The making of a conservation frontier: Nation‐building, green productivism, and environmentalism in Patagonia

Abstract

In Patagonia, emerging concerns over environmental degradation in frontier territories suggest the constitution of a new type of frontier—the conservation frontier—in which nature is an object of consumption rather than extraction. Conservation frontiers are made through disputed forms of spatialization, in which wilderness can be a refuge, a source of capital accumulation, and a new space for political experimentation. Three overlapping yet conflicting processes constitute the conservation frontier: nation‐building, green productivism, and environmentalism. The material and discursive making of a conservation frontier illustrates how environmental conservation both disrupts and extends settler projects of territorialization.

Between conservation and care: Ontological mixtures and juxtapositions in protected areas of Patagonia, Argentina

“…However, I maintain that, in the situated and everyday politics of co-management in Argentina, it is possible to witness "leakages" as spaces in which ontologies mix and where it is possible to glimpse "a relation with nature other than reification and possession" (Haraway, 1999, 122). In this sense, the borders of conservation are uncertain spaces and, as Di Giminiani and Elliott Oakley (2023) argue, the transition from resource frontiers to conservation frontiers implies the emergence of multiple forms of ecological knowledge that are entangled in debates and controversies about the future of these particular spatial configurations.…”

“…Far from being different entities, for the Mapuche People, the volcano entity and the pijan mawiza entity entangle ontologically in the political dispute over co-management, challenging the idea of one culture-one knowledge-one ontology dichotomously embodied in the categories "Mapuche People" and "parks people." It is necessary to understand how these entities are understood and disputed in the particular context of a conservation frontier in Argentinean Patagonia, which is activated by unresolved overlaps and tensions between (1) nation-building; (2) the enactment of new forms of capital accumulation under green productivism; and, particularly for the case being studied, (3) the emergence of new forms of knowledge, in which environmental concerns relate to, enter into tension with, and are reconstructed in relation with other knowledges that can reveal the ontological limits of naturalism, as well as the emergence of hybrid practices (Di Giminiani & Oakley, 2023).…”