Shifting the Conservation Conversation? A Critical Reflection on DH Project Design for a Counter-Mapping of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazon

This article is a reflection on Digital Humanities project design, and a commentary on the way practice often falls short of theoretical ideals. Its critiques are rooted in personal experience of a particular context: mapping conservation areas in the Northeastern Brazilian Amazon. The author explores the theoretical ideals of engaged participative project design in digital counter-mapping initiatives and measures the ability of her own project to live up to such ideals. Through a process of critical reflection, and an exploration of the theoretical literature in critical cartography studies, science, technology and society studies and political ecology, she describes the ways in which counter-mapping can unseat hegemonic discourse for conservation and development schemes in the Amazon, while highlighting the pragmatic limitations that researchers may face in designing participative counter-mapping projects. Engaging with the tensions between theory and practice in politically engaged research, the author offers a critical analysis of her own work as an example of imperfect project design, with the hope that such a reflection may be useful and generalizable for researchers wary of the pitfalls in planning engaged participatory research projects in the field of digital mapping. Resume Cet article represente une reflexion sur la conception de projet des humanites numeriques, ainsi qu’un commentaire sur la facon dont la pratique n’atteint pas les ideaux theoriques. Ces critiques decoulent de l’experience personnelle dans un contexte particulier : celui de la cartographie de zones de conservation de l’Amazonie du nord-est du Bresil. L’auteure explore les ideaux theoriques de la conception de projet participative engagee dans des initiatives de contre-cartographie numeriques et evalue la capacite de son propre projet a atteindre de tels ideaux. A travers un processus de reflexion critique et une exploration de la litterature theorique dans les domaines des etudes de cartographie critique, des etudes sur les sciences, la technologie et la societe, et l’ecologie politique, l’auteure decrit les manieres dont la contre-cartographie peut invalider le discours hegemonique pour des programmes de conservation et de developpement en l’Amazonie, en soulignant les limitations pragmatiques que les chercheurs peuvent rencontrer durant le processus de conception de projets de contrecartographie. Engagee dans les tensions entre la theorie et la pratique ayant trait a la recherche politiquement engagee, l’auteure offre une analyse critique de son propre travail comme un exemple de conception de projet imparfaite, en esperant qu’une telle reflexion puisse etre utile et generalisable pour des chercheurs sur leurs gardes quant aux embuches dans la planification de projets de recherche participative engagee dans le domaine de la cartographie numerique. Mots-cles: contre-cartographie; Bresil; Amazone; Google Earth; cartographie critique; ecologie politique


Introduction
This article is a reflection on Digital Humanities project design, and a commentary on the way practice often falls short of theoretical ideals. Its critiques are rooted in personal experience of a particular context: mapping conservation areas in the Northeastern Brazilian Amazon. In 2016, I started working on the Calha Norte Portal, a digital tool with an interdisciplinary focus that catalogues conservation areas and relevant municipalities in the Guiana Plateau/Calha Norte region of the Northern Brazilian Amazon. At the time I was working as a research intern for the Amazonian Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon 1 ). The Social Policy department of this 1 Imazon established a reputation as a leading civil society organization in conservation debates thanks, in part, to its maps. In the 1990s the organization came to fame for developing a "logging feasibility map" (Souza, Brandão and Lentini 2010). Using GIS mapping software, the feasibility project charts data on transportation networks (including existing roads and navigable rivers), topography, biodiversity figures, deforestation areas, conservation zones and timber processing facilities. This data is combined in raster layers and applied to a least-cost-surface analysis technique to predict the cost of transporting logs to regional processing facilities. This makes it easier to detect areas most susceptible to illegal deforestation, as well as those areas where timber can be most efficiently extracted by authorized parties, using sustainable methods. As the tool has become more sophisticated, it has also been used with great success in developing recommended zoning of different areas for tourism, community use and conservation.

