Parks: national pride?

A place for walks, entertainment and even wonder, the national park is also an instrument in the service of the Nation. Guillaume Blanc analyzes this overlap between environment and politics based on the cases of France, Canada and Ethiopia.

Talking about national parks immediately brings to mind the image of large natural spaces, where flora and fauna flourish sheltered from human activities. This is because this term is so linked to the imagination of “ wild nature » that the title of this work calls out: associating national parks with the question of the nation initially sounds like a paradox. This is nevertheless the ambition that Guillaume Blanc sets himself in this work where he compares three Canadian, Ethiopian and French experiences: to show that parks, beyond their vocation of nature conservation, are instruments used by States to build and strengthen nationalisms. “ Do nature » would in short be a political activity intended to arouse a feeling of belonging to a national community. Through an original object of study – the national park – this book therefore explores a central political question, which is that of the making of the nation, understood here as “ an ideal of an imagined limited and sovereign community whose sustainability rests on the capacity of the State to circumscribe (…) its physical and symbolic contours » (p. 280).

Thinking of the park as a political instrument

If parks are likely to inspire a sense of national belonging, it is mainly because of the emotions that the experience of nature evokes. In a world plagued by change and an acceleration of temporalities, nature is reassuring because it lasts. Attachment to nature, and therefore to the territory which supports it, arises according to the author from an awareness of its fragility: “ nature is born (…) on the soil of its imminent disappearance » (p. 129), and therefore arouses nostalgia. Emotion therefore appears to be the main driving force behind the process of patrimonialization, that is to say, the rooting of the identity of a group in a portion of space. This process is marked out by means of a landscape discourse, that is to say a specific planning of the territory, which makes it possible to support the collective feeling of belonging and thus serves as support for the national story. In fact, the nature offered by the park has nothing “ natural “, but must be considered as a cultural artifact, shaped by managers according to the elements they have decided to save. Guillaume Blanc starts from the principle that nature is not biological data but that it is socially constructed. This social and political construction of nature serves a national narrative which will circumscribe collective identity and the heritage process.

Highlighting national stories that support and produce collective identities therefore involves deconstructing the state of nature in order to make a political reading of the territory. Guillaume Blanc does this through a comparative analysis of three national parks: the Cévennes park in France, the Forillon park in the province of Quebec in Canada, and the Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia. We will note the relevance of this triptych for the research problem, since it allows us to associate both a country of the South (Ethiopia) with two countries of the North (France and Canada), themselves very different. from the point of view of their national construction, since the old centralizing tradition of the French State is opposed to the plurinational federalism of the young Canadian State. The author uses historical sociology based on the examination of legislation, activity reports and archival and tourist documentation produced by park managers since the end of the 1960s.

The landscape as a support for the national story

Park spaces are analyzed as political landscapes vectors of national narratives. In France, the Cévennes park is part of a strategy of backward-looking promotion of the rural world, the common denominator of an essentially agricultural nation at the beginning of the XXe century, but which underwent profound changes after the Second World War. Through the Cévennes park, the French administration seeks to perpetuate the time of a rurality which elsewhere is disappearing, thus legitimizing the nation by means of its past. On the ground, this story of the “ nation memory » translates into a strategy for protecting rurality rather than nature itself: it is traditional Cévennes culture which seems imbued with original natural features.

Nature is considered here in an anthropic dimension, and man is integrated as a natural given. In terms of land use planning, park managers promote local folklore, whether through the restoration of traditional peasant habitats, or support for agricultural and pastoral practices.

