A PROPOSITION ABOUT COMPLEX TRADITIONS

            The proposition is this: Traditional small-scale farmers have a knowledge base that is fundamentally sound, and that knowledge base is structurally similar to the growing scientific understanding of ecological complexity.  It is a proposition that may stir a dichotomous response, at least initially.  On the one hand I suspect that there will be those who say, that’s obvious, we have known that for years and it is simply not news for anyone vaguely familiar with anthropological or rural sociological work.  On the other hand, there is certain to be an angry rebuke, noting that excessive reliance on traditional knowledge is frequently nothing more than romantic claptrap and the modern science of ecology relates to traditional knowledge much as modern aviation might relate to belief in the reality of the wings of Icarus.

            If my proposition seems too obvious to bother with, I argue that recent advances in the field of academic ecology have changed the way we look at ecosystems.  Rather than the ordered equilibrium-like processes formerly thought to underlay assemblages of species, a residual of Newton’s world view, new computer-based analytical techniques have been brought to bear on ecosystem dynamics.  We now understand that issues such as complex network structures, spatial dynamics, nonlinearities and time lags, create unusual expectations and challenge older notions of stability and sustainability (including such new buzzwords as resilience and resistance among others).  Furthermore, new molecular tools have provided a new lens on processes as they happen in nature, complimenting the experimental approach that ecology had adapted in the decades of the 70s and 80s.  Putting these two things together, complex theoretical approaches and new examination tools, we have a new ecology, one based as much on the insights of complex systems as on natural history, and one which rejects the naïve assumptions of the Newtonian world view and its magical clockworks universe. 

            If my proposition seems too romantic, I argue that the transformation of world agriculture at the end of World War II ignited a passion of irrational exuberance that has led to meltdown after meltdown, from massive pesticide resistance to hypoxic ocean zones, such that the wisdom of the traditionalists, even on the surface, is worth reconsidering.  Indeed, the assumption that we can continue with the model we developed in the wake of WWII seems far more deserving of the charge of romanticism. Furthermore, a discerning historical lens reveals a structure that has long been with us.  None other than Robert Boyle noted that insights from the “trades,” when coupled with systematic scientific structures, represents a nutritious recipe for fundamental scientific discoveries.  That is, the “wisdom of the ages” is wiser than we think.  It just uses different words to describe things.  As Richard Levins has noted, traditional agricultural knowledge is deep but specialized, while scientific knowledge is broad but shallow.  That advanced scientific knowledge should come to be seen as in accord with some of the principles long held by traditionalists, should not really be a surprise to anyone not religiously committed to the modernist myth.

            In the end this dichotomy (the charge of obviousness versus the charge of romanticism) seems resolved with the emergence of the non-Newtonian consensus and the reemergence of respect for traditional knowledge.  The structure of the universe is no more the result of a watchmaker than is the evolution of an organism, and, through experience and historical memory, traditional knowledge can provide more insights than rigid adherence to a program that was originally designed to understand the mysteries of the Judeo-Christian watchmaker.  Probing the intersection of deep but specialized knowledge with broad but shallow knowledge, in pursuit of the broad and deep paradigm, seems a worthy goal.

REDD AND WHAT BOSS TWEED SAID

            In answer to a question about the poor in New York City, Boss Tweed is reported to have said “I’m not concerned with the poor.  If they give me trouble, I’ll pay half of them to kill the other half.”  Unfortunately it seems that some ecologists are saying something similar these days, albeit not with the disgusting flair Boss Tweed was known for.  Rather, in an astounding failure to heed their own warnings about unanticipated consequences and indirect effects, the theoretical (and increasingly actual) consequences of programs such as REDD (Reduced Emissions through Deterred Deforestation), climate-friendly agriculture (a new World Bank scheme), and more generally payment for ecosystem services, are rarely pondered.  Consequently, when grass roots social movements come out in strong rejection to such programs, ecologists and the NGOs that claim to speak for them, seem like a deer in the headlights.

            In my experience ecologists (and increasingly ecological economists) have not even thought through the objections of these grass roots groups.  When Annie Leonard (famous for her viral video “The Story of Stuff”) came out with a very clear and well-presented argument against “cap and trade,” she lost the fawning support of many ecologists who thought The Story of Stuff was great. Her argument actually is part of a larger argument about payments for ecosystem services.  Whether you agree or not, it is important to at least understand what the issues are.   Simplifying a bit, the argument can be summarized with four interrelated points.

1) Poor farmers and communities in the Global South have been protecting their agroecosystems and forests for many years before the entire idea of payments for ecosystem services.  Why should they now begin serving bloated carbon emitters in the North?  It is at least ironic, and a bit insulting, that the major culprits in the current global ecological crisis are the ones calling on family farms and communities in the Global South to help them out.  To suggest to the poor of the Global South that they serve as an excuse to continue polluting and earth-destroying production activities is reverting to the past where the poor of the Global South provided the raw materials at remarkably unfair terms of trade, to the capitalists of the industrial world.  Rather than supplying raw cotton to the textile mills, they now are expected to supply the legal ruse that permits giant energy companies to continue with business as usual.  Exon, rather than cleaning up its refineries, bribes a small community in southern Mexico to NOT cut its community forest down.  Effectively carbon is “extracted” from the Global South at bargain prices. In addition to insulting, it does little to change the pattern of emissions since most of the payments are for things that people had been doing for generations and almost certainly would continue to do even without payments.  The slogan of Via Campesina “Our carbon is not for sale!” is telling.

