Ivars Pavasars

It has been observed in the environmental impact assessment debate that “right” or seemingly widely accepted environmental arguments are much more powerful as compared to other type of argumentation. A position in favour of protecting biological diversity is an example of such “righteous” argumentation. The aim of this article is to try to clarify what represents this “righteous” biological diversity argumentation and how adequate is the use of this argumentation in the Latvian context.

According to a renowned anthropologist Arturo Escobar who analyses biodiversity as a global discourse, four main discourse positions can be distinguished. By several formal parameters the Latvian situation should correspond to the so called globalocentric discourse position, where a central role occupies the Convention of Biological Diversity which also Latvia has joined to.

However, it is shown in the article that data on the land cover both quantitatively and qualitatively indicate a substantially higher degree of naturalness of agricultural and forest landscapes in Latvia (also in Eastern Europe) as compared to Western European countries. That is, compared to countries where the globalocentric biodiversity discourse has originated and where it is sustained. Also an interview study in the Latvian countryside show strong indications that the degree of naturalness and problems are considerably different from those corresponding to the globalocentric discourse position. The conclusions thus have been made that uncritical and without taking into account the local Latvian context, the simple importing of globalocentric biodiversity discourse position into Latvian legislation and environmental assessment may do harm to a balanced countryside development by giving inadequately strong position to the globalocentric argumentation.