Reardon: Shifting the Conservation Conversation? A Critical Reflection on DH Project Design for a Counter-Mapping of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazon
Art. 14, page 3 of 39 non-governmental organization (NGO), was a significant stakeholder and mediator in the negotiations to implement the Calha Norte mosaic. This mosaic would be one of the largest jointly-managed patchworks of protected areas in the world. The existing conservation zones cover over 14 million hectares of land in an inter-locking network of national parks, biodiversity reserves, sustainable development areas, indigenous territories and communally-held maroon territories, locally referred to as quilombolas. During my internship with Imazon, I was commissioned to build a database of all the protected areas and municipal capitals in the Calha Norte region.
After I left, the website and database that Imazon had envisioned took different directions, but I was granted permission to use the data I had personally collected for a class project. In early 2017, I elaborated the Calha Norte Portal, a website and mapped database which seeks to raise awareness on conservation efforts in this vast biologically and culturally diverse region, using Google Earth to facilitate an interactive user experience. This article will focus on my personal project, the Calha Norte Portal, and not on the work I did for Imazon. The article is divided into three sections. The first presents theoretical perspectives from current critical cartography/GISci, STS, and political ecology debates surrounding conservation. The ideas that circulate in these debates have served me in critically rethinking the design process which produced my Digital Humanities (DH) project. The second section of the paper contextualizes of the emergence of ' conservation' and ' development' as discursive concepts in the political history of the Amazon, and in the Calha Norte region more specifically. This discussion will serve to highlight the particular dynamics which motivated me to create the Calha Norte Portal in the first place, and discuss its potential utility, even if it does not live up to its theoretical ideals as a participative project. The third section is far more analytical.

Critiquing cartography
Crampton and Krygier define "critical cartography" as a kind of "undisciplined cartography", describing in a positive light the ability of projects in this vein to transcend disciplinary boundaries and challenge the traditional power structures which have controlled cartographic technologies (Crampton and Krygier 2005, 16).
As a growing field of critical theory and experimental work which democratizes mapping practices, critical cartography strives to generate explicit or implicit critiques of the imperial history of cartography as a 'scientific' discipline. The contribution of theorists in this field has been to expose the ways in which maps, typically presented as objective artifacts of science, are in fact of the products of culturally-embedded practices and points of view. In the words Farman, "maps, instead of being an objective visualization of a territory, are instead unstable signifiers, heavily imbued with the cultural perspectives of the society that created them" (Farman 2010, 874).
The power relations associated with the production of maps, the hierarchization of types of knowledge, and the impetus for imperial expansion have been a major focus for many scholars in the field (see Harley 1988Harley , 1992Harley , 2001Lefebvre 1991;Monmonier 1996;Johnson et al. 2005, among others

GIS beyond western science and discourse
On this note, we return to the discussion of cartography and alternative forms of conservation to incorporate contributions from the fields of science, technology and society studies (STS) and political ecology. has become a champion of this field through his deconstruction of the "discursive invention of biodiversity" (Escobar 1998, 53). Although the term biodiversity points to a measurable scientific reality (the variety of species within a delimited area or identified ecosystem), Escobar describes how it is reused and reinforced through a complex network of NGOs, international organizations, local communities, social movements and other political actors (Escobar 1998, 53). The widespread currency of the term 'biodiversity' also has significant economic impact through a major international industry based on the internalization of the costs and benefits of environmental services, or disservices (what economists would call "externalities")

Reardon: Shifting the Conservation Conversation? A Critical Reflection on DH Project Design for a Counter-Mapping of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazon
Art. 14, page 10 of 39 (Carneiro da Cunha and Almeida 2000, 334). By tracing the historical roots of terms such as "biodiversity" and "development", Escobar highlights how discourse brings social reality into being (Escobar 1995, 39).

A political ecology of conservation and development discourse in the Amazon
I will now turn to a more specific focus on the historical, political and cultural origins of ' conservation' and ' development' as discursive concepts with important ramifications for environmental challenges in the Amazon. This section will serve to nuance the previous theoretical debates by illustrating the historical dynamics which have shaped conservation and development as powerful narratives in the contemporary politics of the Amazon, and the Calha Norte region more specifically.
In this section I will explain why I developed the Calha Norte Portal in the first place, and how it may still be useful in questioning some of the assumptions common to mainstream Western ideas about the Amazon.