   2)  Most schemes of ecosystem service payments involve, either directly or indirectly, some sort of affidavit, a stock or bond so to speak.  The energy company buys from the community a promise not to cut their forest down, and agrees to pay x amount of money each year to do that.  If that particular company sees a downturn and is forced to downsize, there is nothing to stop it (indeed there are structures that encourage it) to sell that promise to another company.  Once these affidavits begin generating their own markets (hard to imagine that NOT happening), the same sort of speculative behavior can be expected as we have seen in the past, with the sequential bubbles that “inexplicably” burst at regular intervals.  As prices of affidavits increase, the land on which they are based is also likely to inflate, and investors will begin the process of land acquisition.  (indeed, some analysts have suggested that the “land grabs,” especially by China and India, in recent years are at least partly a consequence of this new speculative market). Small scale farmers and poor communities may have little resistance to such pressure, leading to massive abandonment of the countryside and swelling of the cities.  And the payments will eventually go to whichever rich capitalist was able to buy the land from which the peasants were excluded.

3) Land speculation is likely (indeed some analysts have claimed that it has already begun) to create antagonistic class struggles within the poor classes.  The farmer who receives payments suddenly has not only extra money but also extra incentive to purchase his neighbor’s land.  Buying into the system by one newly rich (comparatively) class to the detriment of the other class, whether intentional or not, is what Boss Tweed said.  If Exxon can arrange it so that farmers in the Global South are fighting with each other over who will serve Exxon, it will have engineered the proverbial win-win situation for itself.

4) Many, perhaps most, programs of payment for ecosystem services will dictate certain aspects of how the ecosystem is to be utilized, ranging from not cutting trees (REDD) to tillage constraints (climate-friendly farming) and undoubtedly many others.  Which payments go to which communities and which farmers is a decision that will be made by agencies ranging from the World Bank, to the IMF to the BINGOs (e.g., Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund) to local governments/militaries with questionable motivations (e.g., the Mexican government in Chiapas whose main concern is to put down the growing Zapatista revolution). Peasants and peasant communities who go along with these schemes, while they prosper in the short run, in the long run they loose a bit of sovereignty over their own land.

In the end, REDD and REDD+ and REDD++ and climate-friendly agriculture and any of the other proposed schemes will likely be opposed by popular social movements.  Unfortunately, academics with careers to nurture play the same game as speculators with capital to maneuver.  The urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is likely to blind many people to the collateral damage likely to be caused (we already see this happening in Mexico) and encourage participation in these schemes.  And once participation begins, it is difficult to change a funding pattern (it is always surprising to me how cheaply academics can be purchased). With regard to agriculture, the overwhelming importance of the industrial system as a contributor to GHG emissions is now well-established and should be opposed.  Trying to elicit the support of small-scale agriculturalists and communities in the Global South and asking them, implicitly, to relinquish a part of their sovereignty over their own productive enterprises is akin to the drunk looking for his lost keys on the wrong side of the street simply because the light is better there.  Challenging Monsanto or Exxon is daunting.  “Helping” the poor farmers sell their sovereignty in the name of GHG emissions is a lot easier.

PSYCHOPATHIC MONARCHIES

The democratic ideal that emerged with the Enlightenment has been hijacked.  It is worthwhile looking at how that happened in anticipation of the next world experiment in modernity, hoping to avoid generating just another royal structure.  To this end we ask, who precisely hijacked the original ideals of the Enlightenment, how can we regenerate those ideals in principle, and, finally, how can we avoid a future hijacking.

            The first principle was formally completed in 2010 in the USA, with the Supreme Court finalizing what had been a long struggle by advocates of corporate power.  The Court recognized the free-speech rights of corporations.  The notion that a corporation was a person, long advocated by the US version of corporate control was now complete.  All the individual rights inscribed in the US constitution, essentially the rights enshrined in Enlightenment ideals, now became rights for corporations also.

            Leading up to this formalization was the slow but sure entrance of corporate interests into the political and judicial system.  Through the vehicles of lobbying and lawsuits, Corporations have been able to construct legal systems in their favor, place advocates in any regulatory positions remaining, and file lawsuits against individuals (or, rather, other individuals).  The use of lobbying to “influence” legislation is not new, but in the past 20 years has become so dominant that any legislation that disfavors the corporate system simply cannot be placed on the table for consideration.  Legislators are vastly outnumbered by lobbyists and it is well known that most legislation is dramatically influenced by or even simply written by those lobbyists.

            The well-known revolving door approach to regulation has also become standard operating policy.  Government regulating positions are filled with industry representatives, mainly representatives of those industries that are supposed to be regulated.  Subsequently, after a time in the government position, regulators either return to, or gain entry positions in the industries they had been “regulating.” 

            The final nail in the coffin is provided by armies of lawyers who jump to the cause of filing lawsuits at anyone, or any institution that dares to challenge corporate authority.  The actual lawsuit itself is largely irrelevant.  It is the cost of litigation that allows the agency with the deepest pockets to prevail.  Criticism of corporations has thus been effectively limited to private conversations, much as serfs who may have hated the lord would never criticize him in public. 

            So, the basic idea of individual rights, where individuals are real flesh and blood people, is largely an idea of the past.  There are some individuals, corporations, who have the rights, and, like monarchs of the past, exert supreme authority.  Their claim to absolute authority is structurally identical to the more traditional monarchs, an unquestioned ideology that says so.  In the past it was the authority of an omniscient being.  Today it is the authority of an omniscient economic philosophy.  The monarchs of the past didn’t say it in precisely this way, but Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark that “there is no other alternative” is, from a policy perspective, equivalent to “God willed it.”

