MOUNTAIN OPENING

Every year in July a small group of people gather on the summit of Ontake-san, a 3,067-meter volcanic mountain in the central Japanese prefecture of Nagano, to ceremoniously open it for the summer season. They do so with prayers to the gods, or kami, who dwell on the mountain. After Shinto priests have welcomed the kami with chants and offerings, representatives of several local constituencies come forward to offer prayers; included among them are employees of Japan’s national Forestry Agency and officials from local government and business offices.

Shinto priests conduct a mountain-opening ceremony on the summit of Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Though my knowledge of and relationship with Ontake-san began much earlier, my engagements with the spiritual ecology that encompasses the mountain began in July 2008 when I climbed to its summit and joined in that year’s mountain opening ceremony. After the formal ceremony ended, I followed other participants into a mountain hut near the summit shrine. Outside, cold winds whisked clouds over Ontake-san’s rocky slopes. Inside, the mountain hut was warm and inviting. The head priest of Ontake-jinja, a shrine dedicated to the gods of the mountain, thanked us for our participation in the ceremony and made a brief speech. In particular, he emphasized the importance of Ontake-san for the local community, suggesting that as long as the mountain was cared for those who inhabited its foothills would be fine. He then led us in a toast of ritually sanctified sake, called o-miki. And, with that, the ceremonious morning quickly gave way to merriment.

The annual mountain-opening ceremony, or kaizanshiki, which takes place in the rarified air of Ontake-san, stands in stark contrast to other images often associated with modern Japan—those of high technology, cute characters, and densely packed urban cores. It is a wonder that people go to so much trouble to climb a mountain that many in Japan have never heard of to give offerings and prayers to the deities who inhabit its rocky slopes.

In this post, I offer this ceremony as one among many other localized human-mountain interactions that constitute a local response to broader changes currently taking place in Japanese society. My focus in on Otaki, a village community located at the base of Ontake-san, where I conducted research for 24 months between 2008 and 2010. For residents of Otaki, I argue, the mountain is embedded in symbols, meanings, and practices that contribute to community perseverance within the increasing turbulence of late capitalist Japan.

OTAKI

Otaki is located at the back of a box canyon that runs along Ontake-san’s southeastern flank. With a population of fewer than one thousand (and shrinking), the village is less than a pinprick within the national geography of Japan. Otaki belongs to the larger Kiso Region, which, though famed for its lush pine forests that once brought prosperity, is today economically depressed and generally considered a social, economic, and political backwater. The vast majority of land in Otaki is also forested, but roughly 87% of this is designated as national forest, meaning that local residents have no formal role in forest governance. Government-sponsored forestry once enlivened the village economy (albeit while ravaging its environments), but post-war decreases in demands for domestic timber brought those days to an end. More recently, water resource development has played a large role in shaping the Otaki landscape, with two major dams and several minor ones located within the village.

In these terms, Otaki is representative of rural communities across Japan for which the nation’s post-war “economic miracle” has by and large been experienced as a period of  social and economic decline. There have been limited successes—development of tourism and other light industries—but overall the pattern has been one of marginalization, with rural communities struggling to survive off the scraps that fall from Japan’s mega-cities.

OYAMA

Otaki has also long been an integral part of a spiritual ecology that revolves around Ontake-san, linking together human, non-human, and supernatural beings. The village is known as Otaki-guchi, meaning “Otaki entrance,” and comprises the first of ten stages of pilgrimage that lead to the mountain’s summit. Thus, in addition to forestry, life in Otaki has for generations been economically, socially, and politically oriented around Ontake-san as a sacred mountain.

Ontake-san photographed from Otaki village. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Otaki’s position within the folded slopes and ridgelines that form the broad base of Ontake-san makes it so that the summit of the mountain is often unseen. Depending on one’s own movement in the landscape, Ontake-san seems to suddenly appear, its rounded form popping out from the forested hillsides like a child playing hide and seek. Residents often expressed feelings of calm or reassurance when conveying their experiences of seeing Ontake-san suddenly emerge from the landscape. As one resident stated, “When I catch a glimpse of the mountain, I feel a kind of relief.”

The cover of a 2001 tourism booklet published by Otaki’s village office offers a similar sentiment in the following lines:

The snowmelt water of O-yama

flows cool and clear.

Again today there is O-yama.

Silently watching over us.[i]

Although the Chinese characters for Ontake-san are used in the passage, written above them in hiragana (a Japanese phonetic script) is the word “O-yama.” O-yama is a local name for Ontake-san largely unknown and unused outside of Otaki. It literally translates as “the mountain” or “honorable mountain” and conveys a sense of respect, but also familiarity. Otaki residents often referred to other landscape elements in relation to Ontake-san, using “Ontake-san” and “O-yama” interchangibly along with the particle no, meaning “of” or “belonging to.” For example, I often read or heard Ontake-san no sato (village of Ontake-san) in reference to Otaki; or O-yama no mizu (water of the mountain) in relation to the mountain waters that flow ubiquitously through the landscape.  In addition, Ontake-san was often depicted as a central (if not THE central) element of the village landscape in pictures and photographs. These various verbal and visual clues reflect the central position that Ontake-san holds in the mental geographies of Otaki’s residents, who continue to create and reinforce a strong sense of individual and community connection to the mountain.

Map of Otaki village drawn by a junior high school student. Ontake-san is the mountain prominently featured. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Not only did Otaki residents often reference O-yama, but they spoke of it as a stable, benevolent, and even guiding entity. Just as the Shinto priest did in his speech in the mountain hut, they often referred to the mountain as a central part of village life and discussed it as something that must be respected and protected. They appealed to O-yama and its enduring qualities in ways that reflected multiple, and at times contradictory, anxieties concerning the future of the village. For instance, during mura-zukuri or “village-making” meetings, residents and I discussed the ties between the village community and Ontake-san. At the beginning of one meeting in the fall of 2008, the leader of a village revitalization group explained that:

Otaki is a village that has walked hand in hand with the history of the sacred mountain Ontake-san. However, in recent years, in the midst of a very severe situation never experienced before, returning to financial health and creating vitality in which citizens live in health and well being have become new topics for the village.

In this quote, “severe situation” refers to financial troubles that had recently plagued Otaki. By invoking Ontake-san in this way, the speaker was giving voice to more general feelings of anxiety among residents.

As a symbol of endurance and even permanency for Otaki’s residents, Ontake-san helps throw into sharp relief the rapid changes that have been part of Japan’s modernization and, more specifically, the processes of resource exploitation, environmental degradation, economic decline, and depopulation that have accompanied modernization in Otaki.

MOUNTAIN MOVEMENTS

One cool spring morning in 2010 I visited an exhibition of Ontake-san-related materials in the gymnasium of Otaki’s run-down community center. The exhibition mostly included old scrolls with prints of deities, various talisman, and small statues made of wood or bronze. What caught my attention, however, was a collection of guidebooks about Ontake-san covering the span of the last century.

A sweep of 20th century media depicting Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Early guidebooks from the beginning of the 20^th century had covers portraying religious pilgrims set against the form of Ontake-san, with photographs and captions depicting ascetic activities and sacred sites. Then, in those from the middle of the century, I noticed a shift. One small pamphlet from 1953 titled shinkou to kankou no kiso ontake he (“Off to Kiso Ontake, [the mountain] of faith and tourism”) consisted almost exclusively of pictures of religious activities and sites, but also included a photo of a dam and reservoir. Later materials in the collection, dating from about 1955 to 1965, offered images of a desacralized Ontake-san, empty of pilgrims and worshipers. These later pamphlets also included hiking maps and bus schedules.

Moving through the exhibit I began to realize that the artifacts presented a stratigraphy that spoke to Ontake-san’s transitory existence as something created and shared among people—in the past primarily at a local level, but more recently at a national level. Though O-yama seems solid, unmovable, and permanent, there before my eyes on that morning was evidence of an evolution from sacred to recreational space over the span of a century. Within this evolution, which is enmeshed in broader processes of modernization, Onake-san has shifted from a centralized position within a regional spiritual ecology to a position in the oku—the “back” or “margins”—of Japan’s national geography.

UNCERTAINTY AND (MOUNTAIN) FAITH

Through their varied relationships with Ontake-san, many in Otaki recognize their position at the margins of the Japanese nation. At the same time, many (if not most) also continue to exhibit a profound sense of connection to the mountain they call “O-yama,” as well as to the spiritual ecology of spirits, gods, animals, rocks, rivers, trees, and people embodied within its broad slopes. Ontake-san remains a meaningful marker of the vitality and perseverance of both the Otaki community and landscape, albeit one that continues to evolve through the broader set of social, political, and economic processes within which it is enmeshed.

