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140 I Gisela Welz seVeN “Contested Natures” AN eNViroNMeNtAl CoNfliCt iN CYprus Gisela Welz in the winter of 1968–1969, farmers demonstrated in Nicosia. Buses had carried men from five villages in the area of Morphou in the northwest of the island to the capital. There they marched to the presidential palace to protest the government’s delay in constructing a dam that would provide irrigation for the cash crops their communities were growing. The villagers were competing with the inhabitants of nearby Morphou town for access to water. The town did not want the dam to be constructed because it would detract from the irrigation of its own fields and plantations. The villagers saw the state’s reluctance in going ahead with the dam as evidence that government officials were bowing to the pressures of the local elite of Morphou, who were known to be well connected to political circles in the capital. in his political ethnography of a Cypriot village, peter loizos (1975) gave a vivid account of this event. More than thirty years later, what loizos calls the “organizational tactics villagers employ to extract benefits from the political and administrative sectors of the wider society” (loizos 1975, 289) are still very much in evidence. A recent example may serve as an illustration. An airplane rather than buses took representatives from another group of villages, this time from the paphos district, to Brussels in April 2001. Community leaders attended the so-called green week, a series of meetings under the auspices of the european Commission that was organized by one of the leading transna- “Contested Natures” I 141 tional environmental organizations, world wide fund for Nature. The fact that the villagers attended this event did not mean that they had suddenly become spokespersons for environmentalist issues. Quite the contrary: not unlike the Argaki villagers that peter loizos accompanied on their protest march in Nicosia in the late 1960s, they believed they had unfairly been denied resources that were theirs by right and that fault for this laid with a conspiracy mounted against them by their competitors in other communities with the help of certain personages in high places. The resource in question this time around was not irrigation water: These landowners from villages in the paphos district demanded that prohibitions against tourism development in their area be lifted. They wanted to participate in and profit financially from the tourism boom that their neighbors in coastal communities of the region have already been enjoying for some years. however, their own villages are located inland in the close vicinity of the Akamas peninsula. Akamas, a brush-covered area of about 230 square kilometers on the western coast of the island in the paphos district, has so far been largely untouched by development. it contains a number of sensitive coastal ecosystems as well as important habitats of rare and endangered species, some of which are endemic to the island, and it has been proposed that the peninsula become a national park. Against the backdrop of the conflicting concerns of environmental preservation and economic development, the future of the region and the question of which land uses should be allowed or prohibited have been hotly debated for many years, not just in the national but also in the international arena. environmental Ngos who are operating on a global scale have Akamas on their agenda; some years ago, greenpeace presented the issue in transnational fora and staged protests locally, and the european Commission has exerted considerable pressure on successive governments of the republic of Cyprus to prohibit tourism development in the Akamas and to create a national park there instead. The transnational dimension of the struggle over the future of this piece of land infuses what superficially may appear to be a conflict between local landowners and state authorities with a special dynamic. of course, one might say that there were transnational aspects in the 1960s fight of Argaki and its neighboring villages for irrigation water as well, for the owners of citrus plantations were intent on maintaining and expanding production for an internationalizing market, hastening along the integration of post-independence Cyprus into the world economy. Yet there is a different quality today about the transnational dimension of conflicts labeled “environmental.” in their 1998 book from which the title of this chapter is borrowed, Contested Natures, sociologists phil Macnaghten and John urry pointed out that in a globalizing world, the protection and pres- [3.15.225.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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