            Given that the world has decided to live under a monarchy once again, it is worthwhile to ask what kind of a king or queen do we actually have.  This question has already been asked in the context of a corporation as an individual in the book and movie “The Corporation.”  What sort of an individual is our king?  Taking the formalities of modern psychiatry seriously, a rigorous diagnosis is evident.  With their disregard for human welfare, for environmental sustainability, and inability to see the negative consequences of their actions on others, the new king would clearly be diagnosed formally as a psychopath.

            So, in the end, our brave new world resembles the pre-Enlightenment world in that we have a monarchy, but this time, by its very nature, our monarch is a psychopath.  History is filled with other examples of monarchs who were arguably psychopaths, but never before have we been able to see so deeply into the psyche of an individual.  The corporate individual is open to examination by his/her own actions and especially his/her intentions, which are written down for all to see and examine. And those actions and intentions without doubt place our new king/queen well-within the medical definition of psychopath.

            As in the 17^th century, today we also have a whole corpus of thinking that challenges the legitimacy of this arrangement.  And much as in the early days of the European Enlightenment, we have the radicals who say we need to construct ideals such as freedom, equality and democracy.  But similarly, we also have the revisionists who say such utopias are not reasonable and we need something to replace royal authority or “chaos” will reign.  Let us remember that it was the revisionists of the past who set up the system such that monarchy could return in another guise, whether the English Revolution of 1640 or the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution.  If we give in to the revisionists today, we set the world up for yet another discouraging experiment.  If we learn anything from history it is that “radical Enlightenment” thinkers had it right from the start, from Spinoza to Payne, and the revisionists from Voltaire to Hamilton were the culprits who set us up for failure.  Freedom, equality and democracy are not relative terms.  Pursuing them as absolute principles demands a radical departure from the monarchies of the past, whether the traditional monarchies of real kings and queens or the modern monarchies created by the international corporation.  The struggle takes on many forms, from philosophical reflections and debates to the storming of the Bastille.  All concerned serfs have a place.  Acting together we can move back to the “radical” ideals of real Enlightenment thought and get it right this time.

BIODIVERSITY: DO ECOSYSTEMS “FUNCTION”

As so frequently happens, new debates resembles old ones.  In the early part of the 19^th century biologists pondered the question of function, mainly regarding anatomical parts.  While it would seem obvious that the function of a fin is to swim and the function of a wing is to fly, what of the appendix?  And could there be negative function of normal characteristics?  Is the function of the hand to grasp or to make a fist to defend oneself?  It seemed patently obvious that philosophically all one had to do was eliminate the structure and see what happens.  But deeper thinking philosophers correctly pointed out the folly of such experimentation (cutting off the hand, would we conclud the function of the hand was to keep the blood from spilling out the arm?). 

            The problem was, it seems, a failure to articulate the question properly.  To the question “what is the function of x” one must always qualify, “with respect to the desired condition y. “  And it seems rather arbitrary what might be the condition y.   The debate was largely rendered moot with the paradigmatic shift in favor of the Darwinian revolution.  Rarely does anyone seriously ask what is the function of x any longer, but the question “what is the adaptive significance of x” is the question that biologists, probably intuitively, sought to ask in the fist place.

            We are currently witnessing a growth in the idea of ecosystem function.  Yet serious questions about what that might mean are only rarely brought up.  On the one hand there are obvious functions, pollination of crops, control of pests, provisioning of nitrogen to tree plantations.  However, in all such cases the implied normative content of function is obvious, and the conundrum that is parallel with the original anatomical use of the word function is scarcely recognizable.  Yet it is there.  The implied “with respect to y” makes the original question,” what is the function of biodiversity?”, have meaning.

            There is a philosophical problem here.  Words not only have specific meaning, they also carry a halo of context, baggage so to speak, from previous usage.  In their passion to promote the conservation of biodiversity, advocates tacitly sought to leverage this context to their advantage.  If something has a function that implies that the predicate in which it is functioning is normative.  That is, we wish it to “function well” and if it is “unfunctional” or characterized as “with negative function,” we seek to “repair” it.  Using this normative aspect of function is sensible under many situations.   The switch on the wall functions to turn on the light, the light on my computer screen functions to allow me to read the text I type.  And with biodiversity, biodiversity functions to make pollination of crops more efficient, or to control pests, or to control decomposition so as to provide nutrients in a timed fashion to the trees in the plantation, or to increase the yield of the fishery.  In all such cases the predicate is clearly implied and the conundrum faced by early anatomists is resolved by admitting a normative goal.

            However, the problem returns  when talking about non-managed systems, so-called natural ecosystems -- the normative content associated with the word function again rears its head.  In evaluating the function of biodiversity  (or one of its surrogates, e .g., species richness, evenness, connectivity, etc…) in natural systems, the phrase “the function of biodiversity” becomes as curious as the phrase “the function of the appendix” originally was.  Attempts to divest function of its normative content is a fools errand.  The problem is that natural ecosystems are just there and they do not function in the same way as an automobile, or a washing machine or a farm do.  They exist.  The notion that greater biodiversity leads to faster nutrient cycling, for example, leads to the obvious question why would one want to cycle nutrients faster?  Or higher productivity (remember one of the most “productive” ecosystems in the world is a cane sugar plantation)?  In the end, claims that biodiversity contributes to this or that “function” in natural ecosystems boil down to the fact that when biodiversity changes, something about the ecosystem changes too, not exactly a revolutionary idea.

