RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what is the theme of your new book? 

GMS: My book examines obstacles to the forest conservation effort in Madagascar through the lens of labor. It centers on the role and perspective of low-wage workers in conservation projects, and on the significance of manual labor in producing protected areas and biodiversity hot spots.

The book historicizes the conservation-and-development model, and it does so from a “subaltern” vantage point. By this, I mean that I try to tell a history of land degradation and conservation through the eyes of Malagasy worker-peasants, who have consistently been targeted by conservation officials because they practice “slash-and-burn” agriculture in the rain forest. My book begins by taking the reader back in time about 100 years, when France conquered Madagascar. The first half of my book is weighted in the past – an ethnography of the colonial archive – tracing how Malagasy “underlings” confronted (and carried) French colonialists as they organized space and life in such a way as to make Malagasy wildlife and Malagasy people’s “nature” valuable according to specific criteria.  Although I compare the moral economies of capitalism and subsistence agriculture, my focus is really on the middle ground, on the people who straddle both worlds and who are caught between them. The second half of my book is weighted in the contemporary period and focuses on low-wage workers of an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP). I believe that looking at the ways Malagasy workers have negotiated the structure, and shifts in the ideological content, of conservation institutions over time reveals a lot about why peasants still burn forest and why quick fixes through the usual institutional models are elusive.

RG: How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

GMS: Environmental anthropologists have been taking stock of conservation and development interventions into poor countries since the late 1980s, when the sustainable development model took hold.  Following the lead of a number of ethnographers, I explore the social life of an ICDP, a kind of “key symbol” of neoliberal foreign aid. Those of us adopting a political ecological approach investigate: 1) how people in postcolonial contexts receive and interpret interventions such as ecotourism development, the creation of national parks, environmental education, community conservation efforts, agroforestry training, “green” commodification, and so on, and 2) what have been the social, economic, and ecological effects of conservation interventions on postcolonial peoples and landscapes.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

GMS: When I went to Madagascar to do fieldwork for my dissertation, I relied on my close friendship with a Merina family who I had gotten to know through prior fieldwork. Merina is the politically dominant ethnic population of Madagascar; however, the island’s coastal populations, including the Betsimisaraka (the group I focus on in my ethnography) generally do not trust Merina.  Despite these social tensions, I ended up living with members of the Merina family I knew. They had a home in the town of Mananara-Nord, also the location of the headquarters for the UNESCO biosphere reserve and its ICDP that I studied. I stayed in Mananara-Nord with my Merina friends between my forays into Betsimisaraka villages in the biosphere reserve.  My alternating residence in villages and in town was illuminating in many ways. What I feared might be a liability (living with a Merina family) in getting to know the Betsimisaraka workers of the ICDP became, after a while, an asset, offering me a deeper glimpse into the politics of ethnicity there.

While in the field, I was in contact with Malagasy academics, villagers, expatriate conservation representatives and Peace Corps volunteers, as well as tourists and scientists passing through the biosphere reserve.  At the time, my field site did not have telecommunications. However, times have quickly changed–cell phones, internet, and social media networks are now more widely available, at least in larger Malagasy towns.  I am gearing up to go to Madagascar briefly this summer after a long hiatus, and I very much look forward to my fieldwork, and to connecting with people virtually too.

I stay in touch with Malagasy contacts, read posts on the Madagascar Environmental Justice Network – a listserv run by Barry Ferguson – and communicate with conservation scientists and practitioners affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, which manages a protected area in Madagascar. I also treasure any opportunity to talk with doctoral students and recent PhDs who have worked in Madagascar.

RG: What is the key message or key point you hope people take away from reading your book? 

GMS: I hope to convey two key messages. First, that history matters deeply. And, second, given the acceleration of species extinctions, climate change, and habitat loss, it is high time for a redistribution of aid to further the global conservation effort.

Money needs to reach the people most affected by the degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as subsistence farmers. I think the “direct payment” approach to conservation (payment for well-defined and measurable inputs or outcomes) is probably the most persuasive way to get a lot of people to support conservation very quickly. Direct payment for conservation services has been done to some extent by organizations who deliver community development projects in exchange for conservation practices—even the mining company, Rio Tinto, has endorsed this approach, ironically. When I discuss a “direct payment” approach, I mean making direct cash payment to individuals in regions where biodiversity is rich and vulnerable, and where erosion is severely depleting people’s livelihoods.