In this case of Forillon Park located in the province of Quebec, it is on the contrary timeless and dehumanized nature which constitutes the basis of landscape discourse. The Canadian nation compensates for the insecurity of its lack of past by perceiving itself as born from its natural territory. Nature is timeless, in that it was present before the arrival of the first settlers, and that it endures for them. This “ naturalization of the nation » allows us to transcend the cultural divisions of the Canadian nation, which was formed through the process of adaptation to wild nature. For Guillaume Blanc, for the Canadian administration it is a matter of “ influence the way Canadians perceive their country by making untouched and empty nature “a trait as ingrained as a European’s attachment to the place of his hamlet or his valley” » (p. 118). In terms of territorial organization, this national story is materialized by developments aimed at offering visitors a sensory experience of nature, by means of trails, observation posts, or camping areas in the countryside. The aim here is to show a wild and sublime nature, preserved from modern human activities. The only traces of anthropization tolerated by park managers are those of the XIXe century, a period during which local populations were supposed to live in harmony with their environment.

The case of Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia is a little different, in that the park serves less to tell a national narrative than to legitimize the authorities in a state being built on the international stage. It is indeed a question for the Ethiopian State of showing that it is capable of protecting the “ African natural Eden » in danger of perdition and considered by the international community as a “ world heritage “. The origin of the visitors testifies to this “ internationalization » of Ethiopian natural heritage: the vast majority are Western visitors, who come to visit the park to admire – or even hunt – the large mammals. The Simien Park is therefore not strictly speaking a place of collective national experimentation of the landscape, but rather serves as a support for an international heritage story. Nevertheless, the park has an internal political function, as an instrument of control of the national territory: the central power asserts its political authority by controlling the activities of local populations.

As a political landscape, the national park is intended to be the vector of a feeling of national belonging. If this function seems rather well fulfilled in the French and Canadian cases, it is much less obvious for the Ethiopian case where the creation of the park mainly responds to an objective of legitimization on the international scene. Furthermore, the process of heritage attachment based on the emotion aroused by nature is much less obvious for the Ethiopian population, the majority of whom still lives in rural areas, and is therefore not confronted with a “ lack » of nature. However, we regret that the author does not return more to the question at the origin of his research problem: that of the link between nationalism and the nation. If the author opposes the hypothesis of the end of the Nation-State in an interdependent world, the theoretical contributions of this research for the debate on the definition of nationalism would have benefited from being developed.

Nature at the intersection of the global and the local

Beyond the deciphering of national stories through the prism of park landscapes, the great interest of this work is to show the antagonism between the objectives of preservation and local economic development, as well as the duality between the interests of local populations and those of outside populations brought to visit the park. National parks are in fact part of a movement of tourism consumption of nature: we preserve a local territory which is then “ consumes » by a national or even international community.

The creation of the park space implies a restriction of anthropogenic activities, in order to give the illusion that nature persists beyond contemporary time. Thus, even in the case of the Cévennes, where the human footprint is integrated as a natural element, it is the traditional rural man who we intend to promote. This “ temporal immobilization » of nature exerts a certain violence on local populations, which can be concrete, as in the case of expulsions/displacements of populations in the Forillon park or in that of Simien, but also symbolic, to the extent that local populations internalize the “ presupposition that it is in one’s interest, if not one’s duty, to free nature from its presence » (p. 233).

This analysis of the antagonisms between economic development/preservation and local/external development is in line with the concerns of the political ecologya field of research that appeared in the 1970s which analyzes issues related to access to and use of the environment, as well as the conflicts that result from these issues. Guillaume Blanc’s work thus leads us to question the very possibility of sustainable development, understood as the reconciliation of economic, social and environmental objectives.

The speech “ win-win » driven by sustainable development is widely called into question by the observation of an inherent contradiction between economic development and preservation, the local and the national/global. In addition, this book leads us to discuss certain concepts from the sustainable development paradigm, such as that of “ world heritage “. The Simien Park and the natural resources it shelters are considered as heritage by the international community (represented by theUNESCO) and the (largely Western) visitors who visit it, rather than by the populations who live there. Behind the notion of world heritage therefore lies a subjective (because cultural) conception of what must be preserved.

Due to the originality of its object of study, and the general elements of reflection that it provokes, Guillaume Blanc’s work is therefore extremely stimulating. If the academic nature of the writing is intended primarily for researchers in the social sciences, this book will undoubtedly be of interest to various research communities, whether they work on questions of nature conservation or on the processes of formation of nature. Nation-State.