THE CONTINUING CONUNDRUM OF THE SIZE OF THE HUMAN POPULATION

The specter of “too many people” emerges at various scales, from observing the poor single mother with 10 children living in abject poverty in some out-of-the-way place in the Global South, to quantitative estimates of how much energy is fixed by the sun and how many people ultimately could be supported on the earth with that much energy.  It is an old argument.   It has attracted political attention, either accolades or attacks, from its popularization in the 18^th century by Malthus to more recently by some environmental activists. And it worms its way into debates for which it is only questionably relevant, such as the rights of women and the sustainable use of natural resources. 

            At one level this NeoMalthusian position is almost tautologically correct, what might be referred to as the stoichiometric level.  Individual people require energy and the earth has the capacity to produce only so much energy, so there is obviously a limit.  Individual children require a minimum amount of food, a single mom can only provide a limited amount of food.  It is all a question of balancing energy inputs with energy availability.  So, as a colleague of mine once remarked, in looking over a landscape of small farms (clearly a very sparse population), “if only there weren’t so many people here.”  And it is a comment that can always be made, for any situation at all, when taking this point of view.  No children are far easier to care for than ten and no people in the landscape clearly use less energy than millions (or one).

            So it always appears to be the case that whatever environmental problem is of concern, if only there weren’t so many people, that problem would be less severe.  It seems like incontrovertible logic.  But is it?  Consider the following thought experiment.  Suppose you are responsible to plan long term population policy for a country of approximately half a million square kilometers.  Would the country be better off with a population of 127 million people or 2 million people?  Many people would quickly conclude that 2 million is the obvious answer.  However the example stems from a comparison of Japan (378,000 km²) to Botswana (582,000 km²).  Clearly no rational person would suggest that Japan would be wise to reduce its population by 98%.  The difference, of course, is that Japan’s population is engaged in maintaining a modern industrial society, a task that would be impossible with a population of two million.  Yet it would obviously be folly to argue the inverse – that Botswana would prosper like Japan if only it had 125 million more people.  In both cases how those people create the conditions that provide what is necessary for the society to function makes all the difference in the world.

            Japan, like any industrialized country, needs a certain minimum population density to keep its society functioning.  It needs some people to consume the goods that are produced by other people and some people to collect the garbage produced by so many people and people to be police, firefighters, stockbrokers, construction workers, gamblers, architects, scientists, teachers, carpenters, painters, artists, filmmakers, and many many more niches that need to be filled if the society is to be called “developed” or “industrial.”  This is simply to say that there is some minimal number of people that are needed to produce a given level of technological and social development – the “necessary” population.  On the other had, it is certainly clear that a given level of technological development is able to produce only so much of what the society requires.  That is, the given technology can provide for and sustain only a certain number of people – the “sustainable” population.  There is no logical reason that the necessary population and sustainable population need be in balance, at least in the short term.

            Viewing the human population from this perspective is quite different from viewing any other species in the world within the same framework.  It may not seem this way at first, but humans are a completely different kind of species.  Beavers, for example, also have a given level of technology.  They need a certain number of beavers to support a beaver dam of a given height, which is what makes the beaver pond bigger.  A bigger beaver pond makes for more resources for the beavers, meaning that the sustainable population of beavers is larger with a larger beaver pond.  If there are more beavers than the sustainable number, some beavers die.  But as long as there are enough beavers to keep building the dam higher, the pond will continue to expand and more beavers will be born and the actual population will continue expanding.  It will continue expanding, that is, as long as it is below the sustainable population level.  But what happens when the necessary number, the number needed to keep the dam at its current level, is greater than the sustainable number?  If the natural situation requires say 10 beavers to keep the dam at its current level, but the pond that results from that level can sustain only 9 beavers, the population of beavers will decline by one, to a density of 9.  But with only 9, the dam cannot be maintained. When the dam gets lower so that 9 beavers can maintain it, the resulting pond will have resources for only 8 (say) beavers, leading to further decline.  The necessary population can construct a niche for itself to provide sustenance for only a certain number of individuals, the sustainable population.  In general, when the sustainable population is equal to the necessary population, we can expect an equilibrium – no further changes.   

            A moment’s reflection reveals how the human animal is profoundly different.  Because we are capable of complicated language and social constructions, we interact with one another in ways no other social species could possibly imagine.  A beaver population below its sustainable level will inevitably increase its numbers.  But a human population below its sustainable level may or may not increase, depending on decisions made by the individuals, decisions that are a complex consequence of negotiated perceptions of the environment.  To take an obvious example, consider a small farming community producing agricultural products for its own consumption.  Whatever the agricultural technology (irrigation canals, or terraces, for example), its maintenance will require a certain number of people – the necessary population.  And with that technology enough food can be produced to sustain a particular population density – the sustainable population.  Consider what happens when the existing population is less than the necessary population.  By definition, the technological infrastructure cannot be maintained.  Suppose at the same time the existing population is less than the sustainable population.  That means that more food than necessary will have been produced, again, by definition.  The experience of the population will be “we have used a very intensive technology to produce more food than we need!”  Why produce more than necessary?  Indeed, under such a circumstance the tendency will be to reduce the intensity of the agricultural technology to bring production in line with the population’s requirements. 