To varying extents and in diverse ways, residents of Otaki continue to work towards maintaining their connections to Ontake-san and all that it represents in their lives. The mountain remains central to life in Otaki and finding a way to protect it while sustaining livelihoods is their continuing struggle. It is a struggle that I too am now thoroughly engaged in. Unfortunately, the terms of the engagement are difficult to define as I, like my friends in Otaki, are only small parts of the larger spiritual ecology of the mountain. How are we to articulate the importance of such a humbled position within a global economy of knowledge that increasingly values expertise, facts, and certainty?

During my time in Otaki, I introduced residents to the resilience thinking approach to environmental management. Though receptive, I found that people had a hard time understanding the resilience concept and were at a loss for how to implement the approach. I too backed away from resilience thinking in my own research for a time, though I have recently returned to it as a way to think about my research in Otaki. What brought me back was the centrality this approach gives to uncertainty. As a state in which knowledge is lacking, uncertainty calls for humility, caution, and reserve. What I have learned from my friends and colleagues in Otaki is that uncertainty positions us as inhabitants who must practice humility and learn to respect the greater ecologies of which we are but small parts. Through their relationships with O-yama, people in Otaki are made to understand that there exist forces greater than them and that these must be honored. I wonder, how would the management of national forests in Otaki differ if such an understanding was present at an institutional level?

In their own humble way, the Otaki community has persevered through many uncertainties—forest overexploitation, dam building, economic decline, depopulation—and there are more to come. I suggest that their and my engagement with these uncertainties is often inspired by O-yama and a belief that, if cared for, the greater community of beings to which we belong will endure. It is often a subdued engagement, but one that I, and many I work with in Otaki, continue to have faith in.

An Otaki resident explores a statue at a sacred site on Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Eric J. Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Earlham College. His research focuses on cultural representations of nature and the political dimensions of forest governance in Japan

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[i]　御嶽山の雪どけ水が

  清冽に流れていきます。

  今日もそこにあります。

  静かに私たちを見守っています。

  Oyama no yukidoke mizu ga

  seiretsu ni nagarete ikimasu.

  Oyama ha kyou mo soko ni arimasu.

  Shizuka ni watashitachi wo mimamotte imasu.

Through my ongoing research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), I am engaging with broader questions about the “nature” of militarized landscapes and the production of their ecological value. In this piece, I examine how South Korean state and NGO projects configure the DMZ as a unique site of biodiversity that could provide the basis for sustainable development and also peace on the Korean peninsula. These projects, however, often depend upon a branding of the DMZ as a bounded space of pristine nature, disregarding the more complex social and political landscapes of the inter-Korean border region, of which the DMZ is just one part. This tendency to fetishize the DMZ and its “nature,” moreover, disguises the ways in which global capitalism, development, and militarization are affecting other parts of the border region, areas where the majority of what is known of the “DMZ’s biodiversity” exists.

This map shows the location and spatial extent of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and its surrounding geographies.The dotted line is the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the actual border between North Korea and South Korea. The area shaded in dark grey is the DMZ, the area shaded in medium grey is the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) and the light grey area is the border area. This image was adapted from Kim, Kwi-gon and Dong-Gil Cho. 2005. “Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea’s De-militarized Zone.” Landscape and Ecological Engineering 1: 4.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is often described as a space of superlative and jarring juxtapositions: the most heavily militarized area in the world and one of the last remnants of the Cold War; a no-man’s land for sixty years turned into an accidental haven of biodiversity. In South Korea, despite the persistence of the Cold War division and ongoing tensions with the North, the DMZ’s “return to nature” and symbolic potential have fueled state visions of converting the forbidden zone into a peace park or ecological preserve since the 1990s.[1] North Korean opposition, however, has consistently forestalled such plans. Despite this serial disappointment, and in the midst of the latest round of military provocations and propagandistic saber-rattling on both sides of the border, Park Geun-hye, the newly elected president of South Korea, during her visit to Washington D.C. in May 2013, announced her intention to build an “international peace park” in the DMZ to send “a message of peace to all of humanity.” Although she did not make an explicit connection in her speech between the DMZ’s ecological renaissance and its function as a symbol of peace, the equation between the two has been central to official state branding of the DMZ as a zone of “peace and life.”

But what is the “nature” of the DMZ that is being preserved? The DMZ proper is 4 kilometers wide and 248 kilometers long and serves as a buffer between the two Koreas, mandated by the armistice agreement signed in July 1953. It encompasses multiple ecosystems, including mountain highlands, lowland wetlands, grasslands, five rivers, and watersheds. What is referred to as “the DMZ region,” however, is a more expansive area that includes the adjacent Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), which extends south from the DMZ between four and twelve kilometers.

Korean Water Deer in the CCZ, January 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

In fact, one of the major sticking points for measuring the DMZ’s ecological value is the lack of knowledge of what constitutes the biodiversity of the DMZ proper. Surveys starting in the 1990s have documented eighty-two rare and endangered species in areas within and around the DMZ and the CCZ, out of a total of 2,900 plant and animal species, which represent the majority of the all species in the peninsula. Existing surveys inside the DMZ, however, have been spotty and unsystematic, due to difficulties of accessing the highly restricted area, which requires oversight from the UN Command. Thus, ecological knowledge of the “DMZ” is more often based on research in the CCZ and other parts of the border region, where evidence of charismatic megafuna like highly endangered migratory cranes, the rare Amur Goral, and even the apocryphal Siberian Tiger has attracted international attention. In light of these data, conservationists and others have become intrigued by the DMZ’s possibilities as a conservation area and peace park, and central and regional governments have been engaged in sustainable development projects as a solution to the economically stagnant border area to capitalize on the ecotouristic value of the DMZ.

I have worked closely with a small NGO of citizen ecologists that monitors the ecology of the western side of the DMZ region in the area of the Han River estuary and related wetlands, which are habitats for numerous species, the most celebrated of which are the highly endangered Red-crowned Crane (grus japonensis) and the White-naped Crane (grus vipio). The Red-Crowned Crane in particular is culturally valued across East Asia. Both species are declining in numbers, with a global population of 2,750 for the Red-Crowned Crane and around 5,500 for the White-naped Crane. They typically mate for life and produce one or two offspring per year.

White-naped Cranes feeding on a fallow rice paddy in the CCZ, October 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

The cranes’ rarity and association with the DMZ render them even more symbolically potent, especially given the fact that they metaphorically and literally connect the two Koreas as they cross the border annually in their migrations from breeding areas in eastern Russia to the southern half of the DMZ area, where they feed on grains from rice paddies following the autumn harvest. Even as these birds are associated with the DMZ as an ecologically valuable space and branded as an integral part of this landscape (rice grown in the CCZ area is marketed as “Red-crowned Crane rice”), their survival is enmeshed in relationships with humans and agriculture that has evolved over centuries, if not longer.

On the western side of the border area, where wintering populations of Red-crowned cranes used to number in the hundreds, pressures on land use due to development have created inhospitable conditions and loss of habitat for the cranes and other migratory birds like the Bean Goose and the Greater White-fronted Goose. Landowners are increasingly converting fields and forests to high-profit greenhouse products like bell peppers and blueberries, or shade-grown ginseng. Both ginseng fields and greenhouses reduce the amount of feeding and roosting habitats for cranes, and the extension of the agricultural calendar from seasonal rice cultivation and harvesting to year-round production means more human activity and vehicular traffic during the cranes’ wintering months – between October and March. Moreover, electrified greenhouses require the erection of more power lines, which are a major hazard for migratory birds. Dozens of birds are injured or killed annually from collisions with power lines and fences, or poisoning from pesticides. In effect, the nature of the CCZ is far from pristine, and is becoming increasingly developed, threatening the very species whose presence is heralded.

Citizen ecologists monitoring aquatic insects in small irrigation ponds in the CCZ, April 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

For ecologists and crane conservationists, these developments in the CCZ are dismaying. Their monitoring work can often seem like a salvage project, as they meticulously document pockets of biodiversity while the landscape around them is transformed into plastic-covered ginseng fields created atop former forests and meadows. Urbanization and the construction of new edge cities along the western coast are destroying wetland habitats used by cranes and other birds. In response to these developments in the South, the International Crane Foundation has shifted its conservation efforts for the Red-crowned and White-naped Cranes to the North Korean side of the border in hopes that underdevelopment there will make the restoration of crane wintering habitats more viable in the long term. International designation from the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands or the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve might help to stave off the degradation of the CCZ’s landscapes, but with the expansion of ecotourism sites and facilities in the western part of the CCZ, as well as plans to create zones for inter-Korean economic cooperation within the DMZ, many committed ecologists and environmentalists are less than optimistic about the sustainability of these precious habitats.