Conservation as discourse
In 1948, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) was formed in Fontainebleau, France.
The first of its kind, the Union brought together governments and civil society This sharp dichotomization has been studied extensively by many scholars in the field of anthropology. The work of Gisli Palsson and Philippe Descola has allowed for a radical deconstruction of these ideas. In part, they suggest that this divide has biblical roots. When God created man he made him superior to all natural beings, the guardian of all of His creation. Descola and Palsson relate this "paternalistic" view of the human relationship to nature to the 'rationality' of the natural sciences in the enlightenment era (Descola and Palsson 1996). We can see proof of this in the work of early natural scientists and explorers such as Charles Marie de la Condamine, or ' orientalist' visions is that they obscure the reality of a third type of human-nature relationship, which Descola and Palsson call "communalism". Unlike the other two types, communalism rejects "any radical distinction between nature and society and between science and practical knowledge" (Descola and Palsson 1996, 16).
Recognition of a communalist perspective, a term which characterizes the belief system of the vast majority of Amazonian indigenous communities, has bred an entirely new field of anthropological study which seeks to go "beyond the human" fertilized in the fields of economy, ecology, anthropology, architecture, rural sociology and law, and applied problems such as urbanism, integrated resource management, development planning and environmental law" (Leff 2010, 9). According to Leff, one of the most valuable elements of this shift in thinking is its deconstructivist thrust, a decomposition of the separation between "economy" and "environment", and the integration of a multi-disciplinary approach to environmentalism, focusing on cultural factors in conservation policy (Leff 2010, 7). As these ideas gain institutional traction, organizations such as the IUCN have begun to incorporate references to "indigenous and traditional knowledge" into their guidelines for effective protected area management (Beltran 2000).
In the Amazon, this process has been underway at least since the 1980s. Leff In what follows, I will examine different projects undertaken at various periods of Amazonian history which have attempted to impose a particular vision of progress on the region's inhabitants. From this critical perspective I will attempt to reconcile contemporary eco-development projects as participative alternatives to traditional development frameworks, and argue that these alternative visions offer a channel what constitutes development and prosperity. In the final section of this article, I will explore the role of counter-mapping for acting against hegemonic discourse, and how DH project design may aspire to such ideals.

Development throughout Amazonian history
For over a century, between 1820 and 1920, the Amazon's main export was rubber.
The trade in this precious commodity has shaped the history of the region perhaps more than any other. At the peak of the rubber boom, the wealth generated by exports Between 1910 and 1920, the Amazonian rubber industry faced a major crisis.
Competition from Asian rubber plantations, where the plant grew free of its natural predators, was proving untenable for the costly Amazonian production scheme. In its natural habitat, the rubber tree grows in dispersed pockets throughout the forest to avoid contagion of leaf blight, a common pest of the hevea brasiliensis. Plantationstyle production in Southeast Asia was much cheaper, although transportation costs to ship the product to Europe and the United States exceeded those of rubber shipments from Brazil. Bolstered by this calculation, prospectors of Amazonian rubber encouraged the implementation of rubber plantations in Brazil to attempt the revive the dying rubber industry. Unfortunately, they failed to account for the trials of tropical agriculture, neglecting local knowledge of the rubber tree's common pests (Hecht and Cockburn 2010, 96).
In 1927, Henry Ford purchased two and a half million acres of land on the Tapajos river to start up a rubber plantation that might supply the growing U.S. automobile industry. Devoid of local consultation, the project lasted 18 years and never produced sufficient quantities of rubber for export. Furthermore, Ford's austere management style clashed with local patterns of seasonal labour combined with subsistence agriculture. Despite pay scales that exceeded regional norms, and social benefits for plantation workers, such as healthcare and institutionalized education, labour was scarce, as local rubber tappers rejected the Puritanical Midwestern management structure (Grandin 2010; Hecht and Cockburn 2010: 97-99).

Reardon: Shifting the Conservation Conversation? A Critical Reflection on DH Project Design for a Counter-Mapping of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazon
Art. 14, page 18 of 39 The case of 'Fordlandia', as Ford's doomed plantation would come to be called, illustrates what James Scott has called "high modernism", an ideology founded on blind faith in the legitimacy of science, technology, and industry (Scott 1998, 4).
High-modernist states govern through simplifications which attempt to render complex phenomena more "legible" for the purpose of bureaucratic administration, This is the tension that I will return to in the reflexive analysis in part three of this paper. First, however, I present a brief but pertinent history of the Calha Norte region itself. Although this area of the Amazon reflects the larger historical patterns I have discussed above, it is worth highlighting certain particularities of the region, and the history of the conservation mosaic, which is the focus of the Calha Norte Portal. In this section, I will argue in more detail the value that the tool has for unseating dominant narratives about the Amazon region, and for raising awareness of the practical challenges for traditional conservation frameworks.