            Consider an alternative situation in which the available technology has produced less than the existing population needs, which is to say the existing population is greater than the sustainable population (for the given level of agricultural technology).  The experience of the population will be one of food shortage.  Viewing food shortage, the population will almost inevitably try and increase the level of agricultural technology so as to produce more food next year.  But what if the population size necessary to increase that technology is greater than the extant population?  The experience of a food shortage is almost certainly going to trump the evident fact that there are not enough people to maintain, let alone increase, the agricultural technology.  Thus, there will be a tendency to increase agricultural technology, and perhaps even a tendency to look for more people to incorporate into the population (calling on relatives from nearby villages to move in to help with the work, or even, if it is a longer term perception, seeking to have more babies). 

            These two scenarios point to the fact that humans create a population dynamics that is the reverse of all other animals.  When the existing population is below the sustainable but above the necessary density, the tendency is to decrease technological intensity.  When the existing population is above the sustainable, but below the necessary the tendency is to increase technological intensity, and perhaps to increase the population.  The exact reverse of what beavers (and all other animals) do. 

            In general terms, human social decisions create the technologies that provide for the needs of the population.  A certain minimal population is necessary to provide for those needs.  But also, a given technological level can sustain only a certain number of people.  If that sustenance is below what the actual population requires, the local experience is not one of “overpopulation” but rather of scarcity and the response is always to produce more.  Producing more, however, generally requires more people.  The irony is that the increase in production that may result is not guaranteed to be sufficient to accommodate the increase in population required by that increase in technological intensity.  A subtle snowball effect may thus emerge with a population striving to produce more and more and, in order to do so, bringing more and more people into the environment, requiring yet more to be produced.  While such a dynamic process is not inevitable, it is certainly is plausible, and probably characterizes many historical examples.

            In summary, within this general framework it is not the case that population is irrelevant, but the simple idea of  “overpopulation” looses any sensible meaning.  Certainly the crude stoichiometric calculations of Malthus and his followers fail to provide interesting insight.  There are times when it is rational to want more people to come into a population, and other times when the reverse is true.  It depends on socioeconomic and political considerations, not discourses about numbers.

Reference:

Perfecto, I., and J. Vandermeer. 2010.  The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model.  PNAS 107:5786-5791.

SAINTS AND COMMUNISTS IN BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION: COMING TO GRIPS WITH POVERTY TRAPS

From the early days of the Western World’s concern with the preservation of tropical biodiversity it has been apparent that biodiversity hot spots are mainly located in regions where poverty is an evident social problem.  Crude consequences were sometimes proffered (e.g., imprudence about family planning leading to deforesting offspring), but for the most part the evident structural problem was acknowledged from the beginning.  Alleviation of the poverty so obviously associated with biodiversity emerged as the single most vexing problem conservationists have had to face over the past half century. 

            There was, to be sure, also a knee-jerk reaction that saw as the only solution “fencing in” pristineness, sometimes only metaphorically, but sometimes with real barbwire.  Yet for the most part, people and agencies seriously concerned with biodiversity conservation approached the basic problem with a series of sensible initiatives.  Thus we have seen “debt for nature swaps,”  “extractive reserve buffer zones,”  “integrated conservation units,” “payment for ecosystem services” and a host of other initiatives that recognize the need to deal with the issue of local poverty as part of any conservation program. There seems, however, to be general agreement that all such programs have had limited success at best, that poverty is indeed a trap, a recalcitrant problem that continually interferes with serious conservation planning.  But searching for the next magic bullet initiative, although probably inevitable, is not likely to have more success than previous ones.  I am certainly not the first to suggest that failures thus far have not been due to a lack of good will nor of interesting and clever ideas, but rather mainly caused by an unwillingness to ask the basic question – What causes poverty in the first place?  There is a rich history of avoiding this question, articulated in modern times so eloquently by the Brazilian priest Dom Hélder Camara when he said “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint.  When I ask why the poor have no food, they called me a Communist.”

The poverty trap metaphor is compelling, partly because of its humanistic overtones, but also because of its seemingly unchallenged motivational structure.  Envisioning a pitfall trap filled with the poor we can see two obvious interventions, first to help them out of the trap and second, to help them avoid falling into the pit again.  Yet with this metaphorical framework there is a bigger picture, a whole landscape filled with pitfall traps each of which contains not only the poor but an army of development experts frantically trying to help those poor folks climb out and remain out of the devastatingly recalcitrant traps.  There are so many traps, so many people in them, and they pockmark the landscape everywhere we look, so we must redouble our efforts to get more funding to help them, more innovative plans to get them out of those traps, more “development” to help them not fall into those traps in the first place.  Yet it seems that the more we work, the more people become entrapped.  And the reality is that the proportion of the world caught in poverty traps is greater today than it was yesterday and will undoubtedly be greater tomorrow.  It is no wonder that those of us concerned with biodiversity conservation throw up our hands and begin asking for fences and armed guards.

            But the rich texture of the poverty trap metaphor perhaps allows a better vision, if we extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion.  If all these poverty traps pockmark the landscape, doesn’t it make sense to ask where they come from?  Who set the traps in the first place?  If we are to take the conservation of biodiversity as a truly serious issue, we must resist remaining in the intellectual trap of “helping the poor escape the poverty trap” and ask, at the risk of catching the same sort of ad homina launched at Dom Hélder,  “what is the cause of poverty in the first place?”  Who sets the traps? 

