Birds as nature, bird conservation as culture

Abstract

This paper argues that the project of the international bird conservation movement may help, by means other than purely scientific or rational, to deal decisively with some of the most important cultural limits to sustainability. Historically, the emergence and development of the environmental movement is very much linked to the strategic use of wild birds in revealing the impact of human populations upon the environment and in engaging large sectors of the population in the support of a variety of environmental policies. Birds as nature and bird conservation as culture constitute two of the most successful global social relationships of Western cultures in the selective reunification, re-valuation and understanding of nature. On the one hand, bird presence and adequate bird habitats are used as a scientific indicator of environmental quality (nature). On the other, the level of wild bird protection in a given country functions as a benchmark of the degree of environmental «conscience », «moral responsibility» and «civilisation» (culture). Birds have become some of the most prominent new «culture-nature» hybrids in contemporary mass mediated global discourses which construct our ideas about the environment.