Antoinette M. G. A. WinklerPrins

Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek's Vision

1 Amazonian soils are almost universally thought of as extremely forbidding. However, it is now clear that complex societies with large, sedentary populations were present for over a millennium before European contact. Associated with these are tracts of anomalously fertile, dark soils termed terra preta or dark earths. ese soils are presently an important agricultural resource within Amazonia and provide a model for developing long-term future sustainability of food production in tropical environments. e late Dutch soil scientist Wim Sombroek (1934-2003) was instrumental in bringing the signifi cance of these soils to the attention of the world over four decades ago. Wim saw not only the possibilities of improving the lives of small holders throughout the world with simple carbon based soil technologies, but was an early proponent of the positive synergies also achieved in regards to carbon sequestration and global climatic change abatement. Wim’s vision was to form a multidisciplinary group whose members maintained the ideal of open collaboration toward the attainment of shared goals. Always encouraged and o en shaped by Wim, this free association of international scholars termed the Terra Preta Nova Group came together in 2001 and has fl ourished. is eff ort has been defi ned by enormous productivity. Wim who is never far from any of our minds and hearts, would have loved to share the great experience of seeing the fruits of his vision as demonstrated in this volume. William I. Woods Wenceslau G. Teixeira Johannes Lehmann Christoph Steiner Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins Lilian Rebellato Editors Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek‘s Vision W oods et al. ds.

House-lot gardens in Santarém, Pará, Brazil: Linking rural with urban

The division between rural and urban sectors of the landscape in many parts of the world is increasingly blurred. House-lot or homegardens offer a perspective on understanding rural-urban linkages since they are frequently a landscape feature in both settings and the exchanges of their products link the two. House-lot gardens are an under-researched component of the agricultural repertoires of smallholders in many parts of the world. Urban house-lot gardens in particular, have until recently not received much attention despite their critical importance to urban livelihoods. This paper presents findings from research on house-lot gardens in rural and urban zones of Santarém, Pará, Brazil, one of Amazonias largest municipalities. The research demonstrates that garden products are important for household subsistence, but even more importantly product exchanges between rural and urban kin households help sustain critical social networks that subsidize urban life. Gardens are a link between urban and rural settings as products, germplasm, and household members move between the two. People are urban and rural at the same time which demonstrates that households can be multi-local.

Pastoral Herd Management, Drought Coping Strategies, and Cattle Mobility in Southern Kenya

Livestock mobility facilitates opportunistic grazing management strategies that pastoralists employ to counter environmental variability in rangelands. One such strategy is moving livestock to temporary camps that are closer to areas of underutilized forage during times of drought. In areas where pastoralists graze near large protected areas, movement into protected areas, where both forage quantity and quality are higher, is also a common strategy. The aim of this study is to test hypotheses of herd relocation and effects of seasonality and herd size on spatially explicit parameters of cattle mobility for Maasai pastoralists along the northern border of a protected area in Kenya. Modified Global Positioning System (GPS) collars were placed on cattle from ten Maasai households that recorded three parameters of mobility for hundreds of grazing orbits from August 2005 to August 2006. Data were grouped by two constraints—seasonality and herd size—and tested against the two types of enclosure locations (temporary camps and permanent settlements). Hypotheses were formed on the basis of the current knowledge within the literature and analyzed using a series of analyses of variance. Results suggest that household relocation reduces the stress faced by pastoralists and their cattle during the drought by (1) lowering the average total daily distance and time traveled by cattle, (2) directing cattle toward the protected area, and (3) concentrating cattle grazing in distinct areas within the protected area. Herd size was found to have no effect on duration of travel for pastoralists that choose not to relocate during the drought. The research demonstrates how the use of modified low-cost GPS collars can be an effective tool for capturing parameters of mobility and for inferring pastoralist–livestock–rangeland relationships.

SEASONAL FLOODPLAIN-UPLAND MIGRATION ALONG THE LOWER AMAZON RIVER*

A current pattern of seasonal migration, particularly among smallholders, is marked by movement between the Amazon River floodplain and upland bluffs near the city of Santarém, Brazil. Nearly fifty years of jute cultivation “subsidized” residents of the floodplain, enabling them to remain there year‐round. Without this subsidy, annual flooding and the concomitant seasonal dearth of cash‐economy activities make permanent occupancy difficult. The present‐day seasonal migration and complementary use of both upland and floodplain environments has broad implications for theories about past patterns of settlement and for the regions future sustainable development.

Further reflections on Amazonian environmental history: Transformations of rivers and streams

Despite the increasing sensitivity of researchers to historical and contemporary landscape manipulations in the Amazon basin, there is still a powerful consensus in both popular and scholarly literatures that, with the exception of predatory deforestation, the physical environment of the region is largely unmodified by human intervention. An emerging body of scholarship has challenged this view by describing ways that Amazonian populations have managed terrestrial ecosystems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In this research report, we present both new and previously published data showing that Amazonians also intervene in fluvial systems, manipulating rivers and streams to modify the landscape. We argue that these practices, occurring in many different forms, are widespread and commonplace throughout the region, and that, taken together with the emerging evidence for terrestrial manipulation, provide compelling reason for a fundamental reassessment of conventional views of Amazonian nature.