            A careful look at poverty’s roots, an exercise we insist needs to be done for the sake of conservation, must conclude that European Imperialism, writ large, set the stage for unequal development of most regions of the Global South (Latin America, Asia, Africa).  In more recent times, that unequal development was reinforced by neoliberal capitalist policies that resulted in unfair and unbearable economic pressure on rural livelihoods, largely a result of political and economic arrangements coordinated mainly from the United States, leading to rural/urban migration, international migration and impoverishment of the countryside.  Given that rural poverty is seen as antithetical to conservation goals, a point now acknowledged by most conservation proponents, truly understanding the roots of that poverty will enable a more intelligent intervention.  If we find poverty’s roots in the unfolding of neoliberal capitalism from its European Imperial roots, should we not conclude that attacking those roots involves attacking the neoliberal capitalist model at its core? 

Fine tuning this attack, I note that tropical biodiversity today is invariably embedded in that very matrix containing the poverty traps.  Modern ecological understanding of biodiversity compels us to ask how the animals and plants that constitute the biodiversity view the matrix.  And the conclusion is inescapable.  A large, pesticide-drenched, pineapple plantation could never be seen as a biodiversity-friendly place – indeed, part of its very purpose is to eliminate almost all the biodiversity (saving only the pineapples, of course).  Mile upon mile of oil palm creates an environment that is dramatically different for almost any animal or plant you can think of that existed in the forest those palm trees replaced.  From a strictly ecological and environmental point of view, large scale industrial monocultures are simply the enemies of biodiversity.  They must be replaced.

A truly effective and long term program of biodiversity conservation must include simultaneous attacks on poverty’s roots and the industrial agriculture paradigm.  Precisely where will allies in developing this program be found?  I propose that the so-called poverty trap/biodiversity conservation dilemma is best addressed by the emerging peasant movements that have as their fundamental goals first, the challenge of systems that are at the root of poverty, and second, the grass-roots construction of sustainable economic activities, especially sustainable agriculture.

            La Via Campesina (‘the peasant way’) is the most prominent and global of these peasant movements. The Movement originated in Latin America, but quickly acknowledged that peasantries around the world share the same problems, leading to a globalization of the movement from below, including an elaboration of a new conceptual framework, the notion of ‘food sovereignty’. According to Martínez-Torres and Rosset (2010, J. of Peasant Studies 37), ‘food sovereignty argues that food and farming are about much more than trade and that production for local and national markets is more important than production for export from the perspectives of broad-based and inclusive local and national economic development, for addressing poverty and hunger, preserving rural life, economies and environments, and for managing natural resources in a sustainable fashion.’ Through this concept, La Via Campesina envisions ‘agrarian trajectories that would reintegrate food production and nature as an alternative culture of modernity’. It is this sort of global/grassroots social movement that has been challenging the neoliberal model of development and has put forward a vision of what geographer Susanna Hecht calls a “new rurality” which would not only contribute to the conservation of biodiversity but also provide a dignified and sustainable livelihood for rural communities.

As we in the conservation community have gradually come to the realization that serious conservation must include programs to “help people escape the poverty traps” we are seen as saints, but as soon as we ask “who sets the traps in the first place” we are communists, sometimes only metaphorical, but sometimes literal.  The inevitability of such ad hominum attacks should not dissuade us from the conservation mission, and we must seek allies among those who share our ultimate values which, I argue, are not to be found in the board rooms of the international corporations that fund the large conservation organizations, but rather in the grass roots small-scale farmers’ organizations that today are more than ever before understanding the true roots of both poverty and the loss of biodiversity. 

A NEW ECTOPARASITE IN THE HUMAN ECOSYSTEM

As all living things, the human species needs energy to do what needs to be done.  We get some of that energy through our social interactions (e.g.,  electricity) but the most essential part is what we need to keep the organs of our body functioning --  our liver monitoring glucose levels, our muscles keeping us standing or sitting, our neurons firing, -- and that is the energy we take in through food.  From a long term historical perspective, most of our past 200 thousand years on this planet has been a sort of parasitic existence, where we steal the energy that other things had harvested from the sun.  We gathered nuts and tubers and berries and hunted the animals that eat those same nuts and tubers and berries.  It was apparently highly successful, just as it has been with many other species that rely on plants to harvest their energy for them. 

            Then agriculture became involved.  By establishing a synergistic relationship with animals and plants (i.e., the process of domestication) we gave them life and they gave us more energy than we could get from our normal mode of hunting and gathering.  We expend a small amount of energy (cultivating the land, planting the seeds, harvesting the crops) and reap much more.  It is a good deal for us.  It is also a good deal for the plants and animals involved.  One of the truly vital things any plant species must do is disperse its seeds, and there is no better seed disperser than us, when we get a hankering to eat a particular kind of plant.  Consequently Zea maize (what we call corn) has a distribution that is millions of times larger than the distribution of its most recent ancestor, teosinte, a weedy grass limited in its distribution to the local areas in and around the central valley of Mexico. 