President Park’s announcement of the peace park may have seemed merely utopian to some, especially at a moment when inter-Korean diplomacy had reached a particularly low point. The DMZ, however, invites just such projections of hope and myth-making. Many people in South Korea and internationally have become enraptured by the story of the zone and its ecological renaissance. That the most extreme example of human political strife and violence can inadvertently create a preserve for endangered species feeds romantic visions of nature’s resilience and indifference to human design. Imagining the DMZ as a site of pristine nature, however, requires one to forget its ongoing social and historical transformations, as well as the material conditions of its militarization, not the least of which includes over one million landmines within the zone and another one million in the CCZ. The space of the DMZ may be literally shaped by military conflict and political stalemate, but its ecology is also deeply enmeshed with global capitalism. It is at the nexus of militarization and neoliberalization that the DMZ’s nature now emerges as an object of fascination and instrumentalization. The idea of conserving the DMZ as a protected area may provide a glimmer of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation, yet, the romanticization of nature in the zone, whether in the name of unification politics or sustainable development, may be obscuring the ongoing endangerment of the border area’s actually existing biodiversity.

Eleana Kim is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rochester University. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press) was published in 2010. Her current project, Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, received an ACLS/SSRC/NEH fellowship in 2011-12. Articles on adoption have appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Social Text, and the Journal of Korean Studies. Articles on the DMZ have appeared or are forthcoming on SINO-NK.com and Perspectives: The Journal of the Rachel Carson Institute. She can be reached at: eleana.kim@rochester.edu.

[1] This “return to nature” narrative is not unique to the DMZ. In fact, the post-Cold War era has witnessed a number of decommissioned militarized spaces and borders that are being converted into conservation areas after having been “off limits” to civilians and thereby unintentional sanctuaries for other species for decades (despite or because of intense toxicity and militarized pollution). In addition, Transboundary Conservation Areas have been widely celebrated as a “global solution” to conservation and sustainable development (as Bram Büscher describes it in his excellent new book, Transforming the Frontier), in which landscapes of political antagonism could be transformed into zones of mutual cooperation and peace.

In 2012, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians engaged research specialists working in several different fields, including anthropology, the physical sciences, and law. Our assignment was to assemble a report to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about air quality on the tribe’s reservation in northern Wisconsin. With this report, the tribe aims to redesignate its reservation’s air quality from Class II to Class I under the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” provisions of the federal Clean Air Act. The air on the reservation today is too clean to be classified as Class II, and redesignation as Class I will help the tribe ensure that this status is formally recognized and protected. In fact, the tribe first initiated this process in the 1990s, but suspended its work due to the anticipated legal costs that it would incur if the redesignation were challenged by the State of Wisconsin. Now that five other tribes in the United States—including the Potawatomis in Wisconsin—have set a precedent by achieving this same redesignation, Bad River decided to reinitiate the process.

The requirements of the federal law that enable redesignation of air quality include assessment of the environmental, health, social, and economic effects that upgrading air quality is likely to entail. Larry Nesper, who has extensive experience working with tribes in Wisconsin, was asked to contribute the “social effects” section of the report to the EPA. He invited me to assist him by conducting interviews with members and neighbors of Bad River during a one-week visit to the reservation in the summer of 2012.

We began our research with the premise that the sociocultural vitality of the Bad River community is rooted in culturally meaningful interactions with non-human elements of the landscape. Nesper’s previous research with the Sokaogan Band over the development of the Crandon mine has illustrated the deep significance of such relationships for Ojibwe people in Wisconsin. Thus, rather than focusing our interviews on speculations about what could happen if the high quality of air on the reservation were to deteriorate, we mainly discussed what people do on the landscape right now, how these activities underpin the health of the Bad River community, and what happens within the community when environmental degradation interferes with these activities.

From among the many activities that involve culturally meaningful interactions with the environment, one subset emerged as a particularly productive topic of conversation: the wild rice harvest that occurs in the late summer. Wild rice plays a key role in Ojibwe mythohistory and lends its Anishinaabe name to Bad River’s annual Manomin Powwow, which takes place during the harvest. “It’s just a big community thing out there, and a lot of people look forward to it,” one man said of the harvest. “It’s something else. If you come into the sloughs [the wetlands near the mouth of the Bad River] and you come around the last corner there by the line, you look and you can stand up in your boat and you can see all the guys out there ricing, all the boats, all the guys out there ricing. […] Same thing in spring time when there’s fishing: you’ll see everybody out there pulling their nets.  You know, it’s always good to [ask], ‘Hey how’d you do?’ And, you know, finding out the scoop and it’s… it’s a lot of fun.  It’s a whole community thing.” Our interviewees remembered going to the ricing camps that were set up near the slough during the rice harvests of their youth—occasions at which they learned about Ojibwe culture from their elders.

Several years ago, the committee of elders that oversees the rice harvest was forced to cancel the annual harvest entirely because low water levels in the Bad River slough disrupted the growing season for the rice, resulting in very low yields. The committee decided that any harvest would impair the rice’s ability to reseed itself for the following year. The cancelation was not prompted by poor air quality, and most interviewees did not attribute the poor yield to human-caused environmental damage. Still, the decision to cancel that harvest triggered tensions in the community that are of direct relevance to our research. One elder, who compared the normal rice harvest to a holiday that draws out-of-town relatives back to the reservation, recalled the year the harvest was canceled: “The younger people really got angry. They were looking forward to going out, bringing rice for the family. They’re all macho guys wanting to do all this stuff, and they couldn’t go. […] Some of the guys, they rice for their family and then they go and sell some. And so they got a little cash in their pockets and they can go buy something [that] they’re not able to get or whatever. And that’s not there. They have to go tell their grandparents there’s no rice. So nobody has the rice for the winter. And there’s special ceremonies, special holiday’s during the year, and on your birthday there’s rice. Whatever kind of meal you have, there’s always been rice there. And it’s…well, you’re feeling sad. It’s like a grieving when something has died. You know when someone dies there’s grieving because it’s not there no more.”

The wild rice harvest is, of course, only one of many activities that bring Bad River Ojibwe out onto the landscape. Our interviewees also talked at length about hunting, fishing, and gathering for subsistence and ceremonial purposes. Each of these activities strengthens the social fabric of the Bad River community as it draws people into closer relationships with each other and with non-human elements of the environment. Amongst humans, extensive networks of reciprocity are activated each time a resource is harvested: interviewees commented that they donate a part of their take from hunting and fishing to the elders, that they give to neighbors who have been less fortunate, that they give foods to relatives who live off the reservation, and so forth. These foods are also a necessary element of feasts celebrating life-cycle rituals. In fact, since many Ojibwe consider it taboo to replace feast foods with store-bought items, special licenses are issued by the tribal council for harvesting certain resources out of season when they are needed for feasts.

A prominent leader in the tribe explained how Ojibwe cosmology extends human sociality and reciprocity to non-humans: “essentially it’s an understanding that we’re sharing the land, that we’re sharing the water, that we’re sharing the air, and as much as we’re sitting here talking about impacts to the people of our reservation, if we really wanted to explore it through an Indian world view, we’re going to talk about the impacts—in as much depth as we do with people—as it pertains to frogs, blue herons, wild rice, forget-me-nots, things like that. Because they all have their spirit. Those rocks under that lake bed—when I talked about water clarity being as important as air clarity and the potential impacts—those rocks have a spirit, and the way we look at them and the way we pick them up and hold them and put them back and things like that, all of that stuff has a place and an importance in who we are and for what they are.”

Succumbing at one point to the temptation of “what ifs,” I asked two men of around 30 what might happen if the air and water quality were to worsen: “If there’s a haze over the watershed, or the mercury levels go up in fish, what happens?” The tone of the interview changed instantly. After losing himself for a moment in thought, one of the men replied, “I say we failed.” He explained: “You know, it’s not in our beings to just let that kind of stuff come into the land that we’re trying to protect and live off of. We are a part of the land, you know; it’s not just for us to use up the way we see fit, but to live within the means of the land. And, I don’t know, it’s just—it would be hard to imagine my rez with those kinds of things, with mercury pollution or any kind of pollution. I don’t know what to think if something like that were to happen.”

The second interviewee, an employee of the tribal natural resources department, agreed: “I think that failing, it’s huge.” He pointed out that the quality of the air, the water, and the land, which the tribe is attempting to protect, affects people well beyond the borders of the reservation. “So when we’re trying to preserve not only our rights and our waters and everything else, we’re trying to preserve [them] for the entire population—the entire world—because our area is something to be seen by, I believe, the entire world. We got one of the most pristine, beautiful wetland areas in the world, I believe. And I’ve been around a little bit in the United States and I’ve yet to see places [like those] that are seen around here. So I think if it becomes like that, [then] yeah, we failed. I think we’d lose a lot. I think our rice is so… so touchy. If an inch of water could affect how it grows I can just imagine what dirty air could do to it, and with the cycle that it’s in I think it’d just be too much for the rice to grow. But… it is something to think about, I guess. You never know until the day comes, but… it would be nice to preserve it for everybody in the future.”