In my book, I have a chapter that discusses how rural Betsimisaraka people in the early 20^th century preferred doing “piecework” to regular wage work. One colonial French entrepreneur had great success in finding Malagasy workers, compared to his competitors because he would pay per log felled, rather than the normal fixed, miserly wage to men working in the timber concessions. As a result, this entrepreneur was never short of labor, while the others complained incessantly of the labor shortage. I think the piecework payment approach for reforestation, though administratively complicated, would be popular and would achieve positive ecological and ideological outcomes very quickly.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

GMS: Despite the complaints one often hears by conservation practitioners that academics criticize their projects but do not offer concrete recommendations for changing their practices, I see critical scholarship as a driving force behind policy changes in conservation programs. In particular, critical scholarship has prompted the conservation community’s re-orientation toward poverty alleviation, as compared to the colonial era. I am hopeful that my attempt to resurrect the concept of “labor” in conservation policy discourse will someday lead to positive change. Interestingly, by the 1990s, the term “labor” had been entirely suppressed in political discourse, including, not surprisingly, discussions about environmental conservation.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

GMS: My book aims to expose the deep contradictions of implementing “participatory” and community conservation via entrenched hierarchies that operate nationally and globally.  The contradictions are not just moral problems but also practical ones: they exacerbate species endangerment, human poverty, and conflict.  I focus on low-wage, locally-hired workers of an ICDP because to me their position epitomizes the contradictions of the bureaucratic hierarchy of conservation and development. These men felt that their ICDP salaries, given the difficulty of their tasks and all the moral and social tensions inherent in the work of cracking down on their friends and neighbors for breaking rules of the national park, were not adequate compensation.  To make ends meet, and to maintain their social bonds, they either practiced or relied on the fruits of slash and burn agriculture and hunting in the reserve, the very things they were supposed to police and transform.  They constantly had to make compromises (if they did one thing, they jeopardized their ICDP jobs; if they did another, they were scorned by their fellow villagers).

A biologist named Joe Peters suggested a while back that a voluntary civilian conservation corps like that of the Roosevelt administration be tried in Madagascar.  Instead of organizations hiring a small contingent of under-paid guards to police reserves and villagers, a conservation corps, perhaps paid according to measurable units of reforestation or agroforestry work, would open up opportunity for a much larger population of able-bodied individuals seeking additional income.  This would offset the precariousness of subsistence agriculture in the current environment.  In my view, this approach is a much better way to spread the conservation message. I would love to see it tried in Madagascar and elsewhere.

RG: How is your book being used beyond the academy?

GMS: In December 2012, I was invited to talk at a conference sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Duke Lemur Center at Duke University. The conference was invigorating because it brought together a mix of conservation experts, activists, and social scientists to discuss the illegal plunder of rosewood and other precious timber out of Madagascar’s national parks (including my former field site) since the 2009 coup, as well as more enduring obstacles to forest conservation. The looting of endangered hardwoods by what the press has called a “rosewood mafia” has shifted global attention from slash-and-burn agriculture to illegal timbering in Madagascar. In addition, the recent expansion of mining by transnational corporations along the Malagasy rain forest belt has ushered in what I see as a post-conservation era. It’s not that conservation has been abandoned, but increasingly it is mediated and managed by the mining corporations. Meanwhile the de facto state has been collaborating with the mining corporations and the timber merchants.  The expansion of mining deepens the problems of soil erosion, pollution, species loss, and social disruption.  The consequences of the mining boom remain to be seen given the time lag of extinction debt and the eventual depletion of profitable minerals.  A number of Madagascar scholars have been investigating the ways in which mining is transforming the management of nature and Malagasy societies. It seems as though the new scramble for African resources, at deeper geological strata and in smaller fragments of forest, has brought together scholars and conservation practitioners in common purpose like never before. Yet, I believe that the insights of my study for long-term conservation, and how they might be applied, will stay on the backburner until a new presidential election happens (the coup regime is still in power). We’ll see.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Genese Marie Sodikoff, for your time and insight.

