage was expressed in 1975 by the Secretary of State for External Affairs Allan MacEachen. Appearing before the Standing Committee for External Affairs and National Defence in May of that year, Mr MacEachen stated:

This official position of Canada on the Northwest Passage is clear enough as far as it goes, but it does leave at least three questions unanswered. These questions will now be examined and are the following: 1) When may a strait be considered as being used for international navigation; 2) What is the legal status of the Northwest Passage itself; and 3) What would be the legal status of the Northwest Passage if it were used for international navigation?

In spite of the conclusion in Chapter 11 that Canada had validly established straight baselines around the Arctic Archipelago, the questions just formulated must still be addressed.

Definition and classification of international straits

At the Third Law of the Sea Conference, the question of international straits was dealt with as a distinct subject, separate from that of the territorial sea. This represents a considerable improvement over the approach taken at the First Law of the Sea Conference and the consequent provisions found in the Territorial Sea Convention of 1958. After much difficulty, the Conference did reach a compromise as to the nature and scope of the right of passage which would be applicable to ‘straits used for international navigation’.

The Northwest Passage – a marine short cut to the Orient for European trade. That was the historic vision of many. The history of the search for a Northwest Passage dates back to 1497 when John Cabot was sent by King Henry VII of England to find a northerly route to the Orient. Cabot's mission was taken up by later explorers, including Jacques Cartier, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, William Baffin, Captain James Cook, Sir John Ross and Sir William Parry, but none were successful and a number of voyages culminated in tragedy. In 1845 Sir John Franklin and the crews of the Erebus and Terror vanished while attempting to find a navigable route across the Arctic Ocean, and from 1847 to 1859 the vast Northern seas were explored from the east and west in search of the lost expedition. The first successful transit of the Passage by sea was achieved by the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, whose converted herring boat Gjoa completed the trip over a three-year span from 1903 to 1906. In the 1940s a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant, Henry A. Larsen, was the first person to transit the Passage in a single season in the schooner St Roch. The Labrador, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, navigated the Passage in 1954 and as of September 1984, 41 surface vessels have completed transits of the Northwest Passage.

Introduction

Almost eighty years after responsible government was withdrawn from the Northwest Territories (NWT), current initiatives now seek its restoration through the creation of one or more Northern provinces. Dismissed for decades as merely a residual territory of the federal government, the NWT is now considered by some to merit greater stature in Canadian politics. However, a number of obstacles inhibit rapid change. For example, there is still no consensus regarding the resolution of the political conflict between theoretical entitlement to responsible government and the practical requirements of political autonomy. The North deserves the former but, at present, is ill-prepared to undertake the latter. Whereas claims for provincial status may be premature, the quest for an improved and more representative Northern government does not preclude the vigorous pursuit of intermediate goals. Specifically, a redefinition of the federal–territorial relationship and division of powers could greatly advance the Northern cause. Since this relationship is not defined by any constitutional document but merely by federal legislation, it is particularly malleable and easily amended. In addition, the relationship is sufficiently ill defined that traditional federalist doctrine may not be applicable.

Being the body which will ultimately effect any constitutional changes in the NWT, the federal government will examine closely the various criteria related to development prior to acting. Questions such as the North's fiscal dependence on the federal government, and Northern claims to greater control of resources in an attempt to alleviate financial reliance are particularly important.

In Africa the term conservation is most often associated with the provision of National Parks and game reserves and the protection of wildlife. In this area the aims of conservationists meet the desires of African governments to encourage the growth and maintenance of lucrative tourist industries. But conservation in the African context should not be seen merely in terms of nature conservation; it is also an important part of the reform process in land tenure systems, land-use patterns, and land management practices. It is primarily in relation to the control of man's exploitation of environmental resources that conservation has its greatest relevance for the governments of West Africa. In Nigeria, land reforms have long been the focus of concern over conservation, being viewed as the best insurance against abuse and misuse of land resources. At a general level, the goal of such reforms is a more controlled or guided use of the land and its resources to achieve sustained economic growth and to promote the well-being of the people. It is with this broader view of conservation as a reform process, linked to changes in land husbandry and land use, that this chapter will be concerned.