Nesper completed a first draft of the “social effects” section of the report to the EPA in August 2012. He will return to Bad River in the summer of 2013 to conduct further interviews. When the physical scientists and the lawyers have weighed in, a final application will be made to the EPA with the full expectation that the agency will approve the higher air quality standards for the Bad River Community. Redesignation will reaffirm the pride with which community members speak about their stewardship of the land and will help them continue to look after the wellbeing of both human and non-human spirits that inhabit the landscape in and around the reservation. It may also become an important tool in the tribe’s efforts to oppose the construction of an iron mine that was recently approved by the State of Wisconsin.

Joe Quick is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He studies indigenous peoples and material culture in the global economy. His dissertation research explores tourist-oriented handicraft production in highland Ecuador.

Larry Nesper is Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He studies American Indian law and politics in the Great Lakes area and is currently working on a book about tribal courts in Wisconsin. His edited volume with Brian Hosmer, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building (SUNY Press), was published this year.

“… In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.”   – Andrew Mathews, as quoted in his January 2013 interview with ENGAGEMENT

I would counter by positing that good bureaucracies do not bleach out local context. Instead, they create big, simplified umbrellas that cloak the complex, dynamic range of local circumstances and thereby give the staff of government bureaucracies the space to address local circumstances despite changes in political direction.   I base this assertion on twenty-five years’ experience working with USAID, and on the literature on good governance.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Kyrgyzstan

I came to Washington DC in 1988 to serve as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow at the USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development).  AAAS Fellowships offer scientists an opportunity to apply their knowledge to policy development.  And, in my case, the Fellowship served as a passport to get inside the State Department building, where USAID was then housed.  Once I had my ID pass and was inside the agency, I was often asked by USAID staff why the AAA had Fellows working in USAID.  (They were confusing AAAS with the American Automobile Association, not the American Anthropological Association.)   The AAA is an all-American organization, trusted by everyone, so AAA unknowingly gave me legitimacy to listen in on the internal workings of part of this federal bureaucracy.  And thus I became a “participant observer” inside USAID for two years, learning the language (acronyms) and customs during the first six months, and then becoming an active member of this society.

At the outset, AAAS sent us new Fellows to an intensive three weeks of in-depth orientations and briefings on the institutions that comprise Washington—from Congress to NASA, from the White House to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Smithsonian.  One briefing stands out in my mind.   The presenter showed us a graph. On one axis was the level of knowledge about a topic, and on the other axis was the level of political attention given to the topic.   These variables were inversely related. The more that is known about a topic, the less political attention it gets.

I was given a position as Advisor to the Bureau for Asia and the Near East, in the office of Energy and Natural Resources.   My first assignment was managing an infamous reforestation project in Nepal—created by a Congressional earmark to ship poplar saplings from a constituent’s nursery in Oregon. Nepal has high levels of poverty, not to mention its own native poplars, so saplings weren’t high on the Nepali list for foreign aid.    My immediate supervisor, a social forester, advised me not to talk too much about this project.  Nepal simply was not a priority country.  He also pointed out that 80% of US foreign aid was in the form of “economic support funds”—checks written to Egypt and Israel—so Nepal was actually near the bottom of the remaining 20% of the budget described as “development assistance.”

Nevertheless, as an actor within this bureaucracy, my supervisor did his best to leverage the reforestation project into something that did more than airlift poplars from Oregon. He worked around the edges to provide assistance that was appreciated in Nepal—and then he threw away all the records of the project when he was transferred to another assignment.  When I saw him dumping out the files, I asked him whether we didn’t need to keep records of what had been done.  He said no, that it was better for the agency not to keep such records.   And thus I learned how dedicated people inside a bureaucracy can use those big, simplified umbrellas to fulfill a professional mission and address local concerns, even when the paperwork and politics push in a different direction.

I entered USAID during the transition from President Reagan to President George H.W. Bush.  There was a flurry of activity creating documents for “transition teams.” In effect, those documents served as ideologically-aligned, simplified umbrellas that shielded the professional, non-ideological work of the agency.   Again, these big simplifications did not bleach out local complexities, but rather covered for them.  During the transition, I discovered that agencies like USAID are run by political appointees, and I watched as President Bush inserted his people from the top down to the level of office director.   Our new office director met individually with each of his sixty-two person staff.  When he met me, the “AAA representative,” he said he was pleased that American business had a representative interested in “environment” inside USAID. Then he said that I needed to understand one thing: USAID was to do nothing to stop pollution. In fact, he continued, we should encourage it because US companies have the “predominant capability” in technologies for cleaning up pollution.

Over the first year, this appointee made it his personal agenda to remove biodiversity conservation from USAID’s mission by adding a “screen” that would stop all biodiversity-related activities and projects.  He believed that biodiversity was a fad whose time had passed, and he wanted to test the political power behind it.  Instead, he ended up being removed from his post because a memo promoting his anti-biodiversity plan was leaked. His memo shamed the administration and strengthened the political power of biodiversity conservation.  At his going-away party, we gave him a piece of window screen with paper cutouts of birds and rabbits taped to it along with a card that read, “We wanted you to have this screen, through which birds and bunnies cannot get.”  He laughed.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Bolivia

After my Fellowship ended in 1990, I had learned the language and culture well enough to be recommended for a new position in a USAID project.   During the 11 years I worked on that project, I again came to appreciate how those big simplified umbrellas can provide cover for dedicated agency staff and local context.   One case stands out.  Our project was able to work with black-listed NGOs in Indonesia because Jakarta had signed an agreement with Washington exempting USAID-funded projects from review against the Suharto government’s black list.  Nonetheless, the project needed its $12 million budget authorized by Congress, and USAID staff knew there were powers who would not want our project authorized.  In the mid-1990s, the paperwork for our project was placed in a stack under a simple cover sheet, which listed a different project instead of the Indonesia project.  No one in Congress looked under the cover sheet to see the details, and Congressional authorization was given on the basis of the umbrella cover memo.  After authorization, Congressional anger was impotent.

Several years later, that multi-million dollar project gave a $15,000 grant to a small NGO. This small NGO was inviting organizations from across Indonesia to a workshop in a village whose river was being heavily polluted by an American mining operation. Women in the village claimed that the pollution was damaging their vaginas because they had to stand in the polluted river to wash clothes and bathe.   Just before the workshop was to occur, the US Ambassador made a phone call directly to the NGO’s staff and instructed them to cancel it. It was inappropriate for an Ambassador to intervene in this way, and we took action to prevent it from becoming a precedent that could limit all future work.  Armed with staff knowledge of Congressional schedules, our allies were able to meet with concerned Members of Congress in both parties and build support for the workshop. But even this was not enough.  Higher levels of power were mobilized by the mining interests.  Only after an ally convinced Vice President Al Gore to step in did the mining interests back down and the workshop proceed.

None of this would have been possible without the big, simplified umbrellas of bureaucracy.  Without the opportunities I have had to be a participant observer within bureaucracies that use these umbrellas, I would not have understood how to play on the insiders’ team.  When our Indonesia project ended, a senior USAID official said to me, “this was the best project USAID ever did in my entire career … and it will never do another one like it.”  The project’s legacy continues more than a decade after it ended in 2001, in the good relations and capacity built among over 150 NGOs and the birth of the indigenous peoples’ federation of Indonesia. The project illustrates, with apologies to James Scott, how career staff in this bureaucracy made judicious and effective use of the “umbrellas of the weak” to achieve positive outcomes despite political obstacles.

March at the founding of the indigenous federation in Indonesia.

Please see the related references below, including Judith Tendler’s classic book on how giving bureaucrats the freedom to make decisions contributes to good governance and good government.

Janis Bristol Alcorn holds a doctorate in botany and anthropology from the University of Texas and has served as President of the Anthropology & Environment Society.  She currently works as the Deputy Director for Social and Environmental Soundness in a USAID-funded project based in Washington, DC.  From 1988-1990, she was an AAAS Fellow in USAID.  From 1991-2001, she was the Asia Director for the Biodiversity Support Program at WWF.  Since 2002, Dr. Alcorn has worked as a consultant for private foundations, NGOs, and USAID projects.  Her current engagements also include serving as Chair of the Theme on Governance, Equity, and Rights with the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy and as Adjunct Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute. 

