Eric P. Perramond

Adjudicating hydrosocial territory in New Mexico

ABSTRACT The US state of New Mexico shifted its management and legal treatment of water in the 20th century to a private property access right, weakening communal notions of water. This article explains how New Mexico has redefined and territorialized water rights as private property through the adjudication process and administrative governance rules. State adjudication of water rights disrupts horizontal social relations. The process also results in territorialization – not of fluid water per se – but of water users themselves. As water users have adjusted to this rescaling of governance, the state has found new ways to govern users vertically through water-crisis measures.

The local climate–development nexus: Jatropha and smallholder adaptation in Tamil Nadu, India

The Kyoto Protocol has initiated Clean Development Mechanism projects in developing countries as one means to offset carbon emitted in developed nations. Biofuels may be a viable solution, but we argue here that it may also compete with local smallholder farming systems and labour resources. This study assesses the integration of tree bio-diesel crop Jatropha curcas into smallholder agriculture in Tamil Nadu, India using data collected from 66 farms through surveys and interviews. Jatropha cultivation carries significant risks for the smallholders. Jatropha competes for space and harvest labour with other market and subsistence crops and does not produce any economic returns until three years after planting. If the jatropha harvests or market price fail or fluctuate, smallholders could default on their loans. This risk could lead to significant changes in the land-holding class structure. Climate change policies, non-governmental organizationss, and national and regional governments should support landholders to sustainably integrate a new crop like jatropha into current holdings, otherwise the current alternative energy revolution could create more problems than it solves. Smallholders are particularly vulnerable to economic risk and crop failure exposure even with well-planned biofuel policies.

ETHNOBIOLOGY FOR A DIVERSE WORLD DEFINING NEW DISCIPLINARY TRAJECTORIES: MIXING POLITICAL ECOLOGY WITH ETHNOBIOLOGY

That which we assume to be a distinct scholarly discipline today may not be so tomorrow; boundaries shift, and territories become redefined in academia just as they do in geopolitics. And so, it would not be surprising to see within just a few decades the methodological pretexts of ethnobiological inquiries once again overhauled as they have been several times already. We anticipate and in fact welcome the re-delineation of the boundaries of this discipline as a result of advances made in political ecology and in other fields as well. Although the term ‘‘political ecology’’ was first used in print more than 80 years ago (Thone 1935), it has been more widely used over the last 30 years in a particular manner by cultural ecologists and human geographers. Since anthropologist Eric R. Wolf published his seminal article entitled ‘‘Ownership and Political Ecology,’’ social scientists have used the concept of political ecology to balance their understanding of ‘‘the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem’’ (Wolf 1972:202). As noted a quarter century ago by applied anthropologist Thomas Sheridan (1988:xvi), this is because it has become increasingly necessary to ‘‘wed the approaches of political economy, which focus upon society’s place in a region, nation, or ‘‘world sphere,’’ with those of cultural ecology, which examine adaptations to local environmental and demographic factors.’’ We are of the opinion that there is also a need to wed insights from political ecology with ethnobiology, which has largely ignored the global and macroeconomic pressures on the so-called ‘‘traditional’’ agricultural, fishing, hunting and foraging cultures with which ethnobiologists have characteristically been engaged. Despite the broad use of both the concepts and methodologies of political ecology in geography, anthropology and history, articles in the Journal of Ethnobiology have seldom used this term, and it is even in less currency in Economic Botany, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the Journal of Ethnobiology

Militarized Spaces and Open Range: Pinon Canyon and (Counter)cartographies of Rural Resistance

This paper examines how rural communities in Colorado have confronted military expansion. Against the backdrop of a series of base realignments and closures during the past three decades that have streamlined US military holdings nationwide, the US Army base at Fort Carson, Colorado, has been growing. In 1983 Fort Carson expanded into a 95 500-hectare training area in southeastern Colorado known as the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS). In 2006 the Army announced plans to expand the PCMS by 169 000 hectares. Under the Armys proposal, a significant portion of southeastern Colorado would be transformed into the largest Army training ground in the US. This prospect galvanized a diverse coalition of rural residents to oppose the Piñon Canyon expansion. Our research critically considers how the principal actors in this case—the US Army and a rural citizen opposition coalition—mobilized different narrative and political strategies based substantially upon contrasting cartographic representations to shape the debate and construct contested geographies of this space as military training ground versus open range. As of 2014, the expansion of PCMS is on hold, although there is no guarantee that base or military area expansion will not proceed in the future.

Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas

and pugnacious insight found in Supercapitalism’s critique of the myth of corporate social responsibility. Somewhat wanly, he avers that the first challenge is to “get our thinking straight” (p. 225), to understand the nature of the beast. Beyond that, there are few specifics. Presumably, the American investor and consumer needs to get in touch again with his or her inner citizen, and then change will somehow come from below. U.S. politicians of both parties like to use rhetoric about bringing “special interests” to heal, of course, but what has been in short supply is the kind of political leadership necessary to match actions with these words. Tactically, does it really make sense to let corporations off the hook—the market made them do it? More fundamentally, the strategy of painting neoliberalism’s “deregulation” offensive as a mere consequence of techno-economic change radically underestimates both the reach and the tenacity of this project, while substituting a political explanation for one based on inherent (indeed, super) economic logic. Reich’s defense of robust regulation, in the public interest, is rather refreshing, but his plan for democratic renewal surely needs to go beyond a “citizen’s guide to supercapitalism,” on which the book prematurely ends.