Jeff Popke

Geography and Ethics: Everyday Mediations Through Care and Consumption:

Some months ago, in preparation for compil-ing the next three geography and ethicsreports, I registered with one of the commonelectronic database services to receive thetitles of journal articles focused on ethics.There are two things that I found noteworthyabout this exercise. The first is the sheer vol-ume of contemporary work on ethics – by myrather unscientific reckoning, something ofthe order of 1500 articles dealing with ethicsare published in academic journals each year.The second is the presumed audience formuch of this work. It seems that the vastmajority of recent ethical writings are aimednot at the readers of social science journalslike this one, but rather at the mundane worldof institutions, organizations and public policy.In recent months, articles have addressed theethical dimensions of a wide range of socialand organizational practices, from auditing tozoo keeping. Ethics are being discussed bybankruptcy lawyers, money managers, judgesand dentists, and applied to our sportingevents, our militaries, and even our spaceagencies. Ethical conversations, it seems, aretaking place at a multitude of sites across thesocial domain.This state of affairs should probably beapplauded. But it does not necessarily ensurethat our social institutions function ethicallyor responsibly, or even that we can easilydetermine what that might mean. At issuehere is a common challenge of ethical think-ing: how do we bring normative demands tobear upon the social world of order, rules, andpublic policy? One well-known theorist whograppled with this challenge is EmmanuelLevinas, who often admitted that his concep-tion of ethics, based as it was on a one-to-onerelation with the singular Other, was ratherdifficult to translate into a social world ofcitizen-subjects:

Geography and ethics: spaces of cosmopolitan responsibility

I In search of perpetual peace In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant set forth his now paradigmatic vision of what he called a ‘universal cosmopolitan condition’ among states, ‘a peaceful, if not yet friendly and universal community of all peoples on the earth who can come into active relations with one another’ (Kant, 2006: 146). Kant pointed out that all human beings share ‘the right of common possession of the surface of the earth’. Since humans ‘cannot scatter themselves on it without limit’, he reasoned, ‘they must . . . ultimately tolerate one another as neighbors’ (2006: 82). As a political project, then, Kant’s cosmopolitanism anticipates a kind of world citizenship within a federation of free and sovereign states, the first step toward the possibility of a ‘perpetual peace’ (see Linklater, 2002; Brock and Brighouse, 2005; Pojman, 2005). But Kant’s call to ‘tolerate one another as neighbors’ also suggests an ethical stance. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism would indicate a wider, spatially extensive sense of responsibility toward others, recognizing, as Kant did, that ‘the growing prevalence of a (narrower or wider) community among the peoples of the earth has reached a point at which the violation of right at any one place on the earth is felt in all places’ (Kant, 2006: 84). If Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal still resonates today, this is perhaps because Kant’s era was witness to the emergence, in nascent form, of the political and economic relationships that have come to characterize our own global modernity. Writing at the apogee of the mercantile trading system and on the cusp of the industrial revolution, Kant was able to capture both the challenges and the opportunities posed by a truly global community of nations, and to articulate the need thereby to rethink the grounds for political and ethical thought. To be sure, the challenges of developing such a global ethics are formidable. Writing in 1784, Kant lamented that ‘one cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men’s actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness’ (Kant, 1986: 250). If we reflect for a moment on our own contemporary condition, it is not difficult to identify sufficient folly, vanity and malice to wonder how far we have progressed over the past 200 years. Progress reports

“Because You Got to Have Heat”: The Networked Assemblage of Energy Poverty in Eastern North Carolina

Current discussions of energy policy seldom acknowledge the problem of energy poverty, a situation in which a household cannot afford to adequately heat or cool the home. In this article, we examine the concept of energy poverty and describe some of its contours in a rural part of North Carolina. Energy poverty, we suggest, is best viewed as a geographical assemblage of networked materialities and socioeconomic relations. To illustrate this approach, we focus on the geographical patterns of three key determinants of energy poverty in eastern North Carolina: the socioeconomic characteristics of rural households, the networked infrastructures of energy provision, and the material conditions of the home. Throughout, we highlight the lived effects of energy poverty, drawing on transcripts from interviews conducted with recipients of weatherization assistance in the region. The challenges of the energy poor, we suggest, deserve greater attention in public policy and as part of a broader understanding of welfare and care.