Related references:

Alcorn, J.B., John Bamba, Stefanus Masiun, Ita Natalia, and Antoinette Royo (2003)  Keeping ecological resilience afloat in cross-scale turbulence:  An Indigenous social movement navigates change in Indonesia. Pages 299-327 in C.Folkes, F.Berkes & J.Colding, eds, Navigating Nature’s Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK.

Tendler, Judith (1997) Good Government in the Tropics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tendler identifies five central themes connecting the successes she identifies:

(1) Government workers demonstrated an unusual dedication to their jobs. (2) The government made efforts to instill a sense of mission in the workers. (3) Workers were more flexible and responded to the perceived demands of the clients. (4) Both workmanship pride and increased community pressures limited corruption and malfeasance. (5) A three way dynamic between the state government (central government), local government and civil society did not fit the stereotypical roles in terms of building civil society.

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.

ENGAGEMENT editor Rebecca Garvoille recently caught up with 

Andrew S. Mathews

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

AM: Well, it looks at how forestry—as an internationally circulating science of how to manage forests, extract resources from them, and bring them into the future—arrived in Mexico in the early twentieth century, and how it encountered landscapes and indigenous people in Mexico.  I focus particularly on a certain part of Mexico, the southeastern state of Oaxaca, with the idea that this could give some insight into how the science of forestry got incorporated into how people understand forests and then how indigenous people learned about forestry and reworked it and ultimately came to turn it back in some measure against the authority of the state.  So it’s about the domestication of a globally traveling science and how that science modified landscapes, and how the science of forestry turns out very surprisingly not to be a very helpful ally for state intervention.  Forestry turned out to be a much less hegemonic or friendly tool for powerful people than we might assume it to be.

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

AM: There were a number of different things that I wanted to do in this book.  One of them was that I had been reading the classic political ecology when I went to the field, and I was interested in questions of control over landscapes and resources.  Nevertheless, I felt that the ecological aspect of a bunch of political ecology hadn’t been developed as much as I would have liked it to be.  And of particular concern to me was this idea that different kinds of politics come into being in relation to ecologies.  So the ecology of pine forests and pine-oak forests in Oaxaca actually engendered particular forms of politics.  This inspired me to pay attention to non-humans as actors who actually produce different kinds of politics.  So that was one part.  The second part came when I was writing the book, when I really became aware of work in science studies on political culture and epistemic culture and how these two relate.  And I found this wonderfully fruitful set of connections between classic work on state-making and politics and Mexican anthropology, and much more recent work in science-and-technology studies which engages with the ways in which knowledge is constituted in different societies.  And that combination worked really well for me because I could focus very closely on how the Mexican forestry bureaucracy worked and how it had to respond to multiple audiences and how, rather than being this solid structure or authoritative agency, it was really much more timid and hesitant and episodic and fragmentary than I thought it was going to be. I thought that bureaucracy was this big thing that did things in the world, and the longer I work on it the more I’ve come to realize it’s much more of a rather theatrical performance where many of the people involved are only partly convinced of the whole business.

RG: Your work draws on political ecology. How do you see political ecology intersecting with the concerns of environmental anthropologists?

AM: I actually don’t think of myself as being a political ecologist.  To me political ecology is one part of the vast range of work by geographers and historians and anthropologists and science-and-technology studies people who are interested in the ways humans and non-humans collaborate to make worlds.  I actually draw upon many domains of scholarship for my work. For instance, I read environmental history quite seriously, partly because I love telling stories about landscape change, partly because history is a wonderful method for sliding through or past apparently authoritative states.  And what I mean by that is that government institutions claim to be a certain thing that exists in time and to be very enduring, very solid.  But when you look at them over a long period of time they turn out not to be anything like that.  And somehow following the history of, say, pine forests or a landscape and how it slips past and only partly connects with human efforts to control it really helps you understand what kinds of affordances landscapes have for political projects, what kinds of weaknesses states have for controlling landscapes, how they engage or don’t engage, how they slip past each other on many occasions.

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?

AM: That’s a great question.  Well, in some measure, I had different personas.  First of all, I’ll start with the indigenous communities in the Sierra Juárez.  I ended up working mainly in the Ixtlán de Juárez, although I did go to some other places also.  And I was really working with the forestry technicians and foresters—I actually went into the field with them a lot.  So clearly my identity was tied in with them.  Therefore, I know that people who were wary of them were probably also wary of me.  And that just goes with the terrain of doing fieldwork in a small town.  But I had of course to get permission from the indigenous community leaders to be there.  So I did quite a lot of work around communicating what I was doing, including a poster that I gave to people, and I gave a presentation toward the end of my time there.  So I engaged in quite a lot of communication with local people. I told them I’m writing the history of the forest here, and people really understood that as being a sensible project and something they could make sense of.  I thought that was helpful.

Working with forestry officials was kind of different, partly because I was then at the Yale School of Forestry, and I’m actually trained as a forester.  I was situated between forestry and anthropology.  So my identity as a forester was extremely helpful in making initial contacts within government agencies.  After that it really has a lot to do with personal chemistry and who finds your work interesting.  A number of forestry officials were themselves extremely troubled about their own institution, so they actually were excited to talk to somebody whom they could tell their stories of discomfort and to share that with me as a fellow forester who actually understood the technical terms. So indeed my identity as a forester was very helpful in allowing me to have certain kinds of conversations with forestry officials.

And finally there was sort of a middle ground of environmental NGOs and environmental activists, who were intermediaries between the state and indigenous communities.  With them it was a pretty comfortable fit because most of them were around my age, it seemed like, though some were a little older.  And they were all also trying to do some of the same kind of work that I was doing, which was traveling between indigenous communities in forests and bureaucracies in town.  So there were some similar kinds of pilgrimages that we were making in a way.

RG: How did your fieldwork spark lasting collaborations or engagements in your study site?

AM: One of the things I tried do was to go back in 2008-2009.  For various reasons, it’s been a bit hard for me to travel back. And the most surprising part of it for me actually is that… well, I have very personal connections with people I worked with in Sierra Juárez, which I haven’t chosen to write about in many ways but which matter a great deal to me.  With forestry officials, when I returned in 2008-2009, they were just happy to see that I was carrying on, doing my work, and they were happy that the book was coming out.  I have one Spanish language article, where I say some critical things about the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), and I thought they would be upset about it.  But actually they were really happy about it.  So their attitude has been much more of, “we’re glad that someone is writing about our world” rather than worrying that I’m saying something impolite.  That was a very pleasant surprise. My more recent work has actually been looking at how climate change and forests are getting packaged together, and quite a few of the people involved in that world were working in forests when I was working there for my long-term fieldwork. So it turns out that personal connections are tremendously important for ongoing research relationships.

RG: You mentioned that some of the forestry officials were receptive to your critique.   Have you had any further engagements with them?  For example, have they invited you to speak?

AM: Yes, actually.  There was a conference on pulling together all the research on Oaxaca’s forests last spring (put together by David Bray at FIU), and there were a lot of people from indigenous communities there.  I talked about a classic environmental anthropology point, which I made in a forthright way by defining forests in Oaxaca as a product of histories of fire and of agricultural abandonment.  Therefore, I argued, these were deeply anthropogenic forests.  And the thing that really struck me was how this point resonated with the indigenous activists and community leaders in the audience.  I was really happy about this is turning out to be helpful.  In fact, that’s coming out in a conference proceedings…  So there are these ongoing relationships with what I call the environmental practitioner-activist community in Oaxaca.

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

AM: One key point would be that ethnographically we find that knowledge bureaucracies like the Mexican Forest Service (but there are many, many others around the world) are usually very fragmented, they’re often uncertain, they have to build alliances with a whole set of different actors: officials above, critics, publics, all kinds of clients; and that this has really huge effects for what kinds of things they know and don’t know.  The kinds of things that become official knowledge about forests in the Mexico case depend very greatly upon the nitty-gritty details of encounters between officials and non-officials.  So, the argument I make is really that it turns out that if you’re going to know something about what happens in distant forests you have to have very good alliances with the indigenous communities who live there.  Which is kind of the opposite of much of the argument that you might hear about how official knowledge gets made.  It’s not this sort of dominating gaze of the state.  It’s rather this state that has to find allies and get them to sign on for a certain way of seeing the world.  And I think it’s rather contrary to much of what we think about states.  And I hope that my argument based on my fieldwork in Mexico will be a kind of invitation for other people who work on conservation or climate change or many other environmental fields to think about how their institutions also might have these similar kinds of processes taking place.