Calha Norte
The name 'Calha Norte' literally means 'the Northern Trench', although its origins are a little more sinister than its name would suggest. In the 1980s the Brazilian Gregory and Vaccaro, have discussed the emergence of conservation zones and indigenous territories as "islands of governmentality 6 " which allow the modern Guyanese state to expand its reach and legitimacy according to territorial reconfigurations of sovereignty (Gregory and Vaccaro 2015). They argue that the creation of these conservation spaces and indigenous territories represents a modernization of the Guyanese state, through a decentralization of power into local, regional, national and international actors. This process of decentralization, paradoxically, does not represent an erosion of state power, but rather a strengthening and legitimization of state penetration into frontier regions (Gregory and Vaccaro 6 Michel Foucault developed the concept of governmentality to refer to "the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument" (Foucault 2009, 108).

Reardon: Shifting the Conservation Conversation? A Critical Reflection on DH Project Design for a Counter-Mapping of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazon
Art. 14, page 22 of 39 2015, 345). The promulgation of the Nossa Natureza program in the northern frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon may also be understood in these terms. By decentralizing state power into local forms of organization, and legitimizing itself in the eyes of international conservation NGOs, the Brazilian government was able to achieve its goal of extending state power over its frontier.
Keeping this historical trajectory of the region in mind, we now turn to the state of conservation policy in the Calha Norte mosaic. The mapped database that I created does not cover as vast a region as the original military agenda once targeted.
The Google Earth map focuses on a reduced area from the border between states of Pará and Amazonas, to the coastline of Amapá state in the east, and is limited by the international borders between Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana in the north.
The map focuses on the Calha Norte conservation mosaic, a patchwork of protected areas, indigenous territories and quilombola communities, which are governed individually but managed collectively, according to certain guidelines. It is from this mosaic initiative that the Portal and the map draw their name.
The protected areas, and indigenous and quilombola territories which will make up the mosaic are pre-existing conservation zones. The innovation of the Calha Norte mosaic will be to consensually manage them as a whole. individual or family inhabiting these territories is subject to eviction. Sustainable use areas, designate those territories that may be used for extractive activities, although the type of activity depends on the specific category. For example, as we have seen, in the case of RESEX (Extractive Reserve) territories, communities may sustain their traditional livelihoods through activities such as logging and agriculture for commercial purposes. In most cases, these activities must be undertaken following certain guidelines elaborated according to scientific prescriptions of sustainable practice. In some National Parks, inhabitants are permitted to use ground-level resources for sustenance purposes, but they may not hunt or commercialize the communities and the official consultative meetings, often held in urban centers. In order for these technologies to truly serve this purpose, however, the maps must be elaborated either by communities themselves, or with the wholehearted participation of engaged residents who care about their impact. If these digital platforms are not adopted by locals who feel that they are served by a sort of "partnership research", then the tools will not fulfill their potential to bridge power divides and democratize the production of discourse (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999 Figures 1 and 2). One aspect of the Google Earth map that does this particularly well is its timelapse feature. By cataloguing satellite images from the 1960s up until the present, Google Earth allows the user to scroll back in time and observe how landscapes and cities have changed (See Figures 3 and 4).

