The Dictionary of Human Geography (218 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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wetlands
Covering about 6 per cent of the Earth?s land area (Turner, 1991), wetlands (NEW PARAGRAPH) include rivers, lakes, marshes, fens and peat lands, and intertidal and shallow marine envir onments up (such as salt marshes and mangroves). Wetlands are economically imp ortant as sources of fish, crops, grazing land and other products, and provide critical ecosys tem services (World Resource Institute, 2005). Key threats include dams, ponution, intro duced species, aquaculture, agriculture, urba nization and industriaLization. The 1971 Ramsar Convention promotes the conserva tion and ?wise use? of wetlands as a contribu tion to achieving sustainabLe deveLopment. There are over 1500 Wetlands of International Importance, covering (129 million hectares) (http://www.ramsar.org/). wma (NEW PARAGRAPH)
whiteness
A racialized ideNTity that is bound up with power and privilege (see also race; raciMization). Although whiteness is a long established part of a geographicaL imagin ation, it has only been subject to critical scru tiny in recent years, particularly since the 1990s. Both within and beyond geography, the power and privilege associated with white ness has underpinned its normalization and assumed transparency, against which other racialized identities are perceived as visible, different and/or inferior. But since the 1990s, geographers and others working across the humanities and social sciences have interro gated whiteness, white identities, and their normative and naturalizing power (for an influ ential study, see Dyer, 1997). Rather than view whiteness as a fixed and essentiaList category, geographers and others have traced more complex and differentiated racializations that are bound up with cLass, ethnicity, gender and sexuaLity, as shown by research on ?poor whites? in the USA and South Africa; white ness, mixed descent and racial ?passing?; the gendered and sexualized commodification of whiteness; and the ways in which the racializa tions of the white working class and the Irish, for example, complicate assumptions about white privilege. Geographers have explored the power relations of whiteness and white identities in relation to racist and anti racist politics; their spatial and temporal differenti ation; and their articulation within and through both the disciplinary spaces of geography and other spaces such as the street, suburb, town, city and nation (see, e.g., Bonnett, 2000; McGuinness, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Both the normative power of whiteness and critical studies of whiteness have their own geographies. The emergence of ?White Studies? in the late 1990s brought together (NEW PARAGRAPH) critical work across a wide range of disciplines, and has been largely based in the USA (includ ing Delgado and Stefancic, 1997). Other researchers have sought to widen comparative and transnational research beyond what might be termed ?American whiteness studies? (Ware and Back, 2002, p. 14) by studying the power relations and material effects of whiteness in a wide range of different contexts. In his forceful critique of multicultural Australia, for example, Ghassan Hage (1998) analyses the ways in which ?fantasies of White supremacy? have shaped ideas about the nation. He considers ? ??Whiteness?? to be itself a fantasy position of cultural dominance born out of the history of European expansion? (p. 20). Alastair Bonnett (2000) analyses the ?mythologies of european whiteness? in relation to two, connected pro cesses: first, ?The development of non (NEW PARAGRAPH) European (and non racialised) white identities and their marginalisation or erasure by an increasingly hegemonic, European identified, racialised whiteness? (p. 7); and, second, the ways in which ?the development of whiteness as a racialised, fetishised and exclusively European attribute produced a contradictory, crisis prone, identity? (p. 8). Unlike work that not only overlooks the importance of white identities beyond the particularity of European and/or Western modernity, but also fails to interrogate this particularity, Bonnett (2000) has studied whiteness and the meaning of modernity in Latin america and Japan. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Like other research that recognizes the social construction of ?race? and ethnicity, the critical study of whiteness in both histor ical and contemporary contexts has been con cerned with the risks of reifying whiteness and its normative power. As Vron Ware and Les Back explain, ?For us it is impossible to separ ate the act of writing about whiteness from a political project that involves not simply the fight against racism, but also an attack on the very notion of race and the obstinate resilience of racial identities one of its most disastrous consequences? (2002, p. 2). ab (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Delgado and Stefancic (1997); Hage (1998); McGuinness (2002); Ware and Back (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
wilderness
