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.

When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study.  But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Honey collecting, like other forms of forest harvesting or hunting, tends to evoke ideas about a bound type of thing moving in one direction – out of the forest and into a market (wherever that might be).  But what happens when a ‘natural forest’ honey supposedly harvested on an island in the Philippines is manufactured and sold in Manila?  And when this honey’s association with nature and forest environments is hardly natural, but needs to be made apparent by literally rendering the final product green?  How do such commodities relate to the forest honeys actually being harvested by Indigenous experts as part of their livelihoods and lifeways, and being marketed by non-government organizations?  In attempting to discuss the issues that arose from my research, I found that bringing together a range of honey products that had different, yet related, trajectories could be a wonderful prompt for talking about the social and spatial disjunctures that often occur within efforts to add value to certain types of natural resources.

Sarah Webb talking with a honey street vendor in Metro Manila

In the Philippines, Palawan[1] honey is one such ‘value-added’ forest product.  Indigenous experts[2] seasonally harvest honey mainly from Apis dorsata beehives in forested areas on Palawan Island.  For the Indigenous Tagbanua families I worked with, honey is not only a part of their livelihood but also an important source of nutrition, sweetness, medicine and cultural identity.  Within the Philippines, many people are interested in buying Palawan honey because it is a highly valued product with a reputation for purity and quality[3], particularly because of its association with Palawan’s iconic forests and ‘natural wonders’, such as the Puerto Princesa Underground River.  Local Indigenous representatives who market honey promote non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as honey because these products support their current goals for sustainable forest livelihoods.

The notion that NTFPs, like honey, can contribute to sustainable forest livelihoods has influenced international development projects, policies and research initiatives – especially since studies began to suggest that the economic value of NTFPs might exceed that of timber.  ‘Value adding’ NTFPs often means building up markets of more highly valued forest products as an alternative to logging and mining.  The idea is to provide income for forest harvesters, while maintaining the resource base.  However, ongoing research makes apparent the need to approach the potential of NTFP commercialization for sustainability agendas with caution.  Scholars have demonstrated that merely providing more valuable resources will not necessarily address the socio-economic marginalization of forest harvesters, or the concerns of sustainable livelihoods (however these might be conceptualized).  Important research in environmental anthropology has documented how value-adding incentives can pay insufficient attention to the reasons forest harvesters do not have access to valuable forest resources – or why they no longer have such access[4].

Drawing upon this line of research, I examined how the politics of capturing value is a part of the social processes of making products valuable in the Philippines. When I began searching for Palawan honeys sold in Manila, I found that it was not only those interested in sustainable forest livelihoods who were ‘adding’ to honey in order to make it a valuable product.

Adding to Palawan Honey

The reputation of Palawan honey as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ gives it certain market appeal, but has also inspired a burgeoning range of imitation products.  Different ‘fake’ Palawan honeys are made by adding water and sugar, the name of Palawan, and even green food coloring to honey of dubious origin.  On Palawan, campaigns have targeted adulterated honey, which is made by adding water to increase volume, and sugar or kalamansi (native lime) juice to disguise the diluted taste.  In Manila, experts on the honey trade assert that the volume of honey claimed to originate from Palawan exceeds both Palawan estimates for local production and state records of honey transported from the island. Green honey is an expensive[5] product (supposedly rare and medicinal) identified as coming from Palawan when sold across boutiques and farmers’ markets in Manila.  However, according to testing conducted by Dr. Cervancia of the University of the Philippines Los Banos, ‘green’ honey is made green by mixing yellow and blue pigments into the honey – additions which she contends change its composition in such a way that it should no longer, technically, be called honey.

A manlalbet (honey harvester) indicates the location of a hive

So what does a black market for green Palawan honey in Manila mean for Indigenous Tagbanua harvesters? Firstly, Indigenous peoples are often blamed for adulterating local honey.  Although this practice is more likely conducted by transitory middle traders[6], these rumors cause some to shy away from purchasing honey directly from Indigenous harvesters on Palawan.  Some local buyers use such rumors to negotiate a lower price for the honey they buy from Tagbanua families, claiming the honey is of a lower or ‘reject’ quality.  Secondly, my use of the term black market is somewhat facetious. While practices of ‘fake’ honeys are widely considered undesirable, and have been banned by Palawan local government, branding or labeling honey as coming from Palawan (even when it does not) is not regulated at a national level.  At the same time, honey from Palawan does not easily make its way from Indigenous harvesters to Manila.  State permits are required to transport honey, and seasonally driven, local production means that a relatively low volume of honey from Palawan enters the Manila marketplace.