Genese Marie Sodikoff is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Professionally and academically, Dr. Sodikoff has focused on rain forest conservation and international development in Africa, specifically the Comoros (1989-1991) and Madagascar (1994-2002). In addition to her current book, Dr. Sodikoff has edited a volume entitled The Anthropology of Extinction:  Essays on Culture and Species Death (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her teaching and research interests include political ecology, conservation and international development, extinction (both biological and cultural), human-animal relations, historical anthropology, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands. She is beginning a project on mining and future perception in Madagascar.

Americans live in a settler colonial society, and this shapes how we understand and engage nature.

In the vast expanse of slow-flowing water and drained agricultural lands known as the Florida Everglades, thinking about settler colonialism helps make sense of Burmese python hunts and Seminole water rights, of scientific restoration models and National Park policies. Doing so informs my own ethnographic research on the relationship between peoples’ sense of belonging and the ways that they value water in the Everglades.

Let me pause to explain what I mean by settler colonialism. Life in the contemporary United States is shaped by seemingly long-ago events that dispossessed indigenous peoples. Less well understood, however, are the ways that ongoing settler colonial structures—of thought, economy, law, environment, and more—influence relations not only between but also among indigenous and non-indigenous Americans. These are distinctive to settler societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand (the only other states that joined the U.S. to vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Insofar as settler colonialism pervades American life, it affects social phenomena that do not directly involve indigenous people.

What does this have to do with the Everglades and the diverse people who live and work there? A great deal, but a few examples must suffice for now.

Working cattle at the J7 Ranch in South Florida (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Reclamation and Refusal

White Floridians in the rural interior of South Florida often refer to the region as “the last frontier,” and indigenous Seminoles sometimes do the same.

During the 1800s and much of the 1900s, the Everglades mantra was “reclamation.” Real estate speculators, industrialists, and settler families and laborers joined politicians to battle the swamp’s alleged unproductivity, miasma, and political unrest. Reclamation projects drained the Everglades in the name of “reclaiming” the land from a state of waste and for manifestly destined productive use by (white) settlers.

But of course Seminoles had lived and fought in the Everglades before and during the era of reclamation. Whether feared as military threats or discarded as quasi-human exemplars of a wilderness that called for taming, Seminoles too became targets of settler colonial reclamation. Refusing removal, Seminoles hid out in the Everglades swamps that they credit to this day for saving them, and they sustained ways of life that defied reclamation’s goals.

My point is not only to recall that indigenous dispossession goes hand-in-hand with landscape transformation but also to assert that “reclamation” in the United States is inseparable from the history and ongoing presence of indigenous peoples. The reclamation process was one of compartmentalization, marking some parts of the Everglades for drainage and others for preservation.  When creating the Everglades National Park (est. 1947) as preserved wilderness, boosters advocated Seminole removal (this was not new: Indians were removed to create U.S. national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone). A land swap removed most Seminoles from park land and created the Big Cypress Reservation. There, Seminoles have become key players in agriculture (especially cattle ranching) and ecosystem restoration. Meanwhile, despite the ongoing presence of Native people within the park, visitors to its website read about Native Americans only in the past tense.  Reclamation is a process not only of acquisition and dispossession, but also of cultural production and forgetting.

At the University of Florida Everglades Research and Education Center, Clewiston resident Jeff Barwick stands beside a pole showing that subsidence has removed over six feet of soil since 1924. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Restoration

“Saving the Everglades,” now guided by federal law, is the largest ecosystem restoration project in the world. In law and public culture, restoration is understood to be a technical issue or an interest-driven political battle. Perhaps. But, as Laura Ogden and others have shown, it’s also a social and cultural project.

The city seal of Clewiston (pop. 6,000), known as “America’s Sweetest Town” and perched on the south shore of bass-rich Lake Okeechobee, features an image of the United States Sugar Corporation (U.S. Sugar) mill that dominates the city landscape. As residents often told me, many had agreed for decades that what was good for “Sugar”—including efforts to fend of environmental taxes and lawsuits aimed at curtailing nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff—was good for the town. It was a shock, then, when in 2008 U.S. Sugar and Florida’s governor announced a planned buyout of the entire corporation and its 187,000 acres for the purpose of Everglades restoration. While environmentalists cheered the prospect of restoring water’s sheetflow through presently-drained lands, many Clewiston residents feared a future of economic decline and depopulation. Economic recession and political upheaval scaled back the buy-out to 26,800 acres and maintained U.S. Sugar’s operations, but the nationally publicized affair drove home the question of what restoration might really look like for the people and businesses of the Everglades.