A condition, usually applied to a Landscape, of being wild, out of human con trol, uncultivated and uninhabited. Wilderness is a highly contentious term with a long history of usage. As an uninhabited land, wilderness has had both negative and positive value. Until the late eighteenth century, Euro Americans regarded wilderness as unproductive, as wasteland, full of danger, a place to be crossed without delay. It was also land ripe for dom estication, for bringing into the house of human and godly order. The gendering of such landscapes (the fertile though poorly harnessed feminine wilds, set against the pro gressive and ordered masculine settlement) is another element to this entrenched cartog raphy of nature or culture. The dualism is carried forward, rather than being overturned, by more contemporary environmentalist interest in wilderness as a refuge from the ravages of modern industrial and urban soci ety. The valorization is reversed and wilder ness becomes something to save. Particularly evident in the nationaL parks movement in North America, and later in africa and austraLasia, conservationists have sought to protect wilderness from human incursion, producing a form of fortress conservation (Adams and Mulligan, 2003). Such enclosures are highly controversial, particularly since the advent of a series of critiques of the idea of wilderness, specifically the sense that cur rent understandings of wilderness tend to be rooted in Western value systems and fail to adequately understand the complexities of Landscape histories and geographies. The environmental historian William Cronon produced one of the more telling critiques, arguing that current concerns over biodi versity and endangered species continue the wilderness tradition, producing a deep fascin ation for remote and exotic ecosystems (the classic example being the tropical rainforest) (Cronon, 1996). As Cronon went on to sug gest, protecting the forests often involved protecting them from the people who lived there (and were in fact partly responsible for the existing ecologies). The cultural myth and ecoLogicaL imperiaLism of a peopleless nature resulted in forced removals akin in his torical and ecological terms to the tragedy that befell the American Indians. Historical, geographical and post coLoniaL imaginations have started to displace wilderness, demon strating its peculiar heritage and power as an idea, and the material consequences of empty ing wild places of people. In addition, there has been work that has sought to demonstrate the material and social connections between so called wilderness and so called civiLiza tion, particularly through figures such as wild animaLs which, it turns out, exist within and across a complex web of spaces, neither con fined to wilderness nor ever reduced to civiliz ing processes (Whatmore, 2002a). The result of this work is certainly fraught by the realization that environmentaLism has a good deal invested in pure categories such as wil derness. Practical manifestations such as fort ress conservation are certainly not criticized across the board, even while the complexities and paradoxes of such practices are recognized (Adams and Mulligan, 2003). Meanwhile, the power of the idea is evident in its longevity and cross cultural currency. The polarization of the civil and the wild is not confined to Western cultures. While the dynamics can be different, the place of wilderness as other to (or distance from) society often seems to be populated in different ways and at different times where it forms part of a spatial practice or rite of passage. From the recuperative desert of the Old and New Testaments, to male circum cision rituals, to contemporary safaris and gap year treks (see also tourism), wilderness acts as a complex repository of values. sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cronon (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
world city
A major node in the organization of the world economy. The term was origin ally coined by Geddes (1915) to denote those ?great cities in which a quite disproportionate part of the world?s business is conducted?. But contemporary usages owe much more to Friedmann?s much later (1986, 1996) discus sions of world cities as global control centres, which gave the term both a theoretical and an analytical inflection. Those conceptual elaborations, in concert with worLd systems anaLysis, have inspired a major programme of research into Globalization and World Cities at Loughborough University in the UK. In fact, the intimacy of the connections between ?world cities? and gLobaLization have prompted many researchers to substitute the term ?gLobaL city?. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Taylor (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
World Social Forum (WSF)