            But corn got greedy.  Rather than simply being satisfied with its comfortable mutualism with us, where we insure its dispersal around the world and it provides us with energy, it started demanding more and more energy input for less and less energy output.  Much as the infamous Audry II from “Little shop of Horrors” who demanded ever more human blood, corn has entrapped us and demands that we supply it with ever more energy-rich inputs, yet gives us less and less energy output, relatively speaking.  That entrapment comes through the industrial agricultural system that corn (and other crops) have imposed on us since the second World War.  We are forced to supply energy in the form of artificial fertilizer, energy in the form of pesticides, energy in the form of machines that run across the soil and on the roads in the distribution network.  And while corn (and its partners in crime, wheat, rice, beans, etc…) has it great, we are not doing so well.  Indeed, the tipping point was clearly traversed when corn decided to become a biofuel.  With our hardly noticing, it demands that we supply it with more energy than it gives back to us.  And according to basic biological principles, when one organism sucks energy out of another organism, beyond whatever energy it might offer in return, that is the fundamental structure of parasitism.  Corn has become an ectoparasite on humans!

Reflections on the New Rurality

REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW RURALITY

Frequently hearalded as a triumph of the industrial revolution, the Global North has experienced a draining of the countryside as farming became less profitable and jobs in manufacturing and urban services became attractive.  In a sense this could be viewed as a natural process, with social value more regularly concentrated in growing urban centers, to the detriment of the social value embedded in the rural system.  Innovation, creativity, and social experimentation were the hallmarks of the city and resistance to change, dullness and backwardness became associated with rurality.

            Without too much thought, analysts of both right and left persuasion assumed that the same dynamic would soon drive the urbanization revolution of the Global South.  The peasant farmers of what was then called the Third World, would succumb to the lure of the city just as the French farmers could not be kept “down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paris.”  However, while urbanism has grown explosively in the Global South, it has not been driven by the same dynamic.  Rather than the “pull” of the city being the main driving force, the “push” out of the rural has been prominent, mainly due to three forces.  First, international agricultural commodity policy has created a system in which local farmers find it difficult if not impossible to compete in local markets.  The dumping of corn on Mexico since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994 is only the most recent example.  The world over one sees the same process.  Hightower’s analysis of the conversion of Africans to wheat (Hightower, 1973), the dumping of potatoes in Jamaica (Weis, 2004), black beans in Mexico (Lucier et al., 2011), and many other examples highlight how farms in the Global North take advantage of direct and indirect political support (popularly referred to as subsidies) to undercut the productive ability local farmers in the Global South.

Second, the original Green Revolution, while providing only modest gains in the productivity it continues to claim was both its vision and accomplishment, it did have a major effect in transforming farming in several regions of the Global South.  Farming in the Punjab region of India, for example, became extremely concentrated due to the economies of scale involved in the use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, irrigation and mechanization, the hallmarks of the Green Revolution (improved varieties were far less important than commonly believed).  That concentration created difficult economic times for farming at a smaller scale.  The patter repeated itself in many places in the Global South.

Third, partly a consequence of assuming that the same dynamic as seems to have occurred in the Global North would engulf the Global South, planning and investment focused on the cities, not the countryside.  The support network that might have been built for small-scale farming (paved roads, local markets, small villages) was absent.  The consequence was a stagnation of “development” activities aimed at the rural sectors.  Regardless of how committed a farming family was to their local property, when their kids need to go to school, if the only school is in the city, they are effectively forced to move.  If the only true health care is available only in the city,  that is where they are forced to move.

Given these three forces, progress toward the “goal” of moving people out of the rural areas and into the cities has been surprisingly slow.  The famous refusal of the “peasantry” to disappear in the Global South has been as much news as the latest giddy prediction of its eventual demise in the face of the undeterable rise of urban sophistication.  Yet one cannot deny that the forces pushing small-scale farming out of the picture remain strong.  The recent commitment of USAID to promote the fortunes of mainly US corporate interests in the rural areas of the Global South is only the latest move to push farmers off the land to make way for the corporate industrial farm sector to continue its expansion.

Popular movements for the support of and reinvigoration of the small-scale farming sector need to recognize the difference in the overall dynamic forces operative in the initial rural to urban transformation (in the Global North) versus those operative in the transformation currently underway (in the Global South).  While the first can be seen as mainly a “natural” consequence of the growth of industrial capitalism which provided a better material life in the city, the current is a consequence of the loss of what were opportunities in the countryside – the first was due to the pull of the urban, the second due to the push away from the rural.  The social, economic and political support for rural sectors that existed prior to WWII in most countries of the Global North were efficient.  Rural schooling was effectively available, even if the mythology of walking miles everyday to school was sometimes a reality.  Rural health care was common and hospitals were available in most small cities and towns.  Roads, railroads and canals, especially those needed to get products to local markets, were maintained by local and regional municipalities. 

Part of the movement toward more rational small-scaled agricultural production should be the move to support the growth and modernization of social services to rural areas, both in the Global North and the Global South, but especially in the latter.  All children must have access to schools,  all people to health care, and everyone to the social distractions that enrich as well as challenge (theatre, music, science).  As much as we need the techniques of agroecology to promote small-scale farming, we need to reinvent some of the supports, both tangible and intangible, that made rural life not only tolerable, but actually attractive in the first place.  Some of this is already happening, as Susanna Hecht has noted in christening the new situation as the “new rurality.”

Hecht, S. 2008. The new rurality: Globalization, peasants and the paradoxes of landscapes. Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente 17:141-160.

Hightower, j. 1973.  Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times.  Agribuisness Accountability Project, Washington DC.

Lucier, G, L. Glaser, and A. Jerardo. 2011.  Dry bean crop report – Record large black bean production. Bean commission news, 17:2-3.