United States Sugar Corporation milling tandem. The Clewiston mill can grind up to 42,000 tons of sugarcane per day. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork on water’s value, I asked water managers, environmental advocates, farmers, and others: restore to when?

The universal response: to the way things were when white people settled. Even restoration skeptics shared the view, albeit by criticizing restoration for erasing people from the landscape. Ecologists with several government agencies and nonprofits confirmed that scientific models take the time of white settlement as their restoration baseline. Lest this seem intuitive, it is worth noting that indigenous people had long altered the landscape through agriculture, wildlife management, and water management, while early non-Native settlers were largely unsuccessful in their efforts to drain the swamp.

That white settlement is the taken-for-granted horizon for restoration is but one of many examples of how settler colonialism structures American nature. Another is the ongoing expectation that indigenous peoples will embody environmental values, and that those values go hand-in-hand with exclusion from economic gain. Over the last thirty years, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has disrupted a legacy of environmental incursion—exemplified by drainage of the Big Cypress Reservation and resultant economic and social upheavals—by directing casino gaming revenues toward water management and ecosystem restoration. The Big Cypress Water Conservation Plan, birthed by a $25 million funding match, represents the largest-ever tribal-federal restoration partnership. Meanwhile, the Seminole Tribal Historic Preservation Office keeps regional water managers on their toes by claiming jurisdiction over cultural artifacts that are unearthed during ecosystem-wide Everglades restoration projects. By tracing these processes ethnographically—alongside Seminole and non-Seminole farming and ranching, water management, environmental advocacy, and recreation—I aim to show policy-makers that cultural analysis is necessary for ecological restoration, regional economic development, and the promotion of a more just coexistence among the Everglades’ diverse human and non-human residents.

Wovoka Tommie, Compliance Officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, shows land use changes at the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Contradictions

Settlers often claim a kind of native relationship to the land while displacing Native peoples, directly and conceptually.  This is a basic contradiction of settler colonial societies.

A speech by Florida Senator Bill Nelson at the 2012 Everglades Coalition conference—where the theme was “Everglades Restoration: Worth Every Penny”—resounded with precisely this contradiction. To great applause, Nelson touted his efforts to ban importation of Burmese pythons. Pythons have reduced the population of other Everglades wildlife and captured the national imagination. Nelson tapped into a dominant environmental discourse that promotes native species and works toward the control of invasive ones.

The 2012 Hendry County Farm-City Tour visits C&B Farms (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Such appeals to the “native”—whether out of concern with giant snakes, striking lionfish, hearty melaleuca and Brazilian pepper trees, or other species—support a contradictory settler logic that blends attachment to the landscape with erasure of settler non-nativeness. Nelson went on, in a voice thick with longing, to imagine Florida as it was almost 500 years ago, when the “explorer” Ponce de León first encountered this land of beauty. Picturing that moment, Nelson delivered his rallying cry: “and that’s what we’re all here today for.”

Senator Nelson would have his presumptively non-Native audience simultaneously battle invasive species, identify with (invasive) Spanish colonizers, and restore the Everglades to a moment of naturalness just prior to European conquest. As his speech illustrates, settler logic requires that the metaphors and practices of native and non-native remain in play. One aspect of my ethnographic research with diverse Everglades residents is to identify and unravel such contradictions. Resolving them will require the hard work of unsettling nature as it is imagined and engaged in settler societies. Only then can we “save” the Everglades and do justice to the people—from cattle ranchers to sugar mill workers to environmental advocates—who live and work there.

Rancher John Ward and Jessica Cattelino, hosting birders during the 2012 “Big ‘O’ Birding Festival.” (photo by Rhonda Roff)

Jessica R. Cattelino is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studies questions of citizenship and sovereignty, settler colonialism, and money and economy. Her research with the Seminole Tribe of Florida has been the basis for numerous published articles and a book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008).  Dr. Cattelino’s current project concerns the relationship between water’s valuation and political belonging in the Everglades.