Conservation Efforts and the Building of the Nature State: A Colombian Case

Claudia Leal, Tinker Visiting Professor

A swath of tropical forest on Colombia´s Caribbean coast, along with the felines and people who inhabit it, are manifestations of what we can call the nature state. This novel concept refers to the set of institutions, practices, and policies by which the state claims that caring for nature, and not just using it, is one of its essential responsibilities. Tayrona National Park allows us to explore the building of the Colombian state through its contested efforts of conserving nature in the 1960s and 1970s. The nature state emerged in alliance and against various state institutions, and in the process reconfigured the citizenship of various constituencies.

Claudia Leal holds a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley and is an associate professor at the Department of History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where she helped create and was the first director of the Master’s program in geography. Claudia has conducted research on rainforest regions, focusing on the transition from slavery to freedom in one such area, the Pacific coast of Colombia. Her book Landscapes of Freedom, Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia, will be out in early 2018 (The University of Arizona Press). Her broader interest in the role of race in the building of Latin American societies led her to edit (with Carl Langebaek) Historias sobre raza y nación en América Latina (Ediciones Uniandes, 2010). She has helped develop the field of Latin American environmental history as co-president of the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) and as co-editor (with John Soluri and José Augusto Pádua) of the forthcoming book A Living Past, Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (Berghahn Books, 2018). She is interested in the relationship between armed conflict and environments, and in the history of animals.

Professor Claudia Leal is teaching HISTORY 276K/376K: The Nature State: Latin American Conservation in Global Perspective in winter 2018 & History 278D/378D: Race, Ethnicity, and the Environment in Latin America in spring 2018.