Weis, T. 2004.  Resturcturing and redundancy: The imparts and illogic of neoliberal agricultural reforms in Jamaica.  J> of Agrarian Change 4:461-491.

DARWIN’S SACRED CAUSE: A POTENT MESSAGE FOR BIOLOGISTS

A review of Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution,    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co. NY 2009.

by

John Vandermeer

In reading this eye-opening book, my feelings about Darwin changed dramatically.  The picture Desmond and Moore paint of him is quite different than anything I had been exposed to in the past.  His stature as a “pure” man of science, a devoté of blindly following where the evidence leads, has changed for me, and no doubt this is part of the intended message of the authors.  But, through the lens of someone who has been a biologist all his life, the picture of this genius in this book is not precisely the picture Desmond and Moore paint of him – very similar but not precisely the same.  There is, in this book, an illuminating message for the community of biologists.

There is no question that Darwin was a fanatic about nature.  From his hunting and taxidermy days to his father’s evaluation that he would be good for nothing but rat catching, to his voyage on the Beagle, he wonders at the natural world, especially the parts we today call geology and biology.  His famous Tangled Bank prose oozes from even his earliest writings.  So, how does a nature fanatic come to grips with the moral dilemma he lived with his whole life?  As so clearly stated in the book, abolitionism was in his DNA. 

In a sense, all human beings face the dilemma he faced, to square one’s passions with one’s sense of moral focus.  For reasons that are completely inexplicable, each human being who has the time, develops passions about some nook and cranny of the world.  But it also seems that each human being who has the time, develops a moral compass about what in the world needs to be done to create a more equitable world.  With the exception of those who obviously take the moral compass to its logical conclusion (Gandhi, Mandela, King, etc…), most people manage to construct blinders and it is even thought to be a sign of maturity when one can ignore that moral compass and focus on one’s passions.

For many reasons, approbation from his father obviously one of them, Darwin was unable to put on those blinders.  What a glorious triumph it would be, he may have thought, to demonstrate that the passion for nature he felt as a naturalist, could serve the moral compass he inherited from his father (and grandfather and family).  The question undoubtedly arose in his mind, “how can I take my passion for nature and turn it into something that benefits the cause?”   A legitimate answer to that question would put to bed once and for all his father’s inability to praise his passion.

The social conditions of the times created the background into which that question was posed.  Two major background conditions were of utmost importance:  First, the idea of evolution was not just in the air, it was everywhere.  From its modern origins in the philosophical anatomy schools of Paris, to the medical schools of Edinburg, to the radical medical schools of London, evolution through common dissent was challenging clerical and scientific establishments throughout Europe.  Second, the abolition of slavery, long before accomplished in most of the world outside of the US, was a passion among all social classes in Great Britain, indeed, even promoted as a way of exerting political pressure on the former colonies (the US was in a difficult economic position, with the slave system essential to keep the economies of the southern states viable).  These two background conditions came together in a most natural way to allow Darwin to answer his fundamental question -- how can I take my passion for Nature and turn it into something that benefits the cause? 

The coming together of these two conditions is reflected in the strong argument, gaining great legitimacy from Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, that God had made all of these different kinds of people for some kind of purpose.  Given the ultimate wisdom of God and his penchant for testing us (remember Job), who are we to question the natural state God imposed on dark skinned people.  The natural order of the world, the one God made for us in the Garden of Eden and took from us after the fall, is one we should constantly strive for as good Christians.  So given the natural order God had imposed, the slave system was not only justifiable, it was God’s will.  This point of view was dramatically countered by the new evolutionary science that had emerged from the French Revolution (and before).  All those different types of humans, just like all the different types of all animals, had evolved from a single ancestor – they were all members of the same family.  Enslaving one line of the family in service of the other, was not justifiable.

Darwin saw, in this major conundrum of the day, the answer to his question.  Could he accumulate enough evidence from his natural history passion to convincingly argue  “we are all in the same family,” thereby crushing (he thought) the argument that slavery was God’s will.  He thought that his scientific argument could serve his moral cause.  Contrary to the passionless robot who blindly seeks scientific truth through a disciplined application of the scientific method (the vision many have of the scientist today), Darwin was a passionate advocate of a political position and used his science to advance that position.  Indeed, as argued in this book, his political position actually drove his science.

The message for today is evident.  It is not that science is or should be independent of one’s moral compass.  Indeed, the drive to make the scientific endeavor “pure,” which is to say independent of political considerations, is as much a pointless exercise today as it was in the mid eighteenth century.  Agassiz’s “science” told him that slavery was nature’s way as much as Darwin’s “science” told him the opposite.  While one could never argue that Darwin in the end actually caused abolition in the US, his coupling of his personal passion with his moral compass seems to have had the dual effect of popularizing perhaps the most important scientific theory of all time, but may have indeed contributed to the demise of the foolish genetic determinism arguments of the proslavery crowd.

Desmond and Moore present an enormous amount of evidence in support of this thesis.  Their interpretation in the end is complex and nuanced and in the end not precisely the normative interpretation I have, but I suspect they would not disagree at any rate.  To simply argue, as they do, that abolitionism was a passion of Darwin is completely evident from the evidence they present.  To argue further that it was a main (perhaps the main) impetus for his persistence in pursuit of his theory is also clear from the evidence.  But the underlying interplay between his passion for natural history and his desire to merge his passion with his moral compass is a further interpretation that I believe gains support in the evidence presented in the book.  More important, it is the message that I believe is the more important one for today’s community of professional biologists.