Critical reflections on DH project design
Reflecting on the potential of this tool, and the future directions for the Calha Norte for the assertion of historical territorial rights, and for facilitating communication between local representatives and conservation authorities. Nevertheless, they emphasize the importance of process in these community-based mapping projects.
It is not enough for researchers to capture alternative visions of space and map them, the communities themselves must be involved in every step of the process, dictating the terms through which the map is created and the purposes for which it will be employed. Indeed, anything short of this would be a repetition of neo-colonial power dynamics and the hierarchization of knowledge. Furthermore, Rocheleau reminds us that even within a community, maps may prioritize certain points of view over others (Rocheleau 2005 researcher with the political and economic freedom to reflect on such things. I am also writing for individuals like me, who believe in the power of research and the production of knowledge, but who often feel uncomfortable with the power dynamics inherent in the work that we do. In my work, I try to cultivate a critical position, drawing attention to unequal power divides, especially when they are inherent to my own actions. It is this feeling of discomfort which led me to write this very article, and yet I still feel a level of discomfort with the results of my own work.
The Calha Norte map does not live up to a participative ideal. It did not benefit from the input of the residents of the protected areas and indigenous territories that it depicts. And yet, for practical reasons, I am resigned to the reality that living up to that ideal at the moment of its creation was impossible.
Projects are never perfect, they are never finished, they are always in progress.
They are often the product of particular circumstances at a particular moment in time. This was the case with the work that led me to produce the Calha Norte map.
Due to financial constraints, time restrictions, and a simple lack of experience, connections, and manpower it would have been impossible for me to produce the same map with input from all the communities it would touch. The effort to produce a participative project on such scale would be superhuman, and would require the participation of a vast and committed network actors. I feel certain that if that project could be undertaken under the right conditions, its effects could be incredibly powerful. But, what are the right conditions? They were certainly not conditions that I, alone, could create. As researchers we must be humble enough to accept our own limits, and often, we must do the best we can with the time and resources available to us. We must also accept that the most successful projects emerge organically out of personal connections. Participative projects cannot be imposed. They must grow out of the desires and needs of a group of people who come together to materialize an idea.
In 2017, Maynooth University, in Ireland, ran a Masterclass on Participatory Engagement in the Digital Humanities (a summary of the class is available online at pedh.hypotheses.org). The participants in the class identified a number of practical themes that DH project designers must take into consideration before launching These are the questions which must dictate the elaboration of engaged projects, especially DH projects with political leanings.
Certainly, going forward in my career I will strive to engage with these kinds of community-based projects. Designing my research program around such initiatives will allow me to work towards the ethical and political ideals of participatory engagement in digital mapping initiatives. In the meantime, however, I consider the Calha Norte map to embody one particular instance of "multi-mapping" (Tsing, Brosius and Zerner 2005). The map speaks to institutional audiences, to young researchers like myself, or Western audiences interested in learning more about the immense human diversity of the Amazon. It seeks to unseat taken-for-granted ideas about an untouched wilderness in need of external protection, and emphasize the immense potential community-based conservation frameworks. In this limited sense, I feel that the project is worthwhile and can serve a particular purpose, for a particular audience. Even though it does not live up to the ideals of the participative projects I feel that engaged researchers should strive for, it serves its purpose as one map among many, offering a unique gaze and a unique approach.

Conclusion
As we have seen, maps are not perfect tools. They have an imperialist history, they tend to reinforce fixed boundaries, even when this is not ideal or appropriate, and they have often cleaved power divides between forms of expert 'scientific' knowledge and Calha Norte Portal is a work in progress. But as a project which situates itself in relation to critical cartography theory and fosters a critical consciousness of its limitations, it may still have the potential to facilitate dialogue among institutional actors and researchers with an interest in locally-relevant conservation policy.
In its current version it can serve to educate foreign researchers, policymakers and legislators interested in the Calha Norte mosaic by demonstrating the human diversity in the region, and the complex political ecology which has produced contemporary challenges to conservation. In order for this project to live up to the theoretical ideals of participative engagement, it would have had to be designed as such an initiative from the outset by a diverse network of actors concerned with developing awareness of local conservation efforts. In this article I have reflected both on the potential value of the tool, and some of its more problematic aspects. This reflection has led me to argue that participative Digital Humanities projects must reflect and ethical and political engagement from the outset, and incorporate this approach into the very earliest stages of project design. Practical limitations may prevent DH projects from attaining the theoretical ideals which drive engaged research, but this is precisely why researchers must remain critical at all phases of their work, questioning and requestioning the shortcomings of their projects. Particularly in counter-mapping projects, we must remember that maps are tools with immense power -the power to show and the power to hide. Taking this into account, and working tirelessly to represent reality from a multitude of different perspectives is the only way to truly apply our theoretical ideals for an engaged research approach in practice.