Real or Perceived: The Environmental Health Risks of Urban Sack Gardening in Kibera Slums of Nairobi, Kenya

Cities around the world are undergoing rapid urbanization, resulting in the growth of informal settlements or slums. These informal settlements lack basic services, including sanitation, and are associated with joblessness, low-income levels, and insecurity. Families living in such settlements may turn to a variety of strategies to improve their livelihoods and household food security, including urban agriculture. However, given the lack of formal sanitation services in most of these informal settlements, residents are frequently exposed to a number of environmental risks, including biological and chemical contaminants. In the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, households practice a form of urban agriculture called sack gardening, or vertical gardening, where plants such as kale and Swiss chard are planted into large sacks filled with soil. Given the nature of farming in slum environments, farmers and consumers of this produce in Kibera are potentially exposed to a variety of environmental contaminants due to the lack of formal sanitation systems. Our research demonstrates that perceived and actual environmental risks, in terms of contamination of food crops from sack gardening, are not the same. Farmers perceived exposure to biological contaminants to be the greatest risk to their food crops, but we found that heavy metal contamination was also significant risk. By demonstrating this disconnect between risk perception and actual risk, we wish to inform debates about how to appropriately promote urban agriculture in informal settlements, and more generally about the trade-offs created by farming in urban spaces.

The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D., 1000–2000

The first three of these chapters situate the analysis in the discourse of globalization, especially the particularities of global–local interactions. The second of the following two chapters on urban conditions—by Swapna Banerjee-Guha on Mumbai—is also located in the same discourse. Banerjee-Guha follows David Harvey’s characterization of capitalist urban economies to critique Mumbai’s current conditions, especially the increasing emphasis on the service sector and centralization of urban infrastructure. Her relentless attack, based on thin and selective evidence, takes no cognizance of Mumbai’s growth—from 8 million in 1981 to 18 million in 2001, a rate that is historically unprecedented—and the immense dexterity needed to manage this growth. Her kind of reflexive antimarket rhetoric makes the critique itself irrelevant. It ensures just as reflexive a dismissal by the often capable people managing the Mumbai phenomenon. The other urban chapter is by Stephen Legg on the discourse of development in Delhi. Legg uses the term “governmentality” (from Foucault) to critique planmaking and plan-implementation institutions in Delhi, from the inception of New Delhi (1911–1931) through the current master plan, in terms of the explicit and implicit colonialism of these efforts. A good companion piece for this chapter (although it is not placed as such in the book) is the one by Annapurna Shaw on the realities of decentralized planning as seen from the perspective of a small town (Diamond Harbour) in West Bengal. This chapter is richly detailed with the nittygritty of local politics and the contextualized nature of “success” and “failure” of fiscal decentralization. Shaw is also admirably nonjudgmental, in sharp contrast to several fellow authors who seem to know what the answers are before any inquiry is undertaken. There are two chapters on ecological issues. Glyn Williams and Emma Mawdsley survey the proliferating Indian ecological literature, with an emphasis on critiquing the well-known works of Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha. Paul Robbins’s chapter on “carbon colonies” (which I understand to mean “forests”) appears to be thoughtful and knowledgeable. I cannot comment further on these two chapters because I am unfamiliar with this literature. This leaves two usual but interesting chapters. Chapter 12, by Craig Jeffrey and Patricia and Roger Jeffery, poses a very interesting question: Why do rural people who have not derived material benefits from their relatively high level of education nonetheless value it? The first author is a geographer, the latter two are sociologists, and their open-ended inquiry is a pleasure to read, even if, maybe especially because, they do not arrive at firm conclusions. The other chapter (16), the last in this volume, is by Richa Singh and Richa Nagar; the former is an activist in rural Uttar Pradesh, the latter an academic in the U.S. Their chapter, describing the aftermath of the publication of a book called Sangtin Yatra, is part poetry and part soap opera and quite incomprehensible. It is hard to see how either of these two chapters fits into a self-defined text on “geography,” however broad the circumference of the discipline. Everything has to happen somewhere, but does that mean that everything is geographical? To paraphrase Forrest Gump: “An edited collection is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” It will be obvious to the reader that I found this box of chocolates, on the whole, to be tasty. There are some genuinely good pieces and some obviously indifferent ones. Most important, the collection conveys a sense of India’s diversity—not only of its people and places, but also a good chunk of the intellectual issues of significance. The material covers different geographic scales, magnitudes, locations, and time periods. The voices range from curious to expert, dispassionate to lyrical, and crisp to turgid. I found most of the material engaging and some of it annoying, but the engagement to annoyance ratio was a healthy integer, always a sign that the editors have chosen well.