An Ecology of Knowledges

Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) the largest protected area in Central America is characterized by rampant violence social and ethnic inequality and rapid deforestation. Faced with these threats local residents conservationists scientists and NGOs in the region work within what Micha Rahder calls an ecology of knowledges in which interventions on the MBR landscape are tied to differing and sometimes competing forms of knowing. In this book Rahder examines how technoscience endemic violence and an embodied love of wild species and places shape conservation practices in Guatemala. Rahder highlights how different forms of environmental knowledge emerge from encounters and relations between humans and nonhumans institutions and local actors and how situated ways of knowing impact conservation practices and natural places often in unexpected and unintended ways. In so doing she opens up new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental knowledge and conservation in the context of instability inequality and violence around the world.