Brown Bag Lecture
Speaker: Paul Kreitman, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, Columbia University
Discussant: Federico Marcon, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and History Director of Graduate Studies, Princeton University
Summary: After World War II an international network of NGOs and QUANGOs staffed by biologists, ecologists and amateur naturalists began to compile what became known as the Red Data Book - the world's first biodiversity database. The RDB was explicitly designed to guide international conservation priorities by identifying which species were most threatened by extinction. But from the outset, decisions over which taxa to include in the database were driven as much by political, institutional and sentimental factors as by scientific ones. Japanese ornithologists played a prominent role in producing this database, and in 1956 successfully lobbied for Steller's Albatross (Diomedea albatrus), at the time only known to nest on the abandoned Japanese island of Torishima, to be added to the incipient RDB. This international campaign dovetailed with a domestic campaign in which ornithologists argued that nature conservation would help to rehabilitate Japan's international reputation in the wake of World War II. The Japanese government duly canonised Steller's Albatross and its Torishima breeding ground as an officially recognised "natural monument".
But in the 1970s the movement took a curious turn when albatrosses were discovered roosting on the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. The same ornithologists now blocked Chinese proposals to conserve Steller's Albatross through "international cooperation", arguing that the species' status as a "natural monument" showed that it was exclusively indigenous to the geobody of the Japanese nation. To this day the species remains a diplomatic flashpoint, with Japanese naturalists lobbying their government to protect the bird’s Senkaku/Diaoyu nesting site, whilst Chinese media denounce Japan’s “attempts to snatch our islands using the pretext of environmental protection”. Through the case of Steller’s Albatross we see how projects of biodiversity and national heritage classification have braided together over time, and how international efforts to conserve endangered species have also helped to re-inscribe national borders at a biotic and also territorial level.
