Mara Goldman  
Associate Professor, Geography
Director, Environment & Society Program, IBS
University of Colorado Boulder

In Person:
GUGG 205
Mar 10, 2023, 3:35 PM - 5:00 PM

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Abstract

As the global community grapples with how to improve biodiversity conservation efforts, Indigenous communities around the world are demanding the process of conservation itself be decolonized. In this talk, I ask what this means globally, and where I work in Northern Tanzania where colonial models of violently separating indigenous people from their homes in the name of conservation is still happening. I present some aspects of my own approach to the work of decolonizing conservation through my book,  (University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book draws on over two decades of fieldwork among Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. In the book, I seek to unsettle established ways of knowing, talking about, and managing human-wildlife relations and wildlife conservation in these landscapes and beyond, where Euro-American scientific approaches have historically dominated. I center customary Maasai knowledge production and presentation processes—in the form of narratives and the use of an active Maasai meeting/dialogue, the enkiguena. In challenging existing conservation models and the boundaries on which they rely (dividing people/nature, wild/domestic, and science/all other ways of knowing and being with nature), I ask what it might mean to talk about decolonizing conservation globally. I also ask how we can ask this question in academic, policy, advocacy circles as Maasai in Tanzania are currently facing eviction from their homes and physical, epistemic, and structural violence in the name of Conservation. 

Bio

Mara Goldman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, and Director for the Environment and Society Program at the Institute for Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is also an affiliate faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies. She received her PhD in 2006 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (geography) and holds an MS in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development (UW-Madison, 2001) as well as an MA in Geography from the University of California Los Angeles (1998). She was a post-doctoral fellow at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, where she conducted research on “Communication and the Politics of Participation in Pastoral Societies,” among Maasai communities in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.

Dr. Goldman’s research is situated in human-environment geography and can best be described as political ecology with specific attention to knowledge politics as related to conservation and development interventions. She draws on deep ethnographic engagements, political ecology and science studies scholarship, and feminist approaches to research and theory.  She has worked for over two decades in East Africa, specifically with pastoral/agro-pastoral Maasai communities in Tanzania and Kenya and has recently begun to expand her research to include comparative work with forest-dwelling tribal communities in India. Her book, Narrating Nature: Wildlife conservation and Maasai ways of knowing, was published by the University Arizona Press, Critical Green Engagements Series in 2020. She is also co-editor (with P. Nadasdy, and M.D. Turner), of Knowing nature: Conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, and has also published widely in Geography and conservation and development journals.

Current projects include a large-scale collaborative research project with scholars and co-researchers across Europe, Asia, and Africa on the effects of Covid-19 on dryland communities broadly, and on community conservation efforts. She is also involved in collaborative conversations on what it means to decolonize conservation, and to address gender as a factor in biodiversity conservation efforts, globally and within indigenous communities in East Africa and India.

Watch the Presentation

[video:https://vimeo.com/807010156]

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On Dec. 19, more than 190 countries—excluding the U.S. and the Holy See—signed onto an agreement to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030 and take 22 other measures to reduce global biodiversity loss this decade. 

The agreement, signed at the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity’s 15th Annual Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Montreal, is a particularly impactful one, said Mara Goldman, an associate professor in the Department of Geography who specializes in biodiversity conservation, indigenous knowledge and global development. 

“They came together to redesign a new biodiversity conservation framework for post-2020, as there was global failure to meet any of the prior goals that were set for protecting biodiversity,” she said. “It’s a big achievement not only for biodiversity conservation, but for human rights.” 

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Gun violence: Squarely hitting home

So, when the latest “mass shooting” happened at the King Soopers food store just down the street from where I live, the one we always shop at, we all said it was “too close to home.”  My family said that, happy to hear I was safe but shocked and scared by how close it was. I even said it, “this time was way too close to home.” And then I corrected myself.

It was home. It is home. It was the place where my kids used to ride the pony, after getting pennies from the workers. It was the place where my kids were just beginning to get too old to ride in the toy-car shopping carts; where they would pick out free cookies; get balloons; and bump into their friends. It was the place where we ran to for that missing ingredient while cooking dinner. It was the neighborhood shopping center. It was part of the neighborhood we call home.

In this way, the latest mass shooting in America hit, fractured, traumatized and forever changed home for me and many others. And I realized that every single mass shooting in America, does this for me and for everyone else who lives in the US and calls this country home. For every single mass shooting, changes our country. It changes the way we think, act, walk in our neighborhoods. It changes the way we go to our local store, walk our kids to school, think about our home.