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

AM: I think that there is some literature in environmental anthropology which paints conservation institutions as authoritative bad guys. I think that this is partially true, but I also think it greatly overstates how powerful these institutions are.  Instead of looking at discourses of conservation, we need to pay attention to the nitty-gritty detail of who is doing conservation management—how many people, where they are, what they’re doing, how often they’re there.  Because it seems to me that much conservation is so fragile and episodic that it just can’t possibly be this authoritative actor that some versions claim it to be.  And that’s just a question of empirical method.  If you actually trace institutions and careers and where people are, you come up with a very different account of conservation, for example, than if you trace conservation discourse in official documents, which is absolutely valuable, but needs to be supplemented with this who-what-where-when part of conservation.

RG: What would you say are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussion about social and environmental justice?

AM: Anthropologists have long been saying, “look, there’s all of this important local detail that matters: local ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge about forests, indigenous ways of understanding the world.”  And they say, “what happens when outside actors like conservation institutions or government policies come in is that they don’t pay attention to these details.”  And it’s absolutely true that this is the case.  However, this is exactly what any government official would tell you, or any conservation official.  In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.  So we tend to get stuck in a situation of saying, “we see for the local against the power of the global or the outside.”  And I’ve kind of tried to invert that and say, “look, there are moments when details matter a great deal because how conservation gets done affects the careers and the stability of forest institutions or government officials.”  So I’ve tried to look for the back path, the ways in which humans and non-humans but especially publics affect the stability of these institutions because government officials will say, “well, we’re so sorry we can’t pay attention to details of what happens in your village, but that’s how it is.”  But if we tell them stories about how people like them lost their jobs because they didn’t pay attention to the details, then they’re interested.  So my long-term hope is really to say, “look, the details matter to people like you,” meaning officials, and maybe they’ll be receptive to that kind of argument.  Certainly in conversation, I think, they are receptive because most of them feel under enormous pressure.  They’re really stressed out. They have an agenda of twenty things they’re supposed to do, and they’re struggling with how to make sense of a very confusing landscape.  So we can cultivate our understanding of their predicament; maybe cultivate a little bit their fears of why their predicament is unstable; maybe make them a little more receptive to other ways of understanding the world.  This is actually what Sheila Jasanoff calls “technologies of humility,” which, I think, is not a bad metaphor.  Technology has to be created, but it has to be more humble and more willing to consider alternatives.

RG: You were talking before about how your work is being read by forestry officials in a particular area of Mexico, in Oaxaca, where you work.  So it does sound like, in that sense, your work may be actively shaping the management of nature in your study site.

AM: I would say very modestly.  People are very busy.  They don’t necessarily have time to read the kinds of things that we write. I think it’s actually our job to write very simple, bold, one-page summaries of what we have to say.  We have to become more comfortable with the simplification of our work.  Because we have to tell stories that people can take away with them to explain the world to themselves.  For instance, towards the beginning of my book is this image of a person walking off a cliff as they’re blinded by a newspaper in their face.  I think that an image like that with a brief accompanying text about how it links to the lifeworlds of officials is worth a great deal.  The agenda of a bureaucrat is infinitely long, and they have to pick up which things from the agenda they can actually respond to.  So thinking of a really good story or image to anchor a really simple point we have to make is actually quite valuable. My hope is that the thing that will attract their attention is the sense that people like them have in the past suffered when they did not pay attention, that the kind of stuff we love—ethnographic detail—matters in certain ways to people like them.  Maybe that’s the hook.  I can’t say that I’ve managed to do this in huge ways, but that’s certainly my approach to trying to make anthropology meaningful and relevant to these kinds of actors.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Andrew S. Mathews, for your time and insight.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve worked as a volunteer – a citizen anthropologist – in the collaborative conservation movement sweeping across the American West.  I co-founded the Arizona Common Ground Roundtable in 1997.  For the next five years, we (the Roundtable) sponsored forums across the state to bring ranchers, environmentalists, and sportsmen together to talk about the future of Arizona’s wide-open spaces. We found our common ground by paraphrasing political analyst, James Carville: “It’s land fragmentation, stupid!” Then I chaired the Ranch Conservation Task Force of Pima County’s visionary Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP), which seeks to conserve both biodiversity and working ranches around the Tucson metropolitan area.  For the last decade, I have served on Pima County’s Conservation Acquisition Commission (CAC). The CAC provides recommendations to the Pima County Board of Supervisors on how to spend the $170 million in Open Space Bonds that voters approved in 2004 to support the SDCP.

Above all, I am a member of the board of directors and a Community Representative of the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance (AVCA), a grassroots group of ranchers based southwest of Tucson, Arizona.  According to our Vision Statement, “Ranchers and other agriculturalists work effectively with our partners to conserve healthy and productive working landscapes, promote a thriving agricultural economy, and sustain a resilient rural community enriched by the culture and history of the Altar Valley.”

Before I discuss how we’re trying to make that vision a reality, however, I need to provide some historical background on why my rancher friends and I – and ranchers all over the twenty-first century rural West – have formed community-based collaborative conservation groups (CBCCs), like the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance. The United States government launched a revolution in Western land tenure and land management a century ago.  Led by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the federal government “reserved” vast portions of the public domain as national forests, monuments, and parks (Egan 2009, Brinkley 2010).  Most of those land withdrawals were carried out by executive order, not legislative act, because the extractive interests that dominated Congress would have killed them.  But Congress did create the U.S. Forest Service (1905), the National Park Service (1916), the Bureau of Land Management (1946), and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (1940), and the laws that determined their missions.[1] The result was a mosaic of private, state, and federal lands across the West—what historian Donald Worster (1992: 44) calls “a hybrid of capitalist and bureaucratic regimes, each assuming it knows what is best for the nation’s pocketbook and for nature.”

Ranchers, loggers, and miners spent much of the twentieth century either fighting those “bureaucratic regimes” or attempting to co-opt them.  But the contradictions and tensions within the hybrid West were exacerbated as more interest groups—environmentalists, sportsmen, recreationalists—demanded their visions for public land management be recognized as well.  The proliferation of “multiple uses” on federal lands engendered a zero-sum game that promoted gridlock rather than progress (Cawley and Freemuth 1997).  By the late twentieth century, conflict intensified as interest groups became ever more polarized, with federal land managers caught in the middle, beset by lawsuits and debilitated by unfunded mandates and shrinking budgets.

To retain a voice in this increasingly challenging federal arena, rural producers have formed grassroots community-based collaborative conservation groups (CBCCs) throughout the West.  These groups pursue a variety of political and ecological goals. Many of the producers, especially ranchers and foresters, depend upon federal or state trust lands for at least a part of their livelihoods.  There are now so many CBCCs that a number of umbrella organizations, including the Quivira Coalition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition in Portland, Oregon, have emerged to bring these groups together and provide regional forums for their concerns.

Even though ranchers and foresters founded them, CBCCs are fundamentally different from older commodity organizations like cattlegrowers’ or loggers’ associations. Rather than becoming another interest group, CBCCs attempt to bring individuals from different interest groups together to promote the long-term health of particular landscapes. Moreover, CBCCs are not temporary political coalitions.  In many cases, CBCCs avoid taking stands on controversial issues.  Instead, the successful ones serve as nodes that bring producers, environmentalists, scientists, and agency personnel together.  Their goal is to search for the common ground that unites people rather than to remain trapped within the issues that divide them.  CBCCs are trying to stitch the West back together again in an intangible but fundamental way: by bringing together people with different interests, ideologies, and backgrounds to speak with rather than at each other.

The common ground they discover usually turns out to be literal as well as metaphorical:  a watershed, valley, mountain range, or county.  And common goals often revolve around ecological processes that cut across the jurisdictional boundaries that carve up the West: the movement of wildlife, the spread of invasive species, the flow of water, the reintroduction of fire as a natural disturbance in fire-adapted ecosystems. As such, CBCCs serve as means to conserve those regions; they organize or participate in specific projects.  They develop burn plans and help carry out prescribed fires.  They restore eroded gullies.  They improve wildlife habitat or build and maintain rural roads that capture runoff and reduce erosion.

Another shared goal is economic: a desire to keep ranch and forest lands from being converted into subdivisions and strip malls.  To prevent urbanization, however, rural producers have to be able to make a living off the land.  It is not easy to be a rancher or a forester in the modern West, especially during a recession.

One possible source of income in the future may be conservation itself.  The Forest Service is already awarding stewardship contracts to thin forests to reduce fuel loads to CBCCs in some national forests (see an overview article in American Forests). In the future, federal, state, county, and municipal agencies may discover that contracting CBCCs to carry out such conservation projects may be more cost-effective than doing it themselves.  If a second revolution sweeps across the West, and if federal and state agencies develop more inclusive and collaborative decision-making processes to manage public lands, CBCCs may provide the critical institutional framework needed to partner with government agencies to stitch the West back together again, one watershed at a time.

