Abstract
Since the 1980s, there has been a policy shift toward a community-based approach focusing on its needs and effectiveness in the field of natural conservation or development. This approach gives rise to the following questions with regard to the players involved: Whose and what aspect of nature should be conserved? Why and how is its legitimacy accepted by others?
This paper aims to analyze the manner in which the people involved in the Mattole watershed were able to give legitimacy to themselves for managing local natural resources through the process of constructing the collective memory of salmon. In the Mattole watershed, in Humboldt County, California, there have been sharp divisions between ranchers as "developers" and newcomers as "environmentalists" over watershed conservation and restoration since the 1970s. However, a mild collective identity of the residents in the watershed has been cultivated through talks and discussions of the memory of salmon in the discursive space that generated from conflicts. Furthermore, this discursive space provided residents with the watershed ethics of human-nature relations; moreover, it provided them with legitimacy as the main players involved in managing local natural resources. In this paper, the author focuses on the constructive process of the collective memory, particularly on the talks and discussions of the memory among people through interactions; further the author suggests its possibility as the base for legitimacy.
