David Correia

F**k Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is back at it, once again trading in the familiar determinist tropes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book Guns, Germs and Steel. That dull book was chockfull of the bad and the worse, the random and the racist. At best it is just silly, as when he offers unsupported, and unsupportable, assertions such as his get-off-my-lawn grouse that children today are not as smart as in the recent past and television is to blame. At worst, it develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic that reduces social relations such as poverty, state violence, and persistent social domination, to inexorable outcomes of geography and environment.

From agropastoralism to sustained yield forestry: industrial restructuring, rural change, and the land-grant commons in Northern New Mexico

In 1948 the United States Forest Service drastically reduced grazing permits for the El Rito Ranger District in the Carson National Forest in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The decision was based on a 1947 case study in which local forest rangers claimed that smallholder Hispano ranchers “caused surrounding national forest ranges to become depleted of vegetative cover to such an extent that a reduction in permitted grazing use is necessary.” The district proposed to remedy the economic hardship anticipated by the “stock reduction program” by increasing timber-related jobs through the creation of a special sustained yield timber production unit.

Degrowth, American Style: No Impact Man and Bourgeois Primitivism

participants from nearly 30 countries concluded that the ‘‘decoupling between ecological degradation and economic growth appears insufficient after years of important eco-efficiency improvements.’’ Collectively they issued a declaration that called for ‘‘a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of ‘right-sizing’ the global and national economies.’’ This ‘‘rightsizing,’’ according to the declaration, was not a one-size-fits-all prescription. ‘‘In countries where [the] per capita footprint is greater than the sustainable global level, right-sizing implies a reduction to this level within a reasonable timeframe.’’ But, continued the declaration, ‘‘In countries where severe poverty remains, right-sizing implies increasing consumption by those in poverty as quickly as possible, in a sustainable way, to a level adequate for [a] decent life, following locally determined poverty-reduction paths rather than externally imposed development policies.’’ At the same time that conference attendees were working out the principles enshrined in the Degrowth declaration, author Colin Beavan was in the middle of filming No Impact Man: The Documentary, 2 a companion to his book No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process (Beavan 2009). Both book and movie were based on Beavan’s ‘‘No Impact Man Project,’’ a blog he started in November 2006. The blog, as with the book and movie, chronicled the exploits of one upscale, Manhattan family’s efforts to transform their consumption patterns, and thus their social and natural relations, in order to ‘‘save the planet.’’ Beavan sought a way out of their current lives he described in an early blog entry as ‘‘typical convenience-addicted, New York City take-out slaves.’’ Through reduced consumption he hoped to find ‘‘a middle path that is neither unconsciously consumerist nor self-consciously anti-materialist.’’ Beavan, unlike the conference attendees in Paris, put his faith in a version of environmentalism he

Conversations in Environmental Justice: An Interview with Julie Sze

Naomi and David: In your first book, Noxious New York (Sze 2006), you argued that communities engaged in environmental justice struggles “used environmental justice as their new language and approach to old problems of race and urban poverty.” This makes us wonder how we should define environmental justice. Is it a resource that communities draw on in struggles against polluting industries? Is it a phrase we use to name particular kinds of political movement struggles? And what has been and/or should be the role of scholars of environmental justice in contributing to those struggles and creating that shared language?

Apocalypse, the Radical Left and the Post-political Condition

The explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in April 2010 killed eleven men, injured seventeen others, and spilled five million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Although thousands of barrels of oil are spilled daily into the Amazon, the Niger Delta and many other places, and around 80 million barrels of oil are ‘‘spilled’’ into the atmosphere as CO2 and other gasses, the BP oil spill rekindled the urgency of an oil-free future. Yet, the number of drilling rigs across the world continued to increase*including in the Gulf of Mexico. Less than a year later, in March 2011, the Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima exploded, and with it the questionable promise of a more ecologically safe mode of energy generation. Three reactors went into full meltdown, releasing iodine-131 and cesium-137 isotopes into the atmosphere at levels that exceeded the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. And the bad news kept coming, prompting some governments to put nuclear power expansion on hold, though without halting the construction of new nuclear power plants that were already in the process of being built. The Greenland ice sheet collapsed in July 2012. Climate scientists reported that 97 percent of the ice sheet surface showed some thawing. Two months later satellite imagery in the Arctic revealed that summer melt reduced frozen sea ice to an area less than 2.2 million square miles, leading some scientists to predict an ice-free Arctic in the summer months within two decades.

Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas-Fir Country

greater explanation, as does the ‘‘sacred landscape’’ of peyote gardens in South Texas. These conceptual issues are lightly developed relative to the extensive description of the ritual use and effects of peyote. Eric Perramond presents an interesting study of the Tohono O’odham reservation straddling the U.S.–Mexico border. Its inhabitants have become entangled in drug trafficking (rather than production) and suffer from indiscriminate police actions by authorities on both sides. Kenneth Young laments that most scholarly work on tropical deforestation ignores drug crops despite the fact that their cultivation generates considerable changes in land cover. His assessment of coca/cocaine in Peru exemplifies a political ecology approach that he argues will address this deficit in the literature. Though his thoughtfully presented research agenda raises more questions than the chapter itself answers, it provides valuable direction for future research in this arena. The penultimate chapter, by Mark Merlin and William Raynor, describes the cultivation and use of kava root in Oceania. They focus on its emergence as a cash crop and the considerable deforestation resulting from its growing exchange. Because kava faces no legal control (unique among the psychoactive substances covered here) this chapter seems conceptually (and geographically) isolated. Joseph Hobbs’s summary argues that drug crops are a mixed blessing for indigenous populations. Although they provide modest incomes, the crops also invite unwanted attention from authorities committed to prohibition efforts. Because such efforts arouse resistance, they often define an antagonistic relationship between indigenous and majority cultures. What is missing from his otherwise fine conclusion, and from the volume as a whole, is a meaningful discussion of policy alternatives. Considering the importance of the issues raised here (and not just for indigenous peoples), it is insufficient to merely conclude that drug prohibition is a costly and imprudent mess. Hobbs briefly mentions crop substitution programs, subsidies, and eco-tourism, yet these are limited measures that fail to account for considerable opportunity costs faced by peasant farmers abandoning drug crops. Why is there no mention of legalization or any exploration of its potentially momentous effects? Wouldn’t such a shift bear major implications for indigenous landscapes and the sustainable cultivation of drug crops? This volume is readable, entertaining, and thought-provoking throughout, although its thirteen chapters are arranged in a haphazard fashion all too common in edited volumes. A more substantial criticism is that the chapters are typically descriptive accounts of processes that happen to take place in territories inhabited by indigenes. Efforts to synthesize or theorize common elements of the diverse indigenous landscapes presented here are scarce. Indeed, the essential themes covered repeatedly and most effectively in this collection are only indirectly related to indigenousness. In his introductory chapter, Kent Mathewson suggests that ‘‘indigenous moral geographies’’ provide a promising conceptual common ground for the kind of work found in this volume. That his proposal is halfheartedly developed in the introduction, and never mentioned again in the rest of the volume, hints at an unrealized potential that might have been achieved through more active revision and synthesis by the three co-editors. Nonetheless, the disparate work collected in this volume amounts to a productive first harvest in a fertile and innovative research area. It is an ambitious project demanding timely, difficult, and even dangerous fieldwork. The editors have issued their challenge; who among us will answer?