The Altar Valley Conservation Alliance (AVCA), like our fellow Arizonan CBCCs, such as the Malpai Borderlands Group in southeastern Arizona/southwestern New Mexico and the Diablo Trust outside Flagstaff, exemplify these trends. In 1995, ranchers in the Altar Valley southwest of Tucson came together to create the AVCA. Inspired by the Malpai Borderlands Group, AVCA ranchers wanted to return fire to their high desert grasslands and keep the valley as a working landscape—open and unfragmented by subdivisions that were sprawling across the rest of southern Arizona.  The AVCA became a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization in 2000, the same year it completed an assessment of the Altar Valley watershed funded by the Arizona Water Protection Fund.

Those were hard years.  During the late 1990s, Arizona was ground zero in the Western range wars. Environmentalists, land managers and ranchers battled over the environmental impacts of cattle grazing. With its headquarters in Tucson, the Center for Biological Diversity targeted the Chilton family ranch and its Montana grazing allotment in the Coronado National Forest, arguing that Chilton cows were degrading Forest Service lands (Sheridan 2001). Co-founders of the Arizona Common Ground Roundtable as well as the AVCA, the Chiltons fought back, suing the Center for Biological Diversity for malicious libel.  Courts eventually awarded the Chiltons $100,000 in damages and $500,000 in punitive damages, but rancor and bitterness were the order of the day. Conflict between ranchers and the first director of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which occupies the southern third of the valley, only added fuel to the fire. The refuge had been a working cattle ranch and many ranchers resented its loss, especially after the director made his anti-grazing views known.

Today the AVCA and the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge are close partners who share personnel and equipment as they carry out conservation on the ground, not in the media or in the courts. Thanks largely to the efforts of the AVCA, land managers in the Altar Valley are starting to think like a watershed instead of as a patchwork quilt of competing jurisdictions. The AVCA spearheaded the development of the Altar Valley Fire Management Plan, one of the largest in the West.  That plan is being put into action through a grant for $150,000 from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Sky Island Grasslands Initiative. The grant has funded the preparation of five prescribed burn plans, which cover public lands under the jurisdictions of the Bureau of Land Management, the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, Arizona State Trust Lands, and Pima County as well as private ranchlands. Another key partner is the Arizona Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which will provide liability insurance in return for having its fire manager supervise the burns. To paraphrase the fire manager for the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, the AVCA is stimulating its county, state, federal, and private partners to think outside the box and work together across boundaries to accomplish conservation on a watershed scale.

The AVCA is also working on an Altar Valley Watershed Charter, sponsoring workshops and bringing together volunteers and the Pima County Transportation Department to restore gullies and redesign rural roads to reduce erosion.  The AVCA is even working with Pima County to develop a bond proposal to secure funds to carry out a major study of the watershed to determine the best ways to restore the main trunk of Altar Wash.  David Seibert, a graduate student in the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology, spearheaded our early efforts, obtaining grants from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and Freeport McMoran, a mining corporation, to restore upland washes across the valley.  His work will be continued by Sarah King, the AVCA’s new Program Coordinator. Sarah is married to Joe King, one of the sons of Pat King, AVCA’s president. The King family has been running cattle on the Anvil Ranch in the northern Altar Valley since the late 1800s.  Sarah King and Sherie Steele, our Project Administrator, are the AVCA’s first part-time employees, helping us make the crucial transition from an all-volunteer organization to one with paid staff.

Seventeen years of common projects and face-to-face communication have created a network of partnerships in the Altar Valley based upon mutual trust.  AVCA works closely with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the USFWS, the Arizona State Land Department, the NRCS, TNC, and Pima County’s Natural Resources, Parks, and Recreation Department, among others.  AVCA Community Meetings generally bring thirty to fifty people together—ranchers, representatives from county, state, and federal agencies, members of other conservation NGOs—to share news, learn about issues, collaborate on conservation projects, and stay in touch.  The AVCA website disseminates our work and that of our partners to a much wider public.

Because of our track record, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation recently awarded the AVCA a second grant of $382,000 to integrate prescribed fire with watershed restoration.  The AVCA also received the Quivira Coalition’s Clarence Burch Award in 2010, while the Sonoran Institute honored me with one of its Faces of Conservation awards in 2007.  It’s been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with the AVCA and to bring my anthropological training to bear on an ever-changing political and ecological landscape. In addition to the land management issues outlined above, we face other challenges, including a Southwestern climate that is growing hotter and drier and a shared border with Mexico that moves drugs and migrants through our valley every day.  We don’t always agree about these challenges, but we’ve learned to identify our common ground and to agree to respectfully disagree about the rest. That’s the heart of the collaborative conservation movement. It’s also the foundation of democracy. The people I’ve come to respect are the pragmatists who get down in the trenches and try to solve common problems, not the ideologues who are content to snipe from the sidelines.

Dr. Thomas E. Sheridan holds a joint appointment as Research Anthropologist at the Southwest Center and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. A life-long Arizonan, he has authored or co-edited twelve books about the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Dr. Sheridan is a past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society. He and two co-editors – anthropologist Susan Charnley of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan of the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center – are currently preparing Stitching the West Back Together: Conserving Working Landscapes and Biodiversity in the American West, a book on collaborative conservation for the University of Chicago Press.

Notes

[1] Both the BLM and the USFWS are in the Department of the Interior.  The BLM was created in 1946 when Congress merged the U.S. Grazing Service (established by the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934), with the General Land Office, founded in 1812.  Congress established the USFWS in 1940 when it combined the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and the U.S. Biological Survey, both of which evolved out of earlier federal agencies. The USFWS was reorganized in 1956.

References

Brinkley, Douglas. 2010. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: Harper Perennial.

Cawley, RM and J. Freemuth. 1997. A Critique of the Multiple Use Framework in Public Lands Decision Making. In Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics, ed. C. Davis, pp. 32-44. Boulder, CO:  Westview Press.

Egan, Timothy. 2009. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Sheridan, Thomas E. 2001. Cows, condos, and the contested commons: The political ecology of ranching on the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. Human Organization 60(2): 141–152.

Worster, Donald. 1992. Cowboy Ecology. In Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, pp. 34-52. New York: Oxford University Press.

The story of Wildgrass is one of organizational adaptation to the dynamism of present-day China’s politics and its rapidly changing social and environmental needs. After four years of working with the organization, I consider my role in Wildgrass as more of an “exchange” than an “engagement” because of our reciprocal relations. We’ve shared knowledge and influenced one another on multiple levels, providing me a unique perspective to view changes in the organization over time.

Wildgrass was established in 2007 when most of the organization’s members were recent college graduates – all of whom had ties to and experience working with older environmental NGOs that had sprung up in Sichuan Province since the late 1990s. Because of the China’s political climate, most Chinese NGOs do not have the freedom and separation from government that we tend to associate with civil society in the West. For instance, Wildgrass itself is technically registered as a unit of the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Agriculture. Yet such a relationship has not necessarily impaired Wildgrass from fulfilling its goals and creating successful projects.

From its inception, Wildgrass focused its efforts on collaborating with communities to increase environmental awareness via the dissemination of information, either through the media or educational programs. In 2007, Wildgrass worked with local farmers who lived near the famous wildlife preserves of Wolong and Bifengxia, or the UNESCO Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries. Many of Wildgrass’ early projects were partnerships with the World Wildlife Federation’s China Branch. In contrast to the WWF’s implementation of conservation biology programs, Wildgrass took a different approach to local conservation by engaging directly with the knowledge and practices of rural villagers. In this sense, the organization has always drawn on anthropological approaches, which made it easy for us to establish a collaborative relationship.

While Wildgrass was promoting conservation activities in the 2000s, local villagers were becoming more integrated into the Sichuanese economy, primarily as migrant laborers, and were eager to upgrade their lifestyle. One major change was the construction of what people considered to be more sanitary household toilet facilities.

Typical toilet in rural Sichuan

The typical rural bathroom in the mountains of Sichuan is a pit in the ground, placed slightly uphill from a pig sty.  Logs are spaced out ever so slightly above the pit, and a small outhouse-like structure is built around the logs, which (trust me) is difficult for an outsider to use without feeling a bit of “vertigo.” Waste from the latrine flows to the pig sty, where it is consumed by the pigs or flushed out into a nearby field along with the waste produced by the swine. Seen by villagers as a low-tech and unsanitary means of dealing with human waste, this more traditional waste management system is being replaced by “modern” outhouses that include running water and the squat toilets found in the urban centers of Sichuan. Yet, most villages are not equipped with sewage or treatment systems, so waste from these newer outhouses is typically flushed into the nearest stream.