Climate Change, Drought, and Jamaican Agriculture: Local Knowledge and the Climate Record

The purpose of this study is to reach a basic understanding of drought and climate change in southwestern Jamaica through an integration of local knowledge and perception of drought and its physical characteristics manifested in remotely sensed precipitation and vegetation data. Local knowledge and perception are investigated through a survey of sixty farmers in St. Elizabeth Parish and physical characteristics of drought are examined through statistical analysis of satellite precipitation and vegetation vigor time series. The survey indicates that most farmers are concerned about an increase in drought occurrence. Satellite estimates of rainfall and vegetation vigor for St. Elizabeth Parish support this perception and suggest that severe drought events are becoming more frequent. The satellite precipitation time series also suggest that the early growing season is becoming drier as compared to the primary growing season, especially since 1991. This recent divergence in growing season moisture conditions might add to farmers’ observations that drought is becoming more prevalent. Consequently, Jamaican farmers perceptions of drought are not driven by magnitude and frequency of dry months alone but rather by the difference between growing seasons. Any development of drought adaption and mitigation plans for this area must not focus solely on drought; it must also compare moisture conditions between months and seasons to be effective.

Latino Migration and Neoliberalism in the U.S. South: Notes Toward a Rural Cosmopolitanism

This paper examines the relationship between the discourses of neoliberalism and understandings of Latino migration in the rural U.S. South. As a set of economic policies, neoliberalism has provided the framework for the rapid globalization of rural areas and recent increases in Latino migration. At the same time, however, neoliberal discourse depoliticizes economic decision-making and promotes an ethical individualism that narrows the ambit of responsibility toward those same migrants. In opposition to such thinking, I explore the possibilities of a rural cosmopolitanism, which would expand a sense of obligation and mutual regard, and thereby promote a wider net of ethical responsibility.

RE-ENVISIONING THE CITY: LEFEBVRE, HOPE VI, AND THE NEOLIBERALIZATION OF URBAN SPACE

This study draws upon the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre to examine HOPE VI, a public housing demolition and redevelopment program administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Hailed as a new approach to urban policy, the HOPE VI program embodies many of the key tenets of neoliberal urbanization, including an emphasis on entrepreneurial forms of urban regeneration and a focus on individual responsibility. To provide a lens for understanding this neoliberalization of space, we first detail Lefebvres theorization of abstract space and transparency, highlighting in particular its nondialectical and depoliticized character. We then turn to examine the HOPE VI model and its implementation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lefebvres analysis, we argue, provides a useful entry point for interpreting the re-envisioning of urban space that underlies HOPE VI-style redevelopment, and therefore can potentially inform contemporary struggles against neoliberal urban policy.

Neoliberalization, Transnational Migration, and the Varied Landscape of Economic Subjectivity in the Totonacapan Region of Veracruz

Over the past two decades, many of Mexicos rural communities have been faced with significant challenges arising from two interrelated processes: the neoliberal restructuring of rural policy and citizenship, and the dramatic increase in transnational migration. The ways in which local communities experience and respond to such changes, however, are variable. We examine the intersection of neoliberal socioeconomic change and transnational migration in the Totonacapan region of Veracruz, highlighting their uneven regional impacts in the largely Mestizo coastal region and the more indigenous sierra. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we show how neoliberal change is filtered through local historical trajectories and cultural understandings that influence the development of migration in the region. We suggest how different conceptions of social responsibility influence the outcomes of migration, with some communities experiencing severe dislocation and others managing the process for the benefit of the common. In both cases, we argue, the new economic subjectivities arising from intensified migration can be seen as a symptom, and thus potentially a source of ethical critique, of neoliberalisms many failures.

Sensitivity of Crop Water Need to 2071-95 Projected Temperature and Precipitation Changes in Jamaica

AbstractThis study uses empirical models to examine the potential impact of climate change, based on a range of 100-yr phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) projections, on crop water need in Jamaica. As expected, crop water need increases with rising temperature and decreasing precipitation, especially in May–July. Comparing the temperature and precipitation impacts on crop water need indicates that the 25th percentile of CMIP5 temperature change (moderate warming) yields a larger crop water deficit than the 75th percentile of CMIP5 precipitation change (wet winter and dry summer), but the 25th percentile of CMIP5 precipitation change (substantial drying) dominates the 75th percentile of CMIP5 temperature change (extreme warming). Over the annual cycle, the warming contributes to larger crop water deficits from November to April, while the drying has a greater influence from May to October. All experiments decrease crop suitability, with the largest impact from March to August.

Greenhouse governmentality: Protected agriculture and the changing biopolitical management of agrarian life in Jamaica:

This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island’s traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as form of governmentality acting on the conduct and attitudes of Jamaican farmers. As a form of governmentality, greenhouse farming also represents a new and distinctive regime of biopower, one that intervenes with greater precision into the metabolism between the natural processes of the rural population and the vital properties of growing plants. Viewed as a form of biopower, the greenhouse calls particular attention to the ways in which assemblages of materials and technologies enable new forms of control and surveillance over the life processes associated with crop cultivation, thereby generating new kinds of affective relations and agrarian subjectivities. This capital- and chemical-intensive biopolitics, we argue, threatens to re-engineer Jamaica’s agrarian milieu in ways that favor elite agricultural interests at the expense of long-standing traditional farming practices and the forms of socio-ecological metabolism upon which they are based.