First convened in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the World Social Forum is an annual meeting held by members of the so called anti globalization movements sometimes dubbed the ?move ment of movements? (Mertes, 2004) to pro vide a setting in which global and national campaigns can be coordinated, shared and refined. It is not an organization or a united front, but ?an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate . . . by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo liberalism and to domination of the world by any capital or any form of imperialism? (see www.wsf.org). The WSF has grown substantially from its first meeting in Brazil. Subsequent meetings in 2002 and 2003 were also held in Porto Alegre, and thereafter in Mumbai (2004), Porto Alegre (2005) and Nairobi (2007). In 2006 a ?poly centric forum? was held in Bamako (Mali), Caracas (Venezuela) and Karachi (Pakistan). In 2001, 12,000 people attended the WSF; by 2007 the number had grown to 60,000 registered attendees, and 1,400 organizations representing 110 countries. The WSF has also prompted the establishment of a number of regional fora the Asian Social Forum, the Mediterranean Social Forum, and in 2007 the first US Social Forum though not all of them stand in a similar relation to the ?parent body?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The genealogy of the WSF is complex. The fact that four of the WSF meetings have been held in Porto Alegre a city with strong con nections to the Brazilian Left and the Workers Party, and the home to an innovative model of local government and participatory democ racy (so called participatory budgeting) says much about the broad ideological thrust of the Forum. It stands ideologically against neo LiberaLism and free market capitalism; it is of the Left but it looks for new and different models of economic and political organiza tion, drawing from a vast array of experiments embracing the landless workers movements, anti dam struggles, indigenous peoples, and anti corporate and multilateral struggles. The idea of a global convention of anti capitalist movements was in part driven by the desire to provide a counterweight to the World Economic Forum held every year in Davos, and by the difficulty of organizing mass protest in Switzerland capable of generating sufficient media coverage to challenge the prevailing hegemony of free market discourse and practice. The protests against the World Bank and internationaL monetary fund annual meetings in 1999 and thereafter most notably in Seattle, Genoa and Washington, DC were an important milestone in the move towards an alternative forum for civic movements oppos ing unfettered capitalism around the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is impossible, however, to understand the WSF outside of the counter revolution in deveLopment thinking and, relatedly, the grow ing dominance of neo liberalism (free markets, free trade, privatization and state cutbacks). The abandonment of Keynesian models of cap italist development marked by the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl and the rapid adoption of the economic ideas associated with Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and the Mont Pelerin Society, had massive and direct implica tions for the global south, beginning in the 1980s with the massive onslaught of struc tural ADjUSTMENT and stabilization pro grammes. It was out of this combination of ?economic reform? (namely, the rapid liberaliza tion of state led development), ?shock therapy? and in many places massive economic recession (e.g. the early 1980s and the late 1990s) that the plethora of movements, often arraigned against the privatizations of various commons (see primitive accumulation) arose. In contradis tinction to the triumphalism (and purported inevitability) of GLObALizATlON that dominated the 1990s, the WSF stood for, in their own language, ?another world is possible? rather than ?there is no alternative?. In some circles, the WSF is held up as a shining example of what Hardt and Negri (2004) call ?the multitude?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Inevitably, a forum embracing a massive heterogeneity of movements from around the world must confront the problem of political coherence and its strategic role. The WSF has 14 principles (laid out in Porto Alegre in (NEW PARAGRAPH) as part of its Charter. These include strong statements against ?totalitarian? approaches to economy, politics and develop ment, and a robust critique of corporate cap italist and global regulatory institutions such at the world trade organization and the IBRD. But in practice the WSF has never functioned as a central or strategic decision making body, and has often run aground on the reefs of political diversity. Popular move ments often stand very differently in relation ship to development than, for example, non governmental organizations (NGOs), and there are no procedures as such for adopting consensus statements or advocacies. As it has grown in size and scope and become some thing of a media event for visible anti global ization celebrities (Tariq Ali, Vandana Shiva) the early radicalism of the first forum has been lost and dissipated. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Leite (2005); Teivainen (2002). See also the offi cial home page at http://www.forumsocialmun dial.org.br (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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