Despite its severity, this source of water pollution is not the one which most concerned us at Wildgrass. With the gradual disappearance of the latrine-pigsty collection of nightsoil, farmers needed to find additional means of fertilizing their fields. With slight improvements in the local transportation system and extra capital from their salary as migrant laborers, some farmers began to purchase chemical fertilizers. Like much of China’s scarce fresh water supply, the water in rural Sichuan is increasingly polluted due to agricultural runoff. Addressing this problem through official regulation was unrealistic given the difficulty in identifying the source of such water pollution. Instead, Wildgrass encouraged households to continue using the nightsoil fertilization technique without sacrificing their desire for improved sanitation at home.

Enter the waterless ecological toilet, which we began to promote in rural villages in 2008. The eco-toilet helps separate urine from feces and collects the waste material in a sealed compartment underneath the toilet to be cleaned out and used as nightsoil in agricultural fields.[i]  Many of our initial attempts to promote the eco-toilet concept were limited to demonstration projects in villages. Only a handful of residents were interested because the eco-toilet still didn’t conform to their concept of a “modern” toilet.

In May 2008, the Wenchuan Earthquake struck Sichuan Province and devastated homes in many communities where Wildgrass was working. Immediately the organization focused its efforts on making sure that residents of these communities were safe and able to access to food, blankets and shelter.[ii]  I was introduced to Wildgrass while working in Sichuan in early 2009.  The organization was eager to continue promoting eco-toilets in rural mountain communities, particularly since there was a great need for them after the earthquake. Over a period of some five months, we supervised the construction of 400 eco-toilets in eleven different villages around the Province. Wildgrass provided the basic design of the toilet, while each household helped with construction and adapted it to fit their home. One family even decided to put their eco-toilet on the second floor.

A villager’s brand new eco-toilet!

Our collaboration on this project made us realize how much we had in common.  My academic background in anthropology and their hands-on experience in promoting environmental conservation led to a very similar outlook: the only way the project would succeed was by patiently working with our mountain communities. We first needed to clearly inform the residents about the toilets and then allow those who wanted to participate in the project to approach us directly. This strategy ensured their engagement and that villagers would maintain the toilets after we left. Thus, perhaps even more important than the toilets themselves was an educational component that taught local children how the toilet worked and why the use of nightsoil for agricultural purposes was healthier than using chemical fertilizers.

Two things happened directly after this project was completed that made the organization change its course once again. First, China Central Television discovered the eco-toilet project. CCTV awarded Wildgrass a large prize and offered them the opportunity to get their message out to a national audience. This was followed by an invitation from the U.S. State Department to take part in a tour of American NGOs. About a year later, I was also asked by Wildgrass to help interact with a U.S.delegation as they toured through Sichuan.

Second, the eco-toilet project thrust the organization into the Chinese organic farming network, which was growing on the heels of contaminated food scandals, such as the infamous poisoned baby formula. These events renewed our commitment to promoting environmental awareness via education and the media. Over the past two years, for example, Wildgrass has been working on a documentary about rural food systems and the dangers they face. As this closely aligns with my own anthropological research on adaptive agricultural strategies in culturally diverse mountain communities, we’ve also been considering conducting in-depth ethnographic fieldwork to compliment the documentary. Meanwhile, Wildgrass has also begun to take its cues more directly from the communities with whom it is engaged – building their insights into its approach to agricultural problem-solving. The major concern of farming communities is how to generate income while continuing to live in the countryside.  For the past three years, Wildgrass has been working to help rural communities connect with markets in urban centers, where there is a demand for high-quality organically grown food.

Working with locals to husk corn and planning construction of a new eco-toilet.

Certainly each of these projects has had its ups and downs. For instance, a close friend of mine coincidentally was working on her M.A. research in one of the villages where we constructed about 100 eco-toilets. She discovered that for a household of three, the toilets were quite effective, but for larger families, the composting compartment might fill up in a few weeks and thus prevent waste from properly composting before being used as nightsoil. Additionally, a lack of dependable transportation has plagued the organic food network. While markets do exist in the city, the wholesale purchasers are unwilling to hire trucks to pick up the produce. This has placed the burden of transportation costs, which are quite high, on villagers and undermined the project’s sustainability.

These challenges aside, I believe that the story of Wildgrass provides an important window into the world of Chinese civil society. On one hand, Wildgrass is committed both to helping communities manage their needs as they become more integrated with the Chinese market and to informing them about the environmentally friendly options that are available to satisfy those needs. On the other hand, without a traditional mission statement, Wildgrass has developed the flexibility to engage with social and environmental issues as they arise in China– issues which seem to change almost literally with the seasons.  In this regard, Wildgrass is not necessarily unique. Similar to other Chinese ENGOs, Wildgrass remains beholden both to the political whims of Chinese governance and also to domestic and international financial sources. These factors make for an excellent opportunity to examine how grassroots organizations in China operate as an adaptive form of civil society that may not be commonly found in other parts of the world. In many ways I feel I’ve learned as much, if not more, from the organization as they have from me.

Edwin Schmitt is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  His past research interests included commodification of agriculture, ethnic tourism and hydropower development in Southwest China. His dissertation research is focused on examining the linkages between the ritual and agricultural systems of three different ethnic groups living in rural Sichuan Province and their adaptation to ecological, social and political change.

Laura Ogden, author of the new book Swamplife

EE: What is the theme of your new book?

LO: First, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to talk about my book and to have a conversation about engagement.  My book has several themes – but the main concern is to try and think about how the Everglades, as a landscape, comes into being through the shifting dynamics of multiple species, including people (hunters and scientists), alligators and mangroves.  As part of this central concern, I was interested in using some ideas from philosophy (particularly Deleuze and Guattari) to experiment with writing landscape ethnography.  I was also interested in doing justice to the lives of rural, working-class people who are associated with the Everglades, while at the same time playing a bit with the myth of the Everglades outlaw.

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

LO: My work lies at the intersection of political ecology and science studies.  Like many environmental anthropologists, I am very interested in mapping the ways in which nature’s politics foster the inclusion and exclusion of certain people and certain other species.  I have extended traditional concerns in political ecology by asking about the politics of other species and, in doing so, about what constitutes the human.

EE: How did you engage with different communities while you were doing the research for your book?

LO: My book is based on collaborations with several different groups of people associated with the Florida Everglades.  Certainly my book would not have been possible without my close ties to alligator hunters in the Everglades.  I spent about ten years interviewing hunters, starting with an oral history I wrote right after I finished my MA in anthropology.  This was a collaboration with a dear friend, who was like a grandfather to me.

I have also been very fascinated by what used to be called the natural sciences.  Even though I belong to the generation of anthropologists who were trained at the height of the science wars, and I have written critically about scientific metaphors, I just love what scientists do – the fieldwork, the obsessions with algae, forest canopy ecology, wading birds, etc.  I have been very lucky to be able to learn about how science makes the world in specific historically constituted ways. I really cherish my collaborations with scholars in the N.S.F. Long-Term Ecological Research Program – they have helped me understand ecology from the “inside” and avoid some of the easy assumptions we tend to make about science in the abstract.

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

LO: Well, that depends on the reader.  But, in general, I hope to humanize the Everglades a bit.

EE: What are the broader contributions of your work to debates over environmental conservation and its implications for social and environmental justice?

LO: My work with Everglades hunters has been important to those communities in ways I never anticipated.  Over a decade ago, I used the term “gladesmen” to describe the white hunting culture associated with the Everglades (I published a book with that title).  Over the past few years, the term has become fairly political in that hunting groups and others now use it to assert their rights to the landscape and as a way of forcing a place at the decision-making table.  “Gladesmen” was not a term people used traditionally – it just worked for me.  Now, there are clubs of self-described gladesmen, websites, and the like.  While this has been gratifying in some ways, it also has contributed to public discussions about culture that are not particularly helpful.  These discussions feel, to me at least, like an ongoing effort to establish an “authentic” Everglades history and culture – which seems static and exclusionary as well.  Still, poor people have really paid an enormous price so that we can have national parks, including those in the Everglades, and I am grateful if my work can remind us of that price.

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

LO: Each thing we create (books, films, articles, talks, etc.) we do for different reasons and different audiences.  I wrote Swamplife because I wanted to think about some ideas about animals and humans, and I also wanted to write it like the kinds of books I like to read.  The books I like tend to be ethnographic, about ideas, and also attentive to writing – I love Kathleen Stewart’s book Ordinary Affects, as an example.  So, this book was not really intended as a book that speaks to policymakers or conservation organizations.

I have several projects that engage conservation organizations in the US and in Chile, where I am working now.  Those collaborations will shape the outcome of my next book, which is going to be about ethics and what I am calling “animal diasporas.”

Thank you again.