Daniel Jaffee

Food sovereignty: an alternative paradigm for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation in Latin America

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in Latin America. We then analyze the potential of a food sovereignty framework, based on protecting the viability of a diverse agroecological matrix while supporting rural livelihoods and global food production. We review several successful examples of this approach, including ecological land reform in Brazil, agroforestry, milpa, and the uses of wild varieties in smallholder systems in Mexico and Central America. We highlight emergent research directions that will be necessary to assess the potential of the food sovereignty model to promote both biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction.

A Bottle Half Empty: Bottled Water, Commodification, and Contestation

Bottled water has rapidly been transformed from an elite niche market into a ubiquitous consumer object. Yet the literature on drinking water privatization has largely neglected the growth of bottled water and its emergence as a global commodity. This article draws on Harvey’s analytic of accumulation by dispossession to explore how commodification unfolds differently across multiple forms of water. Based on ethnographic interviews with participants in two conflicts over spring water extraction in rural U.S. communities by the industry leader Nestlé, we make three arguments. First, contestation over bottled water commodification is refracted through competing framings regarding control over local water that illuminate the industry’s shifting accumulation strategies. Second, conflicts over specific instances of water extraction draw on rival narratives of the purity, uniqueness, and/or mundaneness of this commodity. Third, bottled water’s traits distinguish it materially and conceptually from tap water, necessitating a more nuanced analytical approach to its commodification.

Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place: Michael Vincent McGinnis. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. 240 pp.

The present age is characterized by complex social and ecological risks, resulting from human activities that are irreversibly altering ecosystems and the climate. Michael Vincent McGinnis calls for a new approach to confronting these challenges in his book Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place. The concept of ecology of place is based in bioregional theory and ecological identity. McGinnis, an associate professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, is editor of Bioregionalism (Routledge, 1999), and draws on theoretical frameworks from the earlier volume throughout this new book. He asserts that ecological identity is developed through inhabiting a place and cultivating a deep understanding of its natural systems. A main theme of the book is that ecological insecurity is the direct result of people’s separation from places that once provided nourishment and sustenance. The author elaborates on this in the opening chapter: “Our water is transported from thousands of miles away, our food is imported by container ships that travel thousands of miles across the ocean, and our energy is derived from sources well beyond our horizon” (4). McGinnis argues for a shift away from the current trend of large-scale, centralized and bureaucratic institutional solutions, and a shift toward a “recovery of the commons” (23). He acknowledges that science plays an important role in determining environmental solutions, but argues that cultural adaptation to climate change will require other epistemologies beyond the scientific. There is value, he writes, in cultivating the traditional ecological knowledge of place that nourishes sensibility and provides lifesustaining resources. McGinnis argues that the first step needed for this adaptation is to foster community, place-based living, and direct human engagement with the natural world. This book is a result of decades of McGinnis’s personal experiences and research in sites across the Pacific Ocean. Following two rich introductory chapters that outline the book’s major themes, arguments, and theoretical approach, McGinnis dedicates the core of the book to seven case studies. Each of these place-based case studies illustrates elements of the author’s broader arguments around the need to shift toward ecologically grounded values. Each of these places is facing serious, complex environmental and social risks due to historic and current political–economic forces. The case studies range in scale and scope, and are divided into three topics: rivers, watersheds and waste; the role of science and values in marine systems; and the importance of place and community in cultural adaptation and ecological resilience. Chapter 3 focuses on watershed-scale activism and place-based sensory participation in California. The fourth chapter looks at watershed degradation and the emergence of “wastesheds” in New Zealand. Chapter 5 delves into the complex trade-offs involved in decommissioning offshore oil platforms. Following this, Chapter 6 documents the decline of marine ecosystems in California as a result of large-scale commercial fishing, incorporating a thorough analysis of the role of governmental regulation and the “politics of civic science.” Chapter 7

29.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-520-28520-0.

ABSTRACT Water scarcity is a highly contested concept. The dominant narratives of water scarcity in policy debates have been criticised for prioritising purely quantitative metrics and eliding questions of inequality and power. While much scholarship on water scarcity examines contexts in the global South where potable water infrastructures do not reach most residents, this article examines conflict over commercial water extraction in a Northern setting where access to potable tap water is nearly universal, yet local water supplies are increasingly constrained. It addresses three main questions: (1) How are narratives or discourses of water scarcity mobilised by a range of actors in local conflicts over groundwater extraction for water bottling?; (2) To what extent do these discourses invoke biophysical versus socially produced scarcity, current versus future scarcity, and local versus regional or global scales of scarcity?; and (3) What are the implications of the findings for efforts by environmental advocates and communities to protect local water supplies? We explore these questions by analysing a local case study of conflict over groundwater extraction by the leading bottled water firm, Nestlé Waters, in southwestern Ontario, Canada. We find that the scarcity narratives deployed by local residents, activists, public officials, and bottling industry representatives illustrate the use of several forms of figurative conflation involving geographic and temporal scales of water scarcity, and economic and volumetric forms of scarcity. We argue that this conflation illuminates deeper issues of economic and social justice at the heart of the conflict, which transcend reductionist hydrological assessments of scarcity or abundance.