As these forest products are made valuable, particularly through their association with iconic forest environments, a space has emerged for creating even more expensive ‘fake’ honey products.  Such cultural politics are part of, rather than external to, the processes of making products valuable.  Those manufacturing and purchasing such products are actively involved in creating social and economic values of not only honey, but also the ideals of nature through which consumers position their tastes and health in relation to the environments of Palawan and the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples.

Taking Away from Added Honeys: Understanding Commodity Flows and Values through Material Culture

As I investigated these politics of valuing honey, I initially collected products[7] because I was interested in the actual objects of honey marketing.  That is, not only was I interested in what people had to say about honey, or how they behaved during sales encounters, but I also wanted to know what these material objects themselves said about honey production. I was fascinated by the material transfer of honey from the large plastic gallon jugs used during harvest to smaller containers for resale, the colors or textures of the honey itself – indicative of different qualities and tastes – and, of course, the product labels that communicated both explicit and implicit messages to potential customers.  All of this material culture supplemented, furthered, or contradicted what different people told me, and it was in making sense of those relationships and tensions that I was able to understand how Palawan honey is made valuable. But during ethnographic fieldwork, I also noticed collections everywhere I looked – from displays of product samples at non-government organization (NGO) workshops, to samples of ‘fake’ honeys being tested in university laboratories, to the ways people arranged important objects in their homes.  And this made me realize that what I had collected might be of interest to others too, and so the collection became the basis of workshops conducted at the end of my fieldwork.

Sarah Webb and research assistant Mr. Rogelio Rodrigo at a honey collection workshop

For workshops with Tagbanua families, I prepared descriptive labels for honey and beeswax products that included information about the price and provenance, as well as photographs of different contexts of sale.  My research assistants and I arranged these into displays, and talked about the different products, answering any questions participants had.  After doing so, we passed the different objects around, and sampled each – trying on beeswax cosmetics, and smelling and tasting honeys.  At their request, a group of harvesters ran their own tests on the honeys we presented to determine for themselves whether they considered any ‘fake’, and to ascertain differing levels of quality.

Tagbanua families are only too familiar with what they describe as the dangers of ‘fake’ honey – particularly, they fear being blamed for the production of such ‘fakes’, and the resultant punishment by the state or low prices from buyers.  Most Tagbanua people are aware that a fraudulent ‘green honey’ is sold.  But the complex connections and distances between the existence of such commodities and their own experiences can be difficult for any of us to talk about.  When these differently sourced, made, packaged, and promoted honey products were brought together, they provided us with the means of discussing the bigger social stories surrounding the journeys of Palawan honey to the marketplace.

The fate of my collection of honey products was important to me; I hoped that it would remain together, and be able to support ongoing research engagements. To this end, I was thrilled to hand the collection over to NATRIPAL, the Indigenous peoples’ federation of Palawan, as an addition to their own display of sample products collected during their research and marketing activities. In the offices of the organization, we installed the display of honey products and conducted an additional workshop to discuss the collection’s relationship to my research and the federation’s ongoing work. Apart from their nationally and regionally awarded efforts to provide more favorable market relations for Indigenous people and to develop the brand of Palawan honey, NATRIPAL has lobbied intensively for the land and livelihood rights of Indigenous peoples across Palawan.

There are many challenges for environmental anthropologists to work through in considering how collections can be used as forms of engagement.  But there is great potential for harnessing approaches to objects, which have traditionally resided within the fields of material culture studies or museology, for research in environmental anthropology. Visual collections are not just symbolic of what we do throughout our research activities, or simply representative of the issues we are exploring.  They can also act as a means for thinking and talking through pressing social and environmental issues in ways that draw from the experiences researchers and those they work with already have.  And perhaps most thrilling, there is a possibility that such collections might have a vibrant life beyond the intentions of researchers. This is, of course, only one of many innovative pathways for collections to act as powerful tools of engagement.

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.