Politics of Environmentalism and Ecological Knowledge at the Intersection of Local and Global Processes

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the intersection of globalized and localized environmentalism in Lajes do Pico, Azores, Portugal, at the historical juncture when whale-watching superseded whale hunting in this village. In so doing, the article explains how localized environmentalismincluding the ecological knowledges and practices of local inhabitants was reproduced, learned, and transformed within the context of globalized environmental concerns, and vice versa. Using ethnographic materials I collected in Lajes do Pico between 1998 and 2000, I suggest that, rather than constituting two clearly distinct types of knowledge, through comparison and dialogical articulation local and scientific knowledge are typically locked in a process of mutual knowledge formation. This entailed the emergence of glo-cal meta-knowledge context for environmental dilemmas. Ultimately, both former whalers and environmentalist scientists overcame some of their differences through mutual learningan issue that has not often been explored within the scholarly literature on the relation between indigenous and scientific knowledge.