Design for conservation: perception and narration of the ecological crisis in cases from the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

We are typically at a loss when designing for places without people. Frontier projects, including eco- and infrastructural tourism and rural development planning, operate where the typical geography is either incredibly large (interoceanic highways) or in the very local, immediate work of NGOs. Here, 'myths' of conservation discourse (population and poverty as drivers of deforestation, biodiversity as merely scientific, etc.) frequently decouple the global-regional from the local specifics of place. In the context of the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), the scope of this paper is to argue for a design research agenda capable of narrating IIRSA's immense yet indirect role in the Peruvian Amazon as a driver of habitat loss and deforestation, due to the highly diffuse conditions of illegal logging, rural human migrations, forest edge-effects, etc. GIS serves as the primary tool for these narratives, deeply entrenched in the methods and instruments of conservation science and working directly with raw data. The work argues that densely mosaicked and homogenous landscapes present a formidable barrier to conservation planning. Design's physical and spatial agency is used to momentarily problematize definitions and classifications promulgated by the use of these tools across multiple disciplines and discourses.