When a shooting happens at a school in your neighborhood, but your family is OK, is it too close to home? No. It is home. When it happens in your bar in your community, in a massage parlor, in a college in your area or your alma mater?  All of those places are part of the communities that we call home. And all of them are part of the country that we call home. Maybe if we all started speaking about the latest mass shooting as not happening, “too close to home” but of hitting home, then we would all act a little bit more, fight a little bit harder to demand it somehow stop.

Mara J. Goldman

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• Message from the Department Chair, pg 2
• ​Mara Goldman: Reaction to Coronavirus, pg 3
• Page Hartwell: An Undergraduate's Perspective on COVID-19, pg 4
• Satellite-based snowpack information to inform water resource management during the COVID-19 pandemic, pgs 5-7
• Professors Seeking COVID-19 Funding, pg 8
• Human Geography Dimensions of COVID-19 in China, pg 8
• New Faculty: Introducing A. Marie Ranjbar, pg 9
• Narrating Nature: book by Mara Goldman, pg 10
• Emily Yeh: Sabbatical Report: Pastoralists of the Upper Yangtze, pgs 11-12
• Alumnus Update: Brooke E. Marston, pg 13
• Department News, pg 14
• Donor Support, pgs 15-16

All previous newsletters are on our Newsletters page.

For a more enjoyable reading experience, open the newsletter file and adjust your browser window to the same size as the newsletter page. The Table of Contents and other links are active within the document. 

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The 2018 Fall Newsletter has been published and is available for viewing. The newsletter is packed with department news, alumni updates, and student and faculty articles. 

• Bill Travis: Message from the Chair, pgs 2-3
• von Dreden Stacey Fellowship Winners, pgs 4-6
• Mark Serreze: Climate Change Becomes Persona (Non Grata), pgs 6-8
• Introducing Caitlin McShane, New Graduate Student, pgs 8-9
• Introducing Katherine Lininger, New Faculty Member, pg 10
• Seth Spielman’s “Double Life”, pg 11
• Mara Goldman: Examining Nature-Society Relations Across Boundaries, pgs 12-13
• A Career in Geography, Dr. Lionel D. Lyles, PhD, 1977, pgs 14-15
• Alumni Updates, pg 16
• Department News, pg 17
• Donor Support, pgs 18-19

All previous newsletters are on our Newsletters page.

For a more enjoyable reading experience, open the newsletter file and adjust your browser window to the same size as the newsletter page. The Table of Contents and other links are active within the document. 

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‘The environment’ figures dominantly in our daily lives and academic pursuits—from concerns over climate change and biodiversity loss, to energy policy and agricultural development. Yet we rarely stop to consider how environmental concerns are tied to specific contexts, histories, and power struggles. In this class we do just that, through the lens of political ecology, a growing sub-discipline, which aims to understand the links between people, the environment, and global political economic processes. 

A political ecology approach highlights the power dynamics involved in knowing, managing, and making claims on the environment, (including those related to gender, class, indignity, development and conservation planning). In this class we will discuss the creation of political ecology as a sub-field, and explore its value for understanding a diversity of topics including wildlife management in East Africa, stream restoration and urban gardens in the US, and development in West Africa. You will leave the class with a more complete view of environmental debates and the guiding principles that make political ecology a strong and growing sub-field. 

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The story is about a reality TV show in Tanzania that showcases women’s empowerment. Goldman’s paper, written together with Jani Little (CU-Boulder, IBS), is cited in the final paragraph of the story:

"What Kibona is referring to—“empowerment”—is exceedingly difficult to define and measure. In a recent paper on NGO work in northern Tanzania, Mara J. Goldman and Jani S. Little took a stab at articulating the meaning of the term: “A process where, with resources and through agency, choices are made by those normally not in a position to do so in a given situation.” By this definition, Female Food Heroes isn’t so much a vehicle for change. It’s an incubator for what that change might eventually look like.

See more at 

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To many observers, East Africa's Maasai pastoralists hunt lions for two distinct reasons: to retaliate against lions that kill livestock or to engage in a cultural rite of passage. But that binary view reflects mistranslations of Maasai terms and simplification of their cultural traditions and their relationship with wildlife, a team of researchers led by a University of Colorado geographer has concluded.

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The devastating drought of 2009 in northern Tanzania generated new coping strategies by Maasai people, suggesting that Maasai with more money and social connections are better able than their poorer, less-connected neighbors to endure extreme events such as drought and, potentially, climate change, a team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers has found.

While the findings have implications for climate-change adaptation, they also highlight the institutional barriers that pastoral cultures such as the Maasai now face—especially the increased fragmentation of landscapes.

And that fragmented landscape could foster greater inequality that could threaten pastoralism, which is the most sustainable lifestyle in the semi arid areas in East Africa, the researchers add.

It's widely predicted that climate change will most acutely affect poorer countries, and the poorest people in those poor countries will bear the greatest burden, said Mara J. Goldman, the study's first author.

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