The social adjustments that any reform process may call for naturally make conservation a sensitive social and political issue.

Introduction

The most conspicuous changes in northern Kenya in recent years have been in the organisation of pastoralism. Pastoralism is becoming an increasingly part-time occupation. The wealthy, who also have access to the best jobs, tend to benefit the most from the changes, while the poor, who only have access to the worst jobs or no jobs at all, are thrust into ever increasing dependency (Dahl, 1979; Hogg, 1985a).The main reason for the changes has been the increasing intensity of national incorporation, which has increased the range of economic opportunities open to pastoralists and has led to the growth of permanent settlements. Yet government and donor agencies largely ignore these changes and continue to design their interventions in terms of an ideal model of pastoralism which, if it ever existed at all, has long since disappeared. In this paper I examine the reasons for the implementation and failure of one particularly important intervention, namely the development of irrigation agricultural schemes. I shall argue that official endeavours to conserve the range and to alleviate poverty have actually resulted in increasing the vulnerability of the people of the area to drought and its consequences of famine and pauperisation. Research on irrigation development was carried out in Isiolo, Turkana and Garissa Districts between 1982 and 1984 as part of a British Overseas Development Administration funded investigation of pastoralist responses to permanent settlement (Hogg, 1985c).

Let me begin with two anecdotes. In 1970 I met a foreign advisor to the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Department at the Department's Headquarters in Addis Ababa. On the wall of his office was a map of the Lower Omo Valley, showing the boundaries of two designated National Parks, the Omo National Park and the Mago National Park (see Fig. 8.1). Between the two parks was a narrow wedge of territory which had been labelled ‘Tama Wildlife Reserve’. (‘Tama’ is one of several names for the Mursi, among whom I was then carrying out my first period of anthropological fieldwork.) I asked the advisor if he was aware that there were 5,000 or so Mursi living between the Omo and Mago rivers and that, if they were excluded from the proposed parks, their subsistence system would collapse. At first he claimed that the area was uninhabited: he had flown over it many times and had seen no ‘villages’. And then, after I had persuaded him that the Mursi did indeed exist, he merely brushed this information aside with the observation that the game wardens would need to employ a good deal of local labour!

During the 1970s the Mursi experienced their worst drought and famine in living memory. This led, at the end of the decade, to a migration from the drought-prone Omo Lowlands to higher land in the Mago valley where a more reliable rainfall offered better prospects for cultivation.

The transformation of the pastoral and nomadic societies of East Africa has long been perceived as one of the more problematic aspects of the development process. This has given rise to an extensive literature focusing on the ‘development’ of pastoral areas (Monod, 1975; Galaty & Salzman, 1981; Galaty, Aronson, Salzman & Chouinard, 1981; Salzman, 1982). A number of specialised journals (e.g. Nomadic Peoples; Production Pastorale et Société)and informal communication networks (e.g. the Overseas Development Institute's Pastoral Development Network) continue the debate on questions of pastoral ‘development’. However, in East Africa the development of pastoral areas is not simply a matter of integrating the pastoralists into the national economy, because this land can be put to a second use: the creation of reserves and parks for wildlife. This aspect of the development of pastoral areas has received less academic attention despite the fact that National Parks and Game Reserves, with their associated tourist industry, have a very obvious impact on pastoral communities (Western, 1982;Turton, 1984, Chapter 8). The alienation of grazing land for the exclusive use of wildlife and tourists has a very direct impact upon pastoralist communities, giving rise to questions about ‘people versus animals’ in the formulation of African wildlife policy.

Introduction

Forest resources are in increasing demand in most developing countries. About 90 per cent of people in these countries depend on firewood as their chief source of energy (Eckholm, 1975). Africa has the largest per person per annum consumption of firewood with an average of 1.18m3 per person in the least developed countries (UN, 1981). In most of these countries the demand for fuelwood is outstripping local supplies and whilst studies on fuelwood use have been carried out in some places, very little is known about natural forest productivity, so that it is extremely difficult to put values on supply and demand ratios.

Concern over fuelwood supplies in Kenya was voiced in the late 1960s and the 1970s, especially over the impact of diminishing forest cover on soil erosion, and in 1975 the Kenyan Government banned charcoal exports. Subsequently the Ministry of Energy in conjunction with the Beijer Institute has been trying to assess demands and supply. A number of studies in Kenya provide information on levels and patterns of firewood use and some consider alternative energy supplies, e.g. Brokensha & Riley (1978), Hosier (1981), Kamweti (1981), Shakow, Weiner & O'Keefe (1981), Hughes (1982) and most recently Barnes, Ensminger & O'Keefe (1984). On average it has been found that 1.4-2.4 m3 per person per annum of wood is used, based on household surveys (Hosier, 1981).

Awareness of the need to prevent environmental degradation and to institute soil conservation measures formed an important element in colonial forestry and agricultural policies throughout the African continent. Recent studies of colonial agricultural policies in East and southern Africa have noted that political considerations, as well as influences from outside the colonies, were significant factors in the implementation of soil conservation programmes, particularly in the colonies of white settlement (Berry & Townshend, 1971; Robinson, 1978, 1981; Stocking, 1983; Anderson, 1984; Beinart, 1984). However, it has not yet been demonstrated whether the generalisations drawn from these studies are applicable to the trade-orientated, West African colonies. This study analyses the relationship between agriculture and soil conservation policies, and environmental degradation during the past century in Sierra Leone (see Millington, 1987a). The period has been divided into thr2ee phases, the first beginning with the establishment of the Sierra Leone Protectorate in 1895, the second running from 1939 until independence in 1961, and the third dealing with the years since independence.

Environmental degradation, 1895–1939

The first detailed statements on environmental degradation in Sierra Leone during this period are to be found in the extensive forest surveys conducted in 1909 and 1911. These concentrated on water resources (Unwin, 1909) and soil degradation (Lane-Poole, 1911) respectively, but both concurred in attributing large-scale deforestation to ‘wasteful’ and ‘reckless’ shifting cultivation.

Introduction

Considerable attention has been given recently to the role of local institutions and communities in the management of Africa's natural resources (Odell, 1982; Sandford, 1983; Doughlin, Doan & Uphoff, 1984). Much of the research has focused on the part that tenure rules play in resource use and conservation, and has resulted in a highly charged debate dividing, on the one hand, advocates of private property and radically new forms of resource management and, on the other hand, supporters of indigenous tenure systems (often based on some form of collective allocation) and institutions. The empirical evidence to support either side has been flimsy at best, and ahistorical in most cases. Thus, for example, what is proffered as 'proof of institutional inefficiencies among East African herders - for instance, ‘overgrazing’ – is more often a result of historical circumstances that limited the pastoralists' land base, than it is of land mismanagement (Little, 1984).

Here, we examine the role of local institutions and communities in the management of rangelands and forests in East Africa, which until recently were managed on a common property basis, often either neighbourhood- or clan-based.2 Particular attention is given to those variables that are likely to make local resource management systems ineffective. As will be shown, change in tenure patterns is only one of many factors that have implications for natural resource use, and that in specific cases it becomes difficult to disaggregate the causal effects of tenure from other, perhaps even more significant variables.

Pastoralists, using the broad definition of the term adopted by Sandford (1983), are very often regarded as a threat to the interests of wildlife conservation, either on grounds of their hunting as a subsidiary economic activity, or of the pressure their mode of livelihood imposes on the grasslands shared by wild herbivores, whose grazing needs and seasonal movements are so often identical with those of domestic stock. It is frequently their misfortune to occupy territories which are not only unstable and peculiarly susceptible to even minor climatic fluctuations, but are also the habitat of wildlife species that have already been exterminated in or driven from land used for cultivation by settled communities. Pastoral societies, ranging from the true nomad to transhumant communities whose populations make use of different and seasonally variable land types, have frequently come to be regarded as obstacles to the national development process and contemporary perceptions of the aims of 'modernisation'. In the post-colonial era ‘exponents of sedentary civilisation have come to regard the word nomad as a term of abuse’ (Abdel Ghafar, 1976). The reasons for this are many. Migratory life is perceived as incompatible with the introduction of essential social services, especially education and health. Pastoral systems are also often seen as wasteful of available land resources, regardless of the fact that such resources are usually marginal and incapable of viable exploitation by other means. Highly mobile societies present problems of administrative control, public security and the administration of justice, while they have often been regarded as outmoded reservoirs of separatist tribal consciousness, an obstacle to national awakening and incompatible with the aspirations of the modern state.

Conservation, as the conference discussion of the chapters collected here revealed, means different things to different people. Those working within scientific and technical disciplines tended to see the conservation of Africa's natural resources as a necessary and urgent task in which experts should play a central role. Some emphasised aesthetic and scientific values, as well as man's responsibility to the future, and displayed a certain humility in the confrontation with nature. They warned of the dire long-term consequences of the destruction of particular natural environments and advocated that these be protected. Others felt that the intensity of the demand for resources in rural Africa, and the creeping process of privatisation, would ultimately lead to the failure of protectionist strategies. Conservationists, they argued, should run with the tide. Game would be more securely protected by commercial game farming for meat and hunting; this would also necessitate the preservation of natural habitats in which the animals could survive. In the agricultural sphere, private gain would provide the incentive for longer-term maintenance of soil fertility and watersheds under changing conditions; interventions should be planned accordingly.

But a number of the social scientists raised more fundamental questions about the motivations for and results of conservation policies. Some suggested that major schemes, involving extensive land-use planning, or the reservation of game parks, or controlled irrigated farming, had totally or partly failed because they were insensitive, or directly inimical to the interests of local people (Collett, Chapter 6; Hogg, Chapter 14).

There is no doubting the seriousness of environmental and agrarian problems in Africa today in the eyes of the developed world. Human life, natural habitat, soils and species are all thought to be endangered in the continent to an extent never known before. The ‘crisis’ in Africa, whether enunciated in terms of sheer human suffering and the tragedy of famine, the threat to wildlife or the spread of desertification, is becoming a commonplace of academic and popular culture throughout the industrialised world and, not least, among urbanised Africans themselves. The western media, and television especially have helped to catalyse this development and, while often distorting and misrepresenting the issues, have linked the African predicament, at least temporarily, to the mainstream of European concerns. Even the very name ‘Africa’, it might be argued, has come to be equated with notions of doom and despondency that have very little to do with older connotations of Africa in the European mind. The more hopeful idea of Africa as a natural habitat teeming with spectacular wildlife has much older antecedents than the image conferred on the continent in the 1980s by famine. Equally the European interest in conserving the wildlife and habitats of Africa has a long history, much of it entirely ignorant of the long-established and successful ways in which Africans have ensured their own survival and that of the soils, plants and creatures which they need in order to live (Worthington, 1958; Darling, 1960; cf. Brokensha, Warren & Werner, 1980; Richards, 1985) and which form a basic part of the texture and meaning of rural, non-industrial existence.

One of the most constant features of conservation in Africa over the last century has been the increasing externalisation of control over environmental resources. Up to the 1880s, management of ecological systems was still retained largely by rural communities, some of them using the mechanism of state power in order to achieve their objectives, others employing more informal means of control. With the establishment of colonial rule, however, the process began, at first sporadically and ineffectually and, from the 1940s, on a larger and more dynamic scale, by which the central government, drawing on a reservoir of metropolitan-based technical expertise, intervened in the shaping of African environments. For a brief period in the aftermath of independence the more irksome controls placed on African cultivators were frequently relaxed. But by the 1970s, growing concern at the mounting environmental crisis led to a renewal of state intervention, much of it inspired, financed and directed by agencies external to Africa. Attempts were made to reincorporate farmers and herders within the decision-making process but, as Little and Brokensha (Chapter 9) show, they were normally incomplete and left producers uncertain and concerned as to who was ultimately responsible for regulating the use of natural resources.

The four chapters contained in this Part move beyond a simple description of the process of externalisation to emphasise a variety of issues integral to that process. The first of these is the importance of indigenous